The Babysitter Channel #9

[Rich Clavey]

Is it just me or does this post have anything to do with the pynchon list or Inherent Vice? If it does can you be a tad more clear? And if not could you please put the polite NP in the subject? Otherwise I am just going to ignore anything you post.
Rich

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:


From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Subject: The Babysitter Channel #9
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 5:29 PM


Hilary P. Dannenberg: Virtuality in Narrative Fiction

"The Babysitter" (1969) by Robert Coover which is composed of numerous
fragmentary episodes which describe contradictory versions of events
taking place one evening at the Tucker family's house where the
babysitter is, and at a nearby party where Mr. and Mrs. Tucker are
spending the evening. As the narrative progresses, more and more
different versions are spawned, closing with a number of alternate
endings, for example in which the babysitter is raped and murdered,
the babysitter accidentally drowns the baby, or the Tuckers come home
to find all is well. Unlike conventional narrative all these versions
apparently have actual status instead of a single actual version being
privileged over other unrealised virtual ones. Furthermore, two
additional virtual levels are integrated into the text. First, the
subjective wish-worlds of some characters are interpolated into the
narration of the actual story versions:
He stares benignly down upon the girl, her skirt rumpled loosely
around her thighs. Flushed, frightened, yet excited, she stares back
at him. He smiles. His finger touches a knee, approaches the hem.
Another couple arrives. Filling up here with people. He wouldn't be
missed. (Coover 1970: 215)

Here Mr. Tucker's virtual fantasy about what he might do with the
babysitter is presented in the same continuous present-tense flow as
the actual events taking place at the party. It is up to the reader to
separate Mr Tucker's virtual fantasy from the actual story level of
the party filling up with guests; there are no markers in the text
itself to distinguish the different ontological levels. In the case of
this example, the context makes the ontological hierarchy of the two
plot levels clear, but in the case of other fragmentary episodes
involving the babysitter, her boyfriend John and his friend Mark, the
reader can never be certain if they should be read as John's virtual
fantasy or one of the alternative actual versions of the evening's
events. The second virtual plot level is also interpolated in a
similar fashion: sections of narrative taken from the television
(which is switched on at the house where the babysitter is), are also
inserted into the running text of the watching babysitter's reactions
to the TV narrative:

The dark man grunts rhythmically, backs off, then plunges suicidally
forward - her own knees draw up protectively - the sheriff staggers!
caught low! but instead of following through, the other man steps back
- a pistol! the dark one has a pistol! the sheriff draws! shoots from
the hip! explosions! she clutches her hands between her thighs - no!
the sheriff spins! wounded! the dark man hesitates, aims, her legs
stiffen toward the set, the sheriff rolls desperately in the straw,
fires: dead! the dark man is dead! (Coover 1970: 214)

Coover's "Babysitter" therefore ensnares the reader in a dense
entanglement of the actual and the virtual without offering clear
signposts as to the events' ontological status.

http://www.dissense.de/vi/dannenberg.html

Date: June 21, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final NY Times
Byline: By Robert Coover

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure
as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of
narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical
new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of
multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or
obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more
preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or
style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional
narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). We are always
astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience
occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments.
That is to say, the text fragments are like stepping stones, there for
our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between them.


http://wings.buffalo.edu/cas/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/370/EndofBooks.htm


Review of the film:

November 15, 1995
FILM REVIEW; Watching Who's Watching Children
By JANET MASLIN
It's no casting stretch to find Alicia Silverstone playing the title
role in "The Babysitter" as a beautiful teen-ager who inspires the
erotic imagination of every man she meets. But Ms. Silverstone, who
made this film just before her comic breakthrough in "Clueless," gives
a dramatic performance that goes well beyond her earlier movie work.
Used in her first films as a rock-video goddess and stereotypical
nymphet, she is much more clever here, playing what effectively is a
dual role. Cool and naive on the surface, she comes alive in the other
characters' furtive, overheated daydreams.

Previously released on video, "The Babysitter" has been imaginatively
rescued by the Film Forum not only as a star vehicle but also as an
impressive debut for Guy Ferland, its writer and director. Mr. Ferland
has skillfully coaxed a linear narrative out of a fragmented Robert
Coover story, weaving a web of sexual fantasy around the baby sitter's
provocative presence. Far from exploiting this material, Mr. Ferland
pares away its more lurid possibilities and instead concentrates on
plumbing the depths of character. The baby sitter winds up having
dark, unanticipated effects on everyone around her.

With stylish precision, "The Babysitter" introduces its diffident
young heroine and her admirers: her boyfriend, Jack (Jeremy London),
his malevolent friend Mark (Nicky Katt), and Harry Tucker (J. T.
Walsh), the middle-aged father of the children she has been hired to
mind. During the single evening on which the film takes place, each of
these men fantasizes avidly about the baby sitter's activities. And
not even the 10-year-old boy she's watching is unmoved by her charms.

If these characters seem especially well-honed, that's because Mr.
Ferland has done a subtle job of transposing their private thoughts
into dialogue, especially at the party that the Tuckers attend. "The
Babysitter" is merciless toward these hard-drinking, self-deluding
adults, especially when Dolly Tucker (Lee Garlington) imagines that
her host (George Segal at his most unctuous) is making a pass at her.
Threatened by the baby sitter's youth, Dolly is the character most
conspicuously resentful of her, even telling Harry that she thinks the
young woman has been taking baths in the Tucker tub. "I mean, can you
imagine that?" Dolly asks.

Actually, Harry can.

Mr. Ferland moves smoothly into and out of such fantasies, with every
character here seeming to wonder what it would be like if Ms.
Silverstone asked him to soap her back. And the film grows
interestingly complex as it piles on layer after layer of imaginary
life. Meanwhile, Ms. Silverstone has the chance to play the consummate
tease, a role for which she has been ideally equipped by nature. With
impressive ease, she slips from propriety to provocation and back
again, while the film wonders what happens to beauty once it dazzles
the eye of the beholder. Ms. Silverstone can count on a long career
spent answering such questions.

This film is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult
guardian). It includes profanity, partial nudity and frequent sexual
situations.

THE BABYSITTER

Directed by Guy Ferland; written by Mr. Ferland, based on a story by
Robert Coover; director of photography, Rick Bota; edited by Jim
Prior; music by Loek Dikker; production designer, Phil Leonard;
produced by Kevin J. Messick and Steve Perry; released by Spelling
Films International. At Film Forum 3, 209 Houston Street, South
Village. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Alicia Silverstone (Baby Sitter), J. T. Walsh (Harry Tucker),
Lee Garlington (Dolly Tucker), Nicky Katt (Mark), Jeremy London
(Jack), George Segal (Bill) and Lois Chiles (Bernice).

Questions for discussion

Who is telling the story? The story is told by an unnamed and
undramatized third person narrator and from an omniscient points of
view.  The narrator knows everything about all the characters,
including their secret fears and fantasies (a privileged narrator) and
we are told about the characters (direct characterization) and how the
characters feel (privileged narration) by a single third person
omniscient narrator. The story begins with what appears to be a
traditional exposition; the story appears to be set in an easily
recognizable location and time, as the baby sitter arrives and the
parents are still getting dressed to go out and the children are still
eating their dinner: “She arrives at 7:40, ten minutes late […] the
children are still eating supper…(335). Immediately, however, we dip
into the Babysitter’s mind as she listens to a television set
broadcasting from a distant room and she speculates about the
programming (335).

Why did Coover choose to construct this/these narrator(s)? By electing
to construct and employ a third person omniscient narrator, Coover can
destabilize the expectations of readers of traditional fiction and at
the same time, invite the reader to participate in the voyeuristic and
titillating experiences his parodies, by imparting privileged
narrative that often includes violent sexual fantasies and violations
of social and sexual taboos.   Of course, he needs a badly-behaved
narrator, a mischievous and roguish perspective to advance the naughty
comic “plots.”

Does this story have a plot? Explain. While this kind of story is
sometimes called an anti-story, it does have a beginning and an end,
even if it disrupts and collapses a traditional reading for cohesive,
linear plot. The reader can appreciate and enjoy the subversive
elements of the story because it is subversive of a traditional and
conventional story. That in itself is a plot. Even if the story bursts
and spills out into spaces and times outside the causal relationships
and actions of the narrative and into and out of fantasies injected
with  a pastiche of television programming and so on, the reader can
still read the story in a fairly traditional, if skewed toward the
reader response aesthetic stance, mode. Reading these kinds of stories
with anti-plots, stories of Robert Coover, John Barth and Donald
Barthelme, others, has a certain subversive allure that springs from
the outrageous realities and alternative histories that were given a
voice in the 60s when rebelling against the limitations of traditional
authority, including the literary (realism), was in vogue.

Do you like Coover’s style? Explain. I like Coover’s style; he has a
keen eye and ear for the recent penetration of voyeuristic,
sexual-spectacle-obsessed entertainment culture in the so-called
middle class American life. And, I love the metafiction elements, the
self-nullifying plot, the cul-de-sacs and Chinese boxes, the
destabilizing myth-making and the puncturing of grand narratives,
including the grand narrative about the impossibility of grand
narrative. And, while I also enjoy characters and verisimilitudes, I
like the meta-fictional style too because I can focus on the pure
aesthetic experience.

The use of TV?

I also like how his stories combine the cartoon Simpsons and the
Hollywood American Beauty in a world that and seems horribly like our
own. The cutting and splicing or channel zapping allows for the
introduction of lots of voices and imitates the experiences of a
television watching public. As the Western film is spliced into the
narrative (339) we experience what has been common on TV and film for
years, a TV set on the set or in the film becomes, as it were, a play
within the play or a motif or an inter-textual device highlighting an
idea or theme or even foreshadowing an event. In The Babysitter, the
language, the diction, both from the TV and from the narrative proper,
bounce off one another and merge, producing puns and ironic
commentaries.

The Title? The character, babysitter, is never given a name, but she
embodies several perspectives and fantasies on/of babysitters. The
title also reminds us of low budget, horror and quasi-pornographic
film titles.
What devices does Coover use to heighten the comic effect?  As noted,
Coover employes the zapping television effect, the semi-pornographic
parodies, the stock figures of Mark and Jack, who are every parents
worse nightmare, lots of bathroom humor and silly fantasy. The
situations or fantasized situations are hilarious; the babysitter
trying on Mr. Tucker’s shorts as the boy looks on.

The targets of Coover’s satire? The targets include American
television suburban culture and the traditional writer/reader of
fiction.




      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20090827/42718a2f/attachment-0001.html>