VL--IV, p80 ff. History is like your average movie script

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Sasha's sense of "history is like your average movie script" is that the real story gets edged out in favor of the crowd-pleasing cheap melodrama or simplistic good-guy stories.  But you can imagine that for Frenesi, thinking back, this phrase has a personal meaning.  That the nuances of bad behavior - her bad behavior - can't be captured in the flickering image on the screen or the heavy-handed melodrama of the scripts.  Sasha's upset that the good-guys' (the Communists) story isn't being told. Frenesi's aware that the bad-guys' story isn't being told either.

On a personal note, I also grew up watching old movies with my mother (who, as a lefty journalist, had had to take the 5th in front of HUAC).  She'd explain the movies to me ("when they cut to the next scene like that, it means that the man and woman had sex"), give me all the gossip (Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye were an item) and also point out who was a rat during the McCarthy hearings (Charlton Heston was a particular target of her venom).  It was lots of fun.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>

>p. 80     "rapt silent swaying".......?? like the dancers in CofL49? 
> 
>p. 81    [History, Frenesi's personal history] as "fuckers & fuckees"...from the anticommunism days...."betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice and lying"...
>"History is like your average movie script"........full of betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice and lying........
> 
>p. 82 YET, movies HAD NOT ennobled 'the finer drama' of [the makers, the workers, of those movies?] A way of Pynchon to say that History as a movie drama
>does not deal with the 'reality' of the people who suffer in History?....