TPPM Watts: (11) Raceriotland

[Paul Nightingale]

"Everything seems so out in the open, all of it is real, no plastic
faces, not [sic?] transistors, no hidden muzak, or Disneyfied
landscaping, or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in
Raceriotland."

>From Seed:

"Watts becomes Raceriotland just as Egypt, Italy, etc, become
collectively Baedekerland in V. The difference here is that Pynchon
tries to undermine the tourist's detachment by his use of perspective
and by insisting on the constant presence of violence." (154)

Hence, "a few historic landmarks" from the 1965 evenements.

The essay has set out to describe life in Watts. It begins by describing
the legal fiction that attends the not-guilty verdict at the inquest.
Soon, in a few paragraphs, "the L.A. Scene" will be described in terms
of media images. The reader is constantly invoked, here as a tourist
with "smiling little chicks to show you around" (just as the female
social workers attempt to "show [Watts youth] around" the values of
respectable white society).

Yet, describing Watts, "all of it is real" (as opposed to "much of the
white culture that surrounds Watts"--later).

We're back with the P-text's enduring interest in how we know what we
know. Even though Raceriotland is juxtaposed to 'Disneyfication' (or
'Disneyisation', perhaps?) it is no less an image, or series of images,
a media construct. Perhaps the difference between a film-set and a
'real' location?