VL--IV. Movies as a betrayal

[Guy Ian Scott Pursey]

I think you guys are onto to something with these few posts. I'm not taking part in the VL close-read (still 100 pages of AtD to go) but now I wish I were!

Please make sure you follow this up - I'd be interested to know how literature/fiction would fit into this "dream factory" picture even if Pynchon doesn't touch on it...

Anyway, a small point and probably worthless but: is this why the dates are featured in brackets after the film titles? Furthermore, are they yet another suggestion that this is how most of us measure history now - not by political events but what film came out and when? By the styles and fashions featured in those films? Or is Pynchon asking us to dig deeper; look into those films, what they're about, how they were made...? Perhaps echoing DL's line to Prairie (and us) that we should "Look it up, check it out." (UK Minerva ed., pg 264)

Cheers,
Guy

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org on behalf of kelber at mindspring.com
Sent: Sat 1/10/2009 19:08
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: VL--IV. Movies as a betrayal
 
This is an issue we'll have to revisit when we get to the sequence about Frenesi's work in the film collective.  Presumably she's trying to right the wrongs of Hollywood until things go horribly awry.  A false consciousness trying to create a real (unalienated) product?

LK

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

>I will still argue that TRP means that movies, the fabricated "dream factories" that pervade the real world, which are the 'real world' of Vineland America, start with a falseness--a betrayal--of reality...........from the betrayals of the workers to the betrayals by melodrama and either-or, good guy--bad guy stories.
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>Frenesi's riff on life "based on" a binary distinction, good guy, bad guy....her embrace of the world of betraying.....and the fact that Hollywood was divorced from its own 'producers"-----what an ingenious Marxist-like metaphor from OBA!......workers alienated from the products of their work and a LITERAL 'false consciousness" created!
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