AtD (37) p. 1055, Kafkaesque dream, guilt, paranoia, Where is LAPD?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The Spiral Staircase (1945)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038975/ 

isn't a Hitchcock film, and, although many of its scenes take place in the dark, its characters aren't stock film noir characters.  It's about a serial killer who attacks disabled women.  If Deuce is now a serial killer, the reference makes sense.  The Hitchcock classic Vertigo also contains a staircase in a stone tower, a kind of squared-off spiral staircase.  The Nancy Drew book Is The Hidden Staircase (not at all spiral, no murder involved).

It's interesting how Deuce makes the transition from Pulp Western bad guy to Film Noir bad guy.  It implies that there's something static about evil (if not evil, "badness") -- it's not just a socio-historic construct (sorry, I'm really beginning to blather -- need caffeine).  Perhaps the next incarnation of Deuce is Brock Vond?  Maybe a character in a 70s TV show?  Anyone up for a group read of Vineland next?

Laura



-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jul 28, 2008 10:34 AM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: AtD (37) p. 1055, Kafkaesque dream, guilt, paranoia, Where is LAPD?
>
>P 1055
>Deuce's dream is kafkaesque? He is assumed to be guilty,---"hell, so did he [think he was guilty]",  "there were others", although we do not know of what---An inquiry by a cadre of Californian youth.........paranoia again.
>
>The dwelling in which the dream takes place has a spiral staircse inside a round stone wall......Stone walls as in the old European villages and a spiral staircase as in twisting Hollywood noir movies [famous hitchcock one?]. [Not that TRP is so alluding but I remember the first nancy Drew mystery I ever read, "The Mystery of The Spiral Staircase"..
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>"The early light coming through it [the dkylight] a dusty rose color".  That early morning light motif, first noticed (maybe; not sure) by Mike B. It is there in GR, Vineland, earlier in AtD and elsewhere.
>"there is a crack in everything [even the darkness], that's how the light gets in."---Leonard Cohen [except for the bracket part]. 
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>Sinister Californian youth..brilliant as arc lamps (very negative in TRPs world, of course)...."unlimited power" [baddest shit].......ramping up Deuce's paranoia. he asks Where is the LAPD?, which shows, with another sly Pynchon joke, how bad it must feel.
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>Deuce hasn't lived an exemplary life, to say the least, but is this section to also show 1) he has an unconscious conscience, at least?  
>2) Hollywood--the dream factory, as it has been called-- creates fear/paranoia no matter who we are? 
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