VLVL 24fps and "the Movement"

[jbor]

I think that Pynchon satirises the American Labour movements (Jess and Eula,
Sasha and Frenesi), as much as he satirises everything else in the novel,
and that he emphasises the failures and sellouts they accrued. None of the
Vietnam vets are explicitly anti-War, but Vato and Blood are cartoon-likable
even despite their treachery and profiteering in Vietnam, and have redeemed
themselves somewhat by sponsoring Thi Anh Tran; Ortho Bob is young, clueless
and food-obsessed; and RC is a shadowy figure with something in his history
that has made him dissociate himself totally from his Vietnam past. They're
not satirised so much as made to represent a range of experience amongst the
returned "bush vets" (i.e. not veterinarians); but they're all as apolitical
as Zoyd and Van Meter are (like Sale, Pynchon neglects that veterans'
against the War lobby group altogether).

So, I don't think that Pynchon is parodying Sale's thesis on the '60s
students. I think that what he's portraying in _Vineland_ is the collapse of
"the Movement" in 1969-70 (see below), following Sale's line that "the
Movement" and SDS were synonymous. After the rout of PR3 the Pisk sisters
abandon 24fps and go off to join a bomb-making commune which is an analog
for the Weathermen; Rex will disappear and throw his lot in with a more
radical political group, maybe those Paris agitators "to the left of Ho Chi
Minh" he's been "in contact with" (i.e. possibly supporters of the Khmer
Rouge). Pynchon, like Sale, focuses on the way "the Movement" turned, and
was turned, away from the causes and methods it had embraced in the early
and mid '60s. 

By the time of the main narrative's setting (1968-9) the anti-War cause
seems to have been lost along the way (again, following Sale's thesis),
along with the Civil Rights cause (fragmentation of "the Movement", BAAD)
and free speech (where is there any mention of that in the text?). We're
told that the rebellion at College of the Surf is "not much by Berkeley or
Columbia standards" (208), and it isn't, but there is no satire in the novel
of these earlier days of the student "Movement", only of what it had evolved
into by 1968-9. (Cf. Oedipa's visit to Berkeley in _Lot 49_, pp. 71-2.)

I think that 24fps, the Pisks especially, are depicted as part of the
problem. They've been around since those early days at Berkeley but they
don't seem to have any consciousness at all of how "the Movement" has
shifted ground, of how the original causes have all been forgotten and lost
in the dance and thrill of protest. They're into dressing up in battle
fatigues and pretending to be martyrs and spray-painting violent slogans,
but what political or social causes do they actually support, what do they
ever actually do? They make films of hippie chicks dancing, chain smoke and
play three tvs at a time while they work, and have sex on the beach. They
like driving around in flash cars with state-of-the-art CB radios, getting
stoned, and mouthing off about martyrdom and anarchy and setting off bombs.
But their biggest gripes are about shopping and food. By the time of College
of the Surf it's all become just image and hot air, protest for the sake of
protest.

Pynchon calls it the "Nixonian Reaction" (239). The point of that is, it
seems to me, that "the Movement" brought on the backlash against itself by
its own excesses and loss of direction, all the violence and violent
rhetoric (the Pisks' slogans about martyrdom and terror tactics), its
abandonment of legitimate causes (they don't even lobby for the
decriminalisation of marijuana, seems to be the point of the CAMP
juxtaposition in the next chapter), its descent into self-indulgence (sex,
drugs and rock and roll), and because of infiltration and sell-outs within
its own ranks. But while Pynchon's satire is critical of 24fps and PR3 (and
the Wobblies and the anti-HUAC lobby), that doesn't mean that he's a
neo-conservative or that he's waving the flag for Nixon, Reagan, Bush etc
(nor Kennedy or LBJ for that matter). Far from it.

****

[...] Why is it necessary to pinpoint the existence and decline of "the
movement"? For years, research on sixties protests has been dominated by
histories of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), perhaps because the
group's rise and fall provided such a compelling narrative. In 1960, a small
group of committed student activists, influenced by the Civil Rights and
peace movements, founded SDS. Fifty-nine SDSers met at Port Huron, Michigan,
in June 1962 to draft the organization's "Port Huron Statement," a prescient
critique of postwar American capitalism. SDS quickly became the key focus of
New Left radicalism in the United States, attracting young Civil Rights and
antiwar activists. Its ambitious Economic Research and Action Project
(ERAP), launched in 1963, sought to "mobilize white wage earners around the
issues of job security, better housing, and racial solidarity and to provide
them with some means of expressing community grievances." Estimates of SDS's
size vary, but by the late 1960s its own membership rolls boasted 100,000
members. The organization collapsed in the summer of 1969 as a result of a
devastating political split between two ultraleft sects, Progressive Labor
and the Weathermen.

The story of SDS is critical to our understanding of the period, but its
significance has been inflated by sixties scholars for the purpose of
establishing a consensus history of the era. [...]

In the past twenty years, the literature on sixties protest movements has
mushroomed. The current state of sixties research owes much to SDS
histories. The genre began with Kirkpatrick Sale's seminal SDS (1973) [...]

Not surprisingly, SDS histories argue, with almost complete unanimity, that
the sixties ended with the collapse of SDS in 1969-1970. Perhaps the
clearest example of SDScentric sixties history is found in Kirkpatrick
Sale's SDS. The era ended on March 6, 1970, Sale argued, when a faulty pipe
bomb destroyed a Manhattan townhouse, killing three radical members of the
Weathermen. A militant, ultraleft sect, the Weathermen represented one of
the last surviving fragments of the moribund SDS. Sale wrote: "The explosion
on West Eleventh Street was the ultimate symbol of SDS's tragic and ominous
demise, and of the decade which had shaped it."(6) According to Sale and
other SDS histories, the vigorous spirit of reform which captured so many
imaginations in the early 1960s, and inspired countless youths to embrace
"participatory politics" and fight for Civil Rights and an end to the
Vietnam war, collapsed into a tragic paroxysm of violence and despair by
1970. [...]

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2005/1_33/56027322/p1/article.jhtml?term
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