Old fans who've always been at the movies

Thu May 30 11:05:29 CDT 2013

RR> a dream that ultimately returns to haunt us all

Hell, we *make* the dreams. Consider Star Wars, with scrappy rebels against
the faceless helmeted Empire forces.

Or Red Dawn (either version), with no-surrender teen guerrillas against the
overbearing occupation troops.

Or the Terminator future, with humans scuttling through the rubble beneath
death-dealing flying machines.

And ask: in the world outside the Rex, who's got the night-vision goggles
and bulked-up Kevlar suits and killer-insect choppers; who's occupying whose
homeland; who's flying the stealth bombers and operating the drones?

The militia/Tea Party fantasy of resisting the IslamoKenyan Agenda 21
takeover is just one facet of a grander national fantasy: how we retain our
Concord & Lexington minuteman virtues, sniping at the redcoats from behind a
tree, while bestriding the world.  

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of rich
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2013 10:59 AM
To: jochen stremmel
Cc: Joseph Tracy; P-list List
Subject: Re: Old fans who've always been at the movies

Joseph

you should watch It Felt Like A Kiss, a neat little film by Adam Curtis (if
you haven't seen it already of course)

It Felt Like a Kiss tells the story of America's rise to power in the golden
age of pop, and the unforeseen consequences it had on the world and in our
minds. Beginning in 1959, the show spotlights the dreams and desires that
America inspired during the '60s, when the world began to embrace the
country and its culture as never before. But as this daring production
unfolds blending music with documentary...to face the dark forces that were
veiled by the American dream - a dream that ultimately returns to haunt us
all.

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:29 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

What a great post, Joseph! 

2013/5/30 Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>

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

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