VLVL 24fps and "the Movement"

[jbor]

> "Here were the usual miniskirts, wire-rim glasses, and love beads, plus
> hippie boys waving their dicks, somebody's dog on LSD, rock and roll bands
> doing take after take, some of which was pretty awful.

So Prairie thinks to herself, watching "reel after reel" (198.28) of this
junk, while Ditzah and DL kick back and reminisce about the sex and drugs
and rock & roll. And this "awful" stuff is precisely the sort of thing
Ditzah and Zipi were most concerned about, even back then (198.15-22).

> Strikers battled
> strikebreakers and police by a fence at the edge of a pure green feathery
> field of artichokes while storm clouds moved in and out of the frame.
> Troopers evicted the members of a commune in Texas, beating the boys with
> slapjacks, grabbing handcuffed girls by the pussy, smacking little kids
> around, and killing the stock, all of which Prairie, breathing deliberately,
> made herself watch. Suns came up over farm fields and bright-shirted pickers
> with the still outlines of buses and portable toilets on trailers in the
> distance, shone pitilessly down on mass incinerations of American-grown pot,
> the flames weak orange distortions of the daylight, and set over college and
> high school campuses turned into military motor pools, throwing oily
> shadows. There was little mercy in these images, except by accident--backlit
> sweat on a Guardsman's arm as he swung a rifle toward a demonstrator, a
> close-up of a farm employer's face that said everything its subject was
> trying not to, those occasional meadows and sunsets--not enough to help
> anybody escape seeing and hearing what, the film implied, they must."
> (198-9)

Sure. From all the footage this is what Prairie picks up on and is affected
by, and, more importantly, she's affected by the fact that it is her mother
behind the camera. But there's nothing in the text which indicates that
anyone in 24fps (perhaps Frenesi, to the farm workers' union organisers) has
a commitment to anything other than making these films, which on the whole
are attempting to glorify the counterculture by portraying its "awful"
excesses as cool and documenting some of its violent clashes with authority,
and certainly not to any of the actual causes behind the confrontations they
film. And, in fact, it's more than likely that Frenesi is sexually-motivated
in some of what she has zoomed in on in these scenes (eg. "Troopers ...
grabbing handcuffed girls by the pussy", "backlit sweat on a Guardsman's arm
as he swung a rifle toward a demonstrator").

The other irony here is that DL and Ditzah, sitting back in 1984, do in fact
seem to "escape hearing and seeing what, the film implied, they must."
Unlike Prairie, nothing in the footage appears to strike a nerve with these
two until Brock Vond's image appears on the screen (198.27, 199.27).

It's the *absence* of any real commitment to ending the US war in Vietnam,
or to Civil Rights, or freedom of speech, or any other social or political
cause, which Pynchon highlights in his depiction of 24fps and PR3.

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