VLVL 24fps and "the Movement"

[pynchonoid]

Good posts, davemarc.

While Vineland satirizes some elements and activities
of the 60s protest Movement in the portrayal of PR3,
the novel is also aware of the protests that actually
occured at Berkeley and Columbia, mentioning those two
universities by name in a passage the jbor quoted in a
post recently -- so it's clear that Pynchon sets his
novel in a larger context of the historical Movement
that fought for civil rights and against the War,
within and among the acid craziness and petty
squabbles and and power tripping and other human
weaknesses. (By the way, if the reader takes Vineland
only as a fiction and chooses to ignore the historical
60s, then it's hardly appropriate to use the novel to
try to discredit the real 60s protest Movement.)

Gotta agree with jbor re the notion that traditional
categories of "good" and "bad" don't easily apply
here, nor in any other Pynchon work that I know of. 
Having said that, it's difficult to find any redeeming
qualities in Brock, except the chuckles prompted by
his deus ex machina fate and glee at the prospect of
his fate at the end of his story. I also agree with
jbor that Pynchon refrains from judging Vietnam Vets
harshly, in part, I suspect but can't prove, because
he, like so many people of his generational cohort,
knows too many casualties of the war, and because, as
was clear in GR, his sympathies are with the ordinary
soldiers (and all the rest of the cogs in the big
wheel) who get sucked into the War by forces beyond
their control.

I guess I haven't been following the discussion
closely enough -- who does jbor mean when he talks
about people here on Pynchon-L reading the novel as an
unnuanced glorification of the 60s Movement?  Seems to
me everybody who's been posting regularly in this
discussion accepts, and offers, a complex, nuanced
view of the 60s; maybe that's just another of those
straw men jbor likes to set up and knock down.

The real satirical target in PR3 is, of course, not
the young people at Berkeley, Columbia, Kent State,
etc. who actually helped bring the 
War to an end (some of them dying in the process),
it's the kids from those uptight Lower California
Republican families who catch only enough of the
protest fever to act out the bits and pieces that
they've seen in TV coverage of the protests at
Berkeley, Columbia, and elsewhere (as Toby mentioned a
while back, Pynchon gives us the 60s as it appears on
TV, back then and revised many times since), the ones
who adopt the symbols of the protest movement, the
music, the drugs, the slang, but not the substance,
although even at PR3 they struggle towards that, too,
and might have had a chance to make it if not for the
pressure and manipulation of the Establishment in the
person of Brock Vond. 

Re another recent post, Vineland is loud and clear on
the idea that there's no need for Big Brother or the
kind of fudning necessary to deploy one-- so many of
the kids have been conditioned by the Tube to accept
the discipline of uniformed officers, they don't need
that sort of surveillance and coercion.

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