Old fans who've always been at the movies
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Wed May 29 21:55:12 CDT 2013
The movie and the particular scene in the movie at the moment of impact fits into Pynchon's writing history as something that would engage him. So he moves the arrival of another bomb, this one directly connected to the revenge of the colonized preterite, to L.A., the imperial center of the dream factory., generator of the tricky Dick and of the Great BonzoGipper 20 MuleteamRaygun bring down this wall and put up a wallmartman.
The actual payback bomb took longer to arrive: after 50,000 suicides from Vietnam, after fucking over Cambodia, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Columbia, after theShah after El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua and Angola and the Congo and Nigeria, after all the glorious victories over communism, over uppity nuns, over labor unions, over tomato pickers, over banana growers and mineworkers, and folk singers,smart ass rag-heads, after safely containing most of the niggers and having a good laugh at the uppity bitches After consolidating the ragheads under our thumb, while innocently strolling to the bank, the evil terrorists finally snuck one past us.
Is there something about Air Power/TV/film that is particularly apropos of the rule of a demigod? Do they all use color coded fear monitors? Are we safe yet?
On May 29, 2013, at 8:58 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
> (Haven’t we?)
>
> Antwerp, 1944:
>
> “Nearly twelve hundred seats were filled in the Rex Cinema on bustling Avenue De Keyser for the Friday afternoon matinee on December 15… [for] a classic Western: The Plainsman, a Cecil B. De Mille melodrama starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane…
>
> “At 3:20 p.m., just after Gary Cooper learned of Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn, a searing white light flashed across the auditorium as a V-2 – unheard and unseen, launched from a new site in Holland – blew through the roof… Recovery teams ultimately retrieved 567 bodies, more than half of them Allied soldiers, Navy gun crews, and merchant mariners...”
>
> Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list