VLVL2 "...like a porno star" ? (237)

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

    No problem anymore with talk of "taking out" Weed
    Atman, as he'd gone turning into a character in a
    movie, one who as a bunus happened to fuck like a
    porno star...(237, Penguin)

This little offhand reference is one of the more important lines in the 
novel. It stems from the narrator, who in this scene is sitting in Frenesi's 
head. Such a comparison by Frenesi, herself, would have been slightly 
anachronistic.

That's because before 1972 there were no porno "stars" in America.
Porno flicks were just furtive, underground, mainly 8mm, low production 
value features, with no plot and little or no dialogue. No mainstream 
theaters displayed any of these, or anything harder than softcore, and 
certainly nothing which showed actual sexual intercourse, the erect male 
penis, penetration, ejaculaton, and all those various things Americans 
have come to expect from X-rated films and videos- now a multi-billion 
dollar business- accessible in the privacy of their homes, thanks to the 
likes of Fox, AT&T, AOL-Time Warner, etc., etc.

Many of you, who weren't born yet, or, if so, were younger than 
Prairie, probably don't recall what America was like before 1972
and the pornography revolution in America- and the easy availability 
of mediated sexuality. Although things had already climaxed politically, 
and people were liberating themselves sexually to varying degrees,
the mainstream media was nothing like it is today. From a sexual
perspective, the mainstream media was more like the innocent kids at 
College of the Surf before the introduction of "the extremely potent" 
form of weed. Significantly, however, before cable and satellite, that is, 
before pay-for-view- TV remained off limits to porno. Broadcast TV 
may still be cherry.

Everything changed on a dime, or rather, $22,000- the cost of Gerard
Damiano's _Deep Throat_ in 1972. This was graciously donated by the 
Peraino's- Anthony, Louis, Joe "The Whale" Periano- an off-shoot of the
Colombo crime family, of NYC. To date, _Deep Throat_ is still the most 
lucrative pornographic film ever made. It's impact on the mainstream 
media and society, however, are incalculable.

Maybe spyware will have as big an impact someday but for now,
_Deep Throat_ began a series of trends which have given the right
wing counterrevolution, still very much in progress- and today much 
further along- a certain nuance, allowing a Brave New World-type of 
co-optation to begin developing, right along side the 1984-type of 
machinations with which we are now all too familiar. The right wing 
uses the pornography issue (often conflating it with free speech) 
in much the same way they use other wedge issues, like drug use, 
i.e., depending on the opportunities available, mixing and matching, 
slicing and dicing them to smear liberals and shore up their far right 
base. This is especially true since the devastation of HIV and the fear 
left in its wake, an issue as noticeably absent from VL as from the 
mind of Ronald Reagan, then and now.

At any rate, after the release of _Deep Throat_ in mainstream theaters
in 1972, names like Harry Reams and Linda Lovelace entered the lexicon. 
"Porn star" became a meaningful household term. Of course, there's the 
Nixon connection, too, which is also at play in this little reference. 
(Ironically, 
it has been revealed, of late, in a recently made public "Nixon-tape," 
unrelated 
to Watergate but from the same time period, that Nixon, while speaking with 
the Rev. Billy Graham, felt it was "the Jews" who were behind "all the porno-
graphy" just then beginning to explode on the screen. I guess Nixon didn't 
have 
the benefit of Kennedy's mafia connections, or, if he did, just felt like 
selling 
the Jews out to the honorable Reverend. Talk about pornography, Sheeesh!)

I won't elaborate on what else I think Pynchon is up to with this little 
narrative anachronism, at least not yet, but I think it is part and parcel 
of his overall strategy in the book, which is mainly a cover, a "Fake Book" 
by which one can "cover" the sixties and their effects leading up to 1984,
as if it were all a TV re-run. The complex social impact of pornography and 
drugs, including their sources of supply, are only barely hinted at- like
other hugely important trends sitting just outside the tubal glow of VL.

respectfully