VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[jbor]

> Frenesi is not insane, yet her motivations are unclear.

She's working for Brock, doing what he wants her to do because he tells her
to. It really is as simple as that.

      She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what
    Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she
    might even do it [...] (216)

      Frenesi was on her own here, improvising. She knew she was
    messing with Rex, using him against Weed, wasn't sure if she
    wanted to, knew that Brock wanted her to, that had been clear
    since the day of the tornadoes [...] (236)

    She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to
    Brock's penis, straightforwardly erect [...] (241)

Without Frenesi's active intervention Weed would not have been killed. Even
she recognises and accepts the fact that she bears the burden of
responsibility for what happened ("What she would then have to bear with her
all her life ... " 245-6).

And, in the larger scheme of things, it's Frenesi's work which directly
causes the collapse of PR3, and she realises this when she congratulates
Brock that his plan has been so successful:

      "It's all coming apart. Suddenly everybody's got a pay-off story
    to tell, total paranoia." (239)

The other point I've made several times now is that Brock is also guilty,
operating far outside his brief as a federal agent, and that he would have
been convicted and sentenced had his role in what transpired ever been
brought to light. But the destruction of PR3 couldn't have been brought
about without someone like Frenesi on the inside who was willing to betray
both her friends and the Movement.

After DL drops her off at "Las Suegras" Frenesi has no friends and no place
left to go. So she latches on to the first dupe she finds: Zoyd. And Zoyd,
looking back now, realises that he "must've been an easy mark" and beats
himself up because she was able to fool him into believing "how innocent she
was" (41-2). Their marriage is one big con job from start to finish, just
like their wedding. And, the *real* issues of the day (the government's war
in Vietnam, the murder of political activists like MLK, Malcolm X and
others, and the slaughter of African-Americans and incineration of their
communities), have been totally forgotten. These issues never figured much
on the hippies' agenda in the first place, but Frenesi is the link here back
to the Youth Movement, and in what she has done and wrought at College of
the Surf in bringing about the destruction of PR3 and the Movement she has
also betrayed these causes. The issues haven't been set aside just for the
day of the wedding -- this completely misses Pynchon's point here -- these
events are now "off on some other planet". It's as though they never
happened, and so the causes have been irrevocably lost as a result.

    War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American
    politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and
    death, all must have been off on some other planet. (38)

best