VLVL2 (2): Film as Metaphor -- Made-for-TV Movie Theory

[Michael Joseph]

>The Pia and Clara namedrop is a complex little joke. It tracks the
objectification of women across sixty years of film history, and the irony
of one Svengali-managed actress being played by another, and the process
of authenticity giving way to an ineptly drawn replica.


> Yes, tragedy and farce perhaps. And the authentic original is herself a
movie image. This is a good example of how we have to think about P's
invention of TV movies in VL.
[...]

Originality in +Vineland* is interesting to me. Pia is a famously inept
actress, whereas Clara Bow is famously the "It" girl.  Pynchon may have
chosen them simply because they each contrast the other in a somewhat
startling, Escher-like, way, but conflating them into one image - the It
and "not It" girl(s) - he draws attention to among things the paradox of
originality: how do we experience originality in an inherently flawed
reproduction? Where the kind of cultural criticism we saw in the Robberds'
essay is so frustratingly banal is in its regulating assumption that there
is an alternative to "televisual culture," - something presumably more
authentic. Pynchon seems to demolish the two moieties of this claim,
plangently insisting that no alternative does exist, but that in fact
authenticity is real; it is realized within the experience of the viewer,
or reader, or listener, or lover - in the intentional acts of a subject.

Pia Zadora is a seriously imperfect instrument (... she's no Clara Bow),
but one might nonetheless experience It in her performance, even
negatively - just as one might experience it (It) in Clara Bow's, whose
competence, however praiseworthy, does not transcend her category of
signification. Obviously, since for Pynchon signification mediates
originality, VL then becomes about interpretation - just as PF (although
Pynchon's catalytic loss is not theological (the big G) but aesthetic (the
big C). Just as Kinbote reads Shade (or, reads Shade reading of Shade, a
kind of infinite regress), and ineluctably constructs his own meaning, the
characters in VL make meaning from their own intentional acts upon the
streaming, ambient culture - and I would posit that the key to the
hollywood-like happy ending of Vineland lies in understand How they do it.



Michael