IVIV page 141

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The level of detail about the murder (assassination) and the camera taking the footage sounds like info provided to an investigatory body:  flashback to the Warren Commission.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>

>
> John Bailey wrote:
>>
>> 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 lead a sheltered life, didn't know that.
>I have heard of snuff films, which depending on the character
>of those friends of Doc's this might end up as...
>but it's just as likely not to, the author doesn't point in
>that direction, unless "money shot" is meant to?
>I'm not in favor of that reading.  Certainly there is no
>prurience suggested here in Doc's viewing.
>
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
>I didn't barf on the detail, it wasn't all that much.
>One of the things I like, in fact, is when this author -
>and others - put some technical stuff in to play with...
>
>the effect here is to emphasize how this is not a professional
>production, that Doc isn't - at this point in his career, anyway -
>much of a professional.  He has the weird feeling that this is a movie
>that involves him personally (remember in Electric Kool-Aid
>Acid Test, how one of the trips of the Merry Pranksters was
>"making life your own movie")
>In fact, his own choppy attention span might be what the
>camera's capacities are the objective correlative of?
>Emblematically, I could run with that, say the three different
>lenses would represent different states of mind (buzzed,
>sleeping and tripping?)
>
>If a person has read some of the Indymedia sites, for instance,
>they suffer from the same sort of choppiness...
>and, less specifically, I often get a weird feeling like Doc when
>reading about events that took place in my youth but
>I was relatively unaware of...