IVIV page 141

[John Bailey]

I agree, and there are probably lots of good comparisons to be made
with the vices of film suggested in IV.

What isn't given that much shrift is Glen's death itself. The coldness
of the image seems really important here - it isn't a "movie death".
But the narrative doesn't make a melodramatic tragedy of the murder
itself. The way that film and video leech reality of its affect seems
to be the saddest thing about this sequence. There's even a reference
to this viewing as pornography - Glen's murder is "the money shot".

I have one of those B&H cameras. Pynchon gives too much information in
this scene imho. If another writer had bothered to describe the film
capacity and number of rotating lenses, I would have considered it
padding at best, boasting about research at worst. What's the point of
explaining the mechanics of the camera?

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> watching footage with Farley:
>
> the "raiding party" is wearing ski masks "machine-knit in
> reindeer and cone-bearing tree motifs"
>
> so, a sort of festive look...I predict not much
> will come of enlarging frames of the faces...
>
> "It was weird to Doc watching now, weird beyond
> easy imagining, that somewhere inside the place,
> invisible, he was lying unconscious, that with an
> X-Ray Specs attachment of some kind he could be
> looking at himself inert, next door to dead, and
> that viewing this film of an assault that was
> just about to begin might qualify as what Sortilege
> liked to call an out-of-body experience."
>
> things that strike me:
> he's lucky he was knocked out...
> it would be wrong to underestimate the
> impact of this film on him.  He's not a
> cold, dispassionate person, not a
> just-the-facts guy.  The reference to X-Ray
> Specs is nostalgic color, and also a grasping
> on his part to kid-stuff manageable technology
> (which was toys and didn't really work -
> but what if they did!  Well, if they did, he would
> see himself missing a firefight by being
> as Frank Zappa put it, unconcho...)
>
> so, if we wanted to be emblematic, we could
> see our 60s hippie already on his way to evolving
> into a PI, sidelined in "big biz v. idealism" writ small,
> unable to prevent idealism getting abducted and
> put back into its seraglio...
>
> and having lived to watch the tale told on film,
> as he will probably play it again in his head
> (like Zoyd, he does revisit stuff and think it over,
> I think the pot helps him do that, if you constantly
> in the short-run have to process a bunch of propaganda,
> which you know is wrong, you
> actually have to forget that stuff to function...)
>
> but I think it's a good sign that he's weirded out
> by it.
>
> "They're, gonna put me in the movies..."
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg67-CIasMg
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> --- "Can't say it often enough -
> change your hair, change your life."
> - Sortilege
>