44 Here Comes Coy to Save the Motherland

[Michael Bailey]

alice wellintown wrote:

>>> know the measure of (Pirate's Bananas), some fortune, shine one like
>>> crazy diamonds. In IV and in VL,  the artist who crosses over to the
>>> political side, like Frenesi with her camera (the camera is a Gun, a
>>> phalic instrument of control and violence) may find his/her way back
>>> to the fold, but will pay a very dear price.
>>

however, IV's a different story with a different moral than Vineland.

In Vineland, ok, Frenesi went to film school (hmm, film school to
film-activist to informant to subject of Hector's upcoming movie,
sorta like that story-movie-tv cycle...) became politicized,
or you could say her talents found a place in the Movement...
which was prominent enough in those days that you could become
a "star" of sorts...

drugged and subdued, her talents were utilized differently and she
was rode hard and put away wet, BUT Hector's about to put her in
an ostensibly "anti-drug" movie and change the whole context...
(but of course, anti-drug movies were what got a lot of people
interested in them in the first place)

but anyway, in IV, nobody's really politically active in the first place.
If Coy is so purblind as to *ever* see vigilante membership as a forum
for expressing patriotism, he can hardly be in the same class or even the
same school ("University of where?  Pluto?") as Frenesi.

To get to any honest political activism in IV we have to trace back to
Vidal Sasson's moonlighting in London...

a-and the drug heroin doesn't show up in Vineland at all, does it?
whereas it's tangled up in (blue) the roots of the "Coy" half of the mystery
which turns out to be the half that Doc can do anything about, sort of,
(although the implications of the stones he turns in the Mickey mystery
are interesting, he doesn't have the juice to do anything about them,
but if a person isn't dead set on seeing the book as strictly dystopian,
there's a suggestion that Doc is setting roots and grafting himself
onto the sour root stock in a way that might eventually bear fruit which
could yield said juice) and, well, the dreaded Junk puts in a physical
appearance eventually later in the book in an exaggerated physicality
like the monolith of pot in _Vineland_.


-- 
--- "Bearing in mind that either I don't know
or it'll be my ass if I tell you, what is it, man?" - Coy Harlingen