VLVL2 (10) Roll-call, nobody's anarchist fantasy, 196-198

[Paul Nightingale]

(196.11-16) "... a slow pan shot of 24fps as constituted on some long-ago
date the two women were now unable to agree on. An incoherent collection of
souls, to look at them, a certain number always having drifted in and
out--impatient apprentices, old-movie freex, infiltrators and provocateurs
of more than one political stripe."

It's noteworthy that this chapter's account of history-as-film begins by
acknowledging the importance of memory. DL and Ditzah cannot reminisce
without disagreeing when their memories differ. However, their disagreement,
interrupted by Prairie, is hardly the same as the disagreements that appear
endemic to the group itself.

(196.16) "But there was a core that never changed ..."

The group is represented as a kind of family; the "core" values are never in
doubt, even if defining them remains problematic.

(197.10-13) "When Mirage, the unit astrologer, found out they were both
Geminis, she started feeding them daily aspects. They learned to get up at
strange hours, and when the Moon was void of course, not to work at all."

Astrology, somewhat incongruously perhaps, is important to the group.
Subsequently, Howie will be accused of signism, worse than either racism or
sexism.

Given that the novel's here-&-now is the Reagan years, one should recall the
importance of astrology in the White House at that time.

(197.14-16) "Frenesi and the Pisks had taken over what was left of the Death
to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective, based in Berkeley, a doomed attempt to
live out the metaphor of movie camera as weapon."

Cf Balazs earlier on the "mute soliloquy" of the close-up.

Also the description of filming as a kind of raid: "They went looking for
trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of
their witness someplace safe" (195). However, the word "trouble" here is
destabilised: the raid doesn't lead to 'making' it, or its 'theft', but its
'liberation'.

(197.19-20) "... a rump of the Kollective's most stubborn personnel ..."

Throughout this section the drifters described at the outset are juxtaposed
to the committed, the unchanging core of genuine activists.

(197.21-24) The manifesto: "A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death
performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a
Judgement. We will be the architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig.
Death to everything that oinks!"

The "death performed" refers to the moment past, of course, the 'freezing'
of something called 'real life'. It's significant that this section is built
on Prairie's ongoing quest to recover her mother's image; while Frenesi's
own meeting with Brock Vond remains elusive of the camera.

The political rhetoric here is undermined by the final, jokey line. The
sound 'oink' has been separated from the animal it is usually associated
with: it now stands in for (human) political enemies. As a childish insult
used to provoke cops on demos, of course, it becomes a valid form of
resistance.

In Marxian terminology, the 'substructure' (aka 'base') is related to, and
to some degree determines, the (ideological) 'superstructure'. Worth
mentioning, perhaps, because the shift to voluntarisms (away from 'economic
determinism') is one of the features of the post-1968 left.

(197.29-31) "'Roaches are cool,' protested Howie, who happened to have a
joint in his mouth. Krishna, the sound person, put in with a stipulation
that all life, even that of roaches, is holy."

Another term that refuses to be nailed down.