IVIV (12): Mental Institutions and the noir genre

[Michael Bailey]

somebody at the place has one of Mickey's ties,
and Threeply is a triploid permutation of Deeply, a doctor
from Vineland, right...
Coy is almost like Zelig, he turns up everywhere.
But, you make a valid point, not much in the hospital scene
is starkly piteous or terrible.  Compared to DL's assault on
Vond's training camp, Doc is accepted as a legitimate
visitor - it's as if he doesn't pose enough of a threat for them
to even mount any defenses (like with Boris)

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 2:42 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Here's something that struck me about Doc's visit to Chryskylodon:  not a whole lot happens.  We've had a lot of build-up to C-don [too lazy to keep typing that damned word].  We know Mickey and his wife have an interest in the place, we know C-don is a Greek rendering of Golden Fang, which has been implicated in Mickey's disappearance, and with which Coy, Jade, and Jason Velveeta have a familiarity.  We also know, via Chandler and the noir genre in general, that mental institutions and their cousins, rehab clinics, spell Bad News for any private dick entering their premises.  So Doc walks in, gets a tour and has lunch.  Lunch?  That's it?  Sure, the creepy Dr. Threeply offers him some white wine that's a queasy shade of yellow and has a suspiciously long list of ingredients on the label, but he doesn't seem to care whether or not Doc drinks it.  Threeply shows Doc the future Noncompliant Cases Unit, which creeps Doc out, although it's apparently empty.  One other thing happ!
>  ens:  Doc's surprised to run into Coy there.  "Now, what the fuck?"  Why is he so surprised?  This is the fourth time he's run into Coy in the space of a few days, and he (and we) know that Coy's in hock to the Golden Fang in some way.  Doc's able to talk to Coy pretty easily, and his subsequent departure from the facility is so uneventful that Pynchon doesn't even describe it.  Shouldn't he be drugged, strait-jacketed, etc., or at least encounter someone (Mickey, Shasta, Coy, Japonica, Jade, etc.) in this condition?
>
> Why does Pynchon set us up for this noir convention, then basically walk away from it?  One thing I've been thinking about is that, for Pynchon, paranoia of the Government trumps paranoia of non-governmental mind controllers.  Anti-government paranoia has had its crests and troughs in the last century.  Its high points were probably the Nixon and Dubya years.  It's low points, the Roosevelt years (when Chandler was writing) and possibly(?) the current Obama years.  There are crooked cops and politicians in Chandler and noir film, but not a lot of wholesale higher government conspiracy going on.  Chandler's more concerned with smaller fish, including "mentalists," "clinics," etc.  Pynchon's got bigger players in mind.  C-don is a mere side show of the bigger Golden Fang cartel/conspiracy, so Pynchon isn't interested in building it up into a big evil player.  A mistake, though, if he's interested in staying within the genre.
>
> Laura
>
>
>



-- 
--- "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