MDMD: Print the legend but don't mention Coppola!
John Lundy
jlundy at gyk.com.au
Mon Oct 8 16:59:24 CDT 2001
Paul,
I remember the kerfuffle over Heaven's Gate, with an exasperated Cimino
sadly distancing himself from his own movie after it had been butchered and
sanitised by the studio. I've never seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid but
I'll seek it out now that you've cast it in such an interesting context.
Improbably, I loved Eastwood's Unforgiven. I still can't believe it was
made by the man who was Dirty Harry and the symbol of everything that makes
me personally uneasy about violent solutions to complex problems.
Unforgiven tore the mask off the myth of Western heroism, showing that the
alterego to Homeric bravery was inevitably cowardice .
Pynchon's deft use of cinema, particularly in GR, is double edged. While
he cautions that it is not ever to be believed and the dangers of movies
replacing reality ("making the unreal reel"), nor can he resist pointing
out that cinema can have a positive influence. I think the Wizard of Oz
references, and even some of the allusions to King Kong, show this.
One of the central themes of V was an exploration of the Great Man theory
of history. Pynchon asks "Is history personal or statistical?". His
complex characters (who mostly do not even know themselves) and
labyrinthine plots seem to suggest that the notion of the Great Man is way
too cute, far too implausible. It's nice to remember that at a time like
this, God bless him.
Naturally I concur with your view that there's nothing in his novels that
would offer succour to the Right, but as you noted with Reagan and ole
Bruce, some people are shameless. The day can't be far off when one of the
nutters on this list finds a reference buried somwhere in GR that
unequivocally endorses the mindless bombing and slaughter of impoverished
Afghan villagers.
It's a crazy world.
John
On Tuesday, 9 October 2001 03:51, Paul Nightingale
[SMTP:paulngale at supanet.com] wrote:
> Thankyou John. Your reference to High Noon reminds me of a film that came
> out at roughly the same time, the flag-waving/union-bashing On The
> Waterfront. Much more popular. And Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers managed
to
> be ambiguous, at least to those too blind to see. The western remained
the
> most subversive genre, I feel, precisely because it claimed to be about
> where America came from: sometimes the cracks showed. Pat Garrett and
Billy
> The Kid was a great Vietnam film and this was probably why the genre went
> into decline in the 1970s; it had become impossible to make such films
> without reference to the developing world (which was how the 'wild west'
had
> always been portrayed). We still hear people blame Heaven's Gate for
killing
> off the western. Again its revisionist account of the C19th range wars
was
> unacceptable. In fact, Cimino's first cut (before the studio took the
film
> away from him) was five hours plus; the battle sequence alone, refusing
to
> be a celebration of violence, lasted about 90 minutes and (apparently,
see
> Steven Bach's far from sympathetic account of the making of the film,
Final
> Cut) left little to the imagination - dangerous stuff!
>
> So where the hell does Pynchon come into all of this? I said earlier that
GR
> could only have been written in, and was therefore about, the period when
> elected governments (in the US and Western Europe) were being challenged
by
> popular dissent. Pynchon is clearly a writer of dissent, in terms of both
> content and form, in everything he has produced (I can't off-hand think
of
> anything that should be of comfort to the political right or conservative
> elements in society generally - but then you only have to think of Reagan
> and Born In The USA to know how risky it is making such a statement).
>
> Pynchon, and also Coover and Delillo, and Donald Barthelme, belong to a
> generation of writers who took popular culture seriously. It's
interesting
> that, as Hollywood discovered counterculture-politics, the literary novel
> discovered 'trivia' - one of the characteristics of postmodernism. In
M&D,
> we have serious historical figures being treated as a music-hall
double-act:
> this is as far from great-man history as it's possible to get.
>
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