VLVL(5) At the Movies and on the Tube

[Dave Monroe]

I probably saw at least as great a number/variety of
old (or, at least, older than me) movies on the local
UHF channel during the 70s than I've watched on
cable/VCR/DVD since.  Including but hardly limited to
Mildred Pierce.  I recently had to shame a
fifty-something perfesser who'd never seen Metropolis
(1926) into going to see the restored version, whereas
the standard butchered U.S. version was regular teevee
fare for me and my friends.  And, for what it's worth
(not much in particular here, perhaps), MP has a
significant gay following, but ... 

But just read these sevral pages around the chpater
change again this morning, don't now have the book
immediately at hand, can't recall why MP in particular
was appropriate there, but the bigger picture here is,
indeed, and ironically or otherwise, the pervasiveness
of that deceptively small screen.  Yet another
resonance betwixt Pynchon's and Orwell's 1984s, though
perhaps where O's teevees operate panoptically ((c) J.
Bentham, renewed by M. Foucault), P's interpellate
((c) L. Althusser), insinuate ((c) MF) ...

--- Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:
> From Toby G Levy:
>  
> > It seems strange that these two characters are
> > discussing a movie from 1945 in the 1970s.  This
> > was just before cable TV and VCRs exploded the
> > availability of old movies. Why do you suppose
> > Pynchon has the two main characters bring this
> > movie up? 
> 
> In the 1970s films like Mildred Pierce were
> important to post-auteurist (ie feminist/genre)
> critics interested in narrative....

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