IVIV (12): Straight is Hip

[Michael Bailey]

Laura pointed out the soliloquy from "American
Psycho" where he talks about "Hip to be Square"
- my spouse chose to rent this movie and I couldn't
watch, but I did hear that bit.

The fluency of this villain - a precursor, maybe,
to the artsy conversations the bad guys have
in Tarantino films? - does single out that "Hip to be
square" notion, and his take on what I considered
to be an innocent and encouraging song is in keeping
with his character, of course.

But in choosing the slogan, the high-fliers behind
C-don are, I guess, cynically tailoring the message
to their target demographic as much as Blatnoyd
with his manual that Doc sneaks a peek at ("how to
deal with hippies") and finds himself typecast and
"dealt with"



> a mental institution/New Age retreat operated by Golden Fang, a dentist-owned drug-smuggling cartel.  A few pages later, Doc has this insight:
>
> " ... if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and also sell them a program to help them kick?  Get them coming and going, twice as much revenue and no worries about new customers -- as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers."
>


that is pretty horrible, on a par with the abuse of Japonica
but stretched over a whole population.
"American life [as] something to be escaped from"
is something that Doc is partly engaging in
(both the experience of it and the attempt to escape):
the "childhood that he never really wanted to escape
from" is put up in opposition to it, and also his rather
constant partaking of hemp combustion byproducts.

Doc's thinking is none too fluent here
(if GF felt a threat to their heroin market
from their rehab efforts, I think the correct marketing
term would be "churn" or "customer retention"
rather than "new customers") but he's hitting upon
a big idea as to the extent of the GF.  Basically
the notion is that it's so big it includes both the
underworld and the establishment.

Whether it's demonstrably true in the world at large,
it does seem to be so within the world of IV, and the
forces that Doc has to range against GF - personal
friendships, family ties, old music, chemically aided
intuition - are themselves implicated in many of the
same problems.  But there's something like a Turing
test of sympathetic subjectivity that Doc manages
to pass, imho.