A Journey into the Mind of

[James Kyllo]

 Hello

following is another preview of the film, from Time Out - the London
listings magazine.  It runs Friday through Tuesday at the ICA.  Anybody else
planning to go?


James

'Things are not as they seem.' In US writer Thomas Pynchon's case, this is a
mantra, cornerstone to a life and labyrinthine oeuvre freighted with
ceaseless speculation.  In books like 'V' and 'Gravity's Rainbow', the
covert arenas of the contemporary order (the military-industrial complex,
governmental conspiracy, the sinister reaches of science) mesh with
counter-cultural values, permeating paranoia, arcane knowledge-systems and
profoundly ironic humour in an encyclopaedic investigation of modernity.
Central to this is a (doomed) quest for some singular explanation of things,
a motif taken up by the Dubini duo in their intriguing derive that takes in
his biography, times and obsessive supporters.

On the surface it's a tall order: Pynchon is one of the great cultural
recluses, unphotographed for 40 years, his absence from the flashgun glare
now an inseperable part of his 'project'.  So the film offers an atmospheric
collage, chaptered around varying recollections and his synchronicity with
resonant aspects of post-war US society.  Apposite newsreel and
found-footage of missile experiments and Agency psychedelics tests mix with
talking heads, spoken extracts and Pynchon's articulate fans.  Stand-ins,
doubles, lookalike contestants populate a shifting reality, scored to a
trippy, fragmented soundscape care of The Residents, that builds towards a
compelling final act, searching for the grail of a new image of the writer.
Reflecting the hall of mirrors in which the novels, history, the novelist
and his 'researchers' move, this documentary, while uneven and occasionally
over-extended, provides required viewing for devotees, and should reward
those keen to explore the mysterious dynamics of the age via one of their
definitive suveillants. Gareth Evans