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

[Michael Joseph]

Thanks, Toby, for the additional historical information. The little I know
about Clara Bow (mainly gleaned from a tabloid-size picturebook on early
movie actors I skimmed as a child, I think), didn't include this backstage
knowledge. Clearly, at some point, Clara Bow moved from the chorus line
into the limelight, becoming an incarnation of Aphroditic desire (which
cfa's Anger reference amplifies). I do think the Clara/Zia pairing
suggests something of the sort of Mickey Mouse performing God (as he does
in Stanley Elkin's The Magical Kingdom) or the table of beggars in
Bunuel's Tristessa representing the Last Supper.

As you suggest, Pynchon's odd coupling also serves to humanize Clara Bow,
or decenter the socio-religious aspect of "The It Girl." While the naive
perception is that her "Itness" was unmediated (She WAS It), the secondary
sign points out that she was in fact part of a process, a cultural
construction, even while it intends, ritualistically, to reactualize its
transcendent character. (Within the celluloid temple, She signified "It"
in which her frenzied, adoring audiences perceived absolute value.) This
aspect of Clara Bow's constructedness redounds to further one of VL's most
Pynchonesque, and Eleadeic, positions - that one can perceive the sacred
in virtually anything - that everything (any music, any film-actress, any
sexual or violent or nurturing or imaginative act) potentiates the
essentially human experience of meaning or transpersonal coherence in a
universe of dissolving parts.  What helps make VL so moving, and
postmodern, is that it positively concretizes the world on these terms,
rather than dismissing it with a sour, 'here be your gods, O Israel!'


Michael


P.S. See also Eric Gans's Carole Landis Project for an anthropoetics
construction of a hollywood star.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/cl/carole_0307.htm


> Also don't forget, Michael, in talking about "It" that this movie was
> based on a best seller by Elinor Glyn concerning a topic that has long
> fascinated Pynchon: Charisma.  The Studios spent massive amounts
> publicizing the fact that Elinor Glyn approved of Clara Bow playing the
> "It" girl.
>
> But the creation of Clara Bow as a charismatic figure was totally
> prefabricated in a Hollywood board room.  There were any number of
> actresses in Hollywood that could have played this role as well or better
> than Bow.
> Toby
>
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