VLVL2 (10) Shared Obsession, Remix (WASRealism, the young gaffer, 201)

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

cf. 

    There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet.
    Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will
    it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will
    the light come before or after?

    But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this
    while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold
    morning air flowing now across his nipples: It has now
    begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels..(GR 4)

And,

    Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd
    Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping
    fig that hung in the window...(VL 1)


In a message dated 12/28/03 3:04:00 AM, isread at btopenworld.com writes:

<< (201.26-33) "Everybody in 24fps had their own ideas about light, and about
all they shared was the obsession. Meanings convened to take care of
business would turn into arguments about light that happened so often they
came to seem the essence of 24fps. Against Howie's advocacy of available
light because it was cheaper, Frenesi wanted actively to commit energy by
pouring in as much light as they could liberate from the local power
company."

Frenesi's commitment to artificial light ties her to the studio system her
father worked within, which returns us to the chapter's opening stand-off
between a production based on location-shooting and one based on the studio
system. Hence, another example of the chapter's interest in film-making as
the construction of realism (as opposed to the reproduction, or
representation, of reality).

Here, natural light is preferable because cheaper. However, artifice becomes
subversive, if they "[pour] in as much light as they could liberate from the
local power company". What appears to be conformity to the mainstream model
becomes something else. Hence the debate with which the passage begins,
discursively both 'aesthetic' and 'political', effectively deconstructs a
realism based on either-or. >>

Leaving out the pitiless unblinking light bulb of artifice in Picasso's
Guernica- giving illumination to the mechanical reproduction of
the means of repression and death while simultaneously being
dependent on the same grid for its existence- I'm not sure Pynchon's
works, as evidenced by the above two openings, don't come down on 
the hope of a natural light, i.e., something analogous to the seemingly 
unreachable window in the upper right corner of the painting:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/english/hemngway/picasso/guernica.htm

respectfully