Heres an Essay I Wrote About The Bleeding Edge Book Trailer

[Jay Siskind]

*Who knew middle-school language arts classes were teaching Pynchon and
having kids write essays about them?*
*
*
*From:* Oedipa Maas <jumpman23g at gmail.com>
*To:* pynchon-l at waste.org
*Sent:* Wednesday, October 2, 2013 9:55 PM
*Subject:* Heres an Essay I Wrote About The Bleeding Edge Book Trailer

In Which Two Canons And Two Appeals In The Book Trailer For Thomas
Pynchon’s Latest Novel Bleeding Edge Are Analyzed

On September 3rd, 2013, after a seven month anticipation period, following
the release of the Penguin Press’ 2013 catalog, the book trailer
advertising Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge (
http://vimeo.com/73716114), surfaced on the Internet. Initially, due to a
number of characteristics regarding the delivery of the advertisement, what
the main character of the ad chooses to argue, along with the ethos of this
character, the book trailer ostensible appears hoaxy, but, like most things
Pynchon creates, after a fourth or fifth viewing, things that at first
glance appeared to be a hoax are unveiled and Pynchon’s twinkle is revealed
in a way that is compatible with an attentive viewers logos, and also
entices the careful (albeit obsessive) fan.
This promotional video comes as the third in a series of book trailers for
Thomas Pynchon’s novels, although this one was completely different. The
book trailers that precede this one, have in common a sleekness and
professionalism, that when compared to this most recent book trailer seem
to be in no way related. For example, in an attempt to promote Pynchon’s
novel, Inherent Vice, the author teamed up with a professional film crew
and produced a movie-like trailer with the author, who has never given an
Interview, narrating the promotional video (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U). Then some time last year,
Pynchon allowed his novels to be tablitized, and in an attempt to
advertise, a second trailer was made that consists of impressive animating
and captivating typefaces. Then comes the most recent trailer, which when
compared to the other ones looks like an out of step black sheep.
Firstly, the video looks like it was filmed with a cheap handycam or even
an iPhone. The typefaces in this video are simple and seem to placed on the
screen in awkward positions, the filming is shaky, the video skips at
certain points, and overall looks like something you might find a high
school student throwing together and turning in at the last minute for an
end of the year project. Aside from the subpar aesthetic value of this book
trailer in comparison to the ones that preceded it, how this video got on
the internet in the first place causes some concern about the ethos of
those who created and uploaded the video. The first thing that seems
initially fishy about the video is the fact that Pynchon and the Penguin
Press decided to upload this video on an obscure Vimeo account with the
username of The Penguin Press. Until the upload of this video, the account
in question had only uploaded two other videos four weeks prior with
strange titles like “Caffeine and Pregnancy” and “Alcohol and Pregnancy”
with even stranger thumbnails. But what really makes this Vimeo account
suspicious and triggers the thought that this video may be a hoax, is that
the Penguin Press already has a YouTube account, with the name Penguin
Books USA, that has been online since February 7th, 2008, has 4,039
subscribers, hundreds of videos and 9,629,267 views as of this week. If
that doesn’t get ones hoax detector blinking, this YouTube account is the
home of all Penguin’s official online videos and is also the place where
the two previous book trailers were uploaded. With all that said, there is
still a couple of things that make the delivery of this advertisement look
suspicious at first or second glance. Namely, the video trailer for
Inherent Vice uploaded on Penguin’s legitimate YouTube account reads,
“Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon”, and the ostensibly hoaxy trailer uploaded
on Vimeo reads “Bleeding Edge book trailer”, which in comparison looks like
a subtle mistake of a hoax artist or impersonator, but as the attentive
viewer/ Pynchon-head will find out if he or she looks close enough this is
all done intentionally.
Then, all the speculation that was written above, about the potential that
this video could be a hoax was suppressed when the Penguin Press uploaded
the same video, this time titled “Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon”, on their
official YouTube account, Penguin Books USA a day later. At this point, the
level of enticement grew for those that didn’t write off the video as a
fraud or a joke, because once the press uploaded the video on their
official account, the video was given new legitimacy and the credibility of
the main character in the video rose. On this day, the questions changed
from “Is this real? Is this a fake?” to “Why would the greatest living
author OK the release of this video?” and “What is really going on?”
Therefore, if one starts to examine this promotional video closely, they
will find that the focus of this video is on a young man who is wearing a
spin off t-shirt of a t-shirt that Pynchon was reportedly seen wearing in
the late 1990’s which read “I’m not Thomas Pynchon”. The t-shirt that this
young man is wearing in the book trailer read “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon”. The
only problem here is that Pynchon was born on May 8th, 1937 and has
throughout his career never been photographed or given an interview. So, it
is safe to say that the young man is not Thomas Pynchon, because of this
outright lie and weak attempt at impersonation, the young man’s invention
(that he is Thomas Pynchon) appears to lose any trace of ethos that a
rhetor may possess, but this is in fact done in jest and done so to get the
audience focusing on this impersonation, and by doing so potentially
mis-details about the authors personal life which are right below the
surface of this video. The viewer must remember that it is Pynchon himself
who supplied the Third Proverb for Paranoids in his 1973 novel, Gravity’s
Rainbow, which reads, “If they get you asking the wrong questions, they
don’t have to worry about the answers” (Pynchon 251). In addition to the
blurring of credibility and legitimacy that the video and it’s creators
have managed to achieve before the video reaches the 30-second mark on the
video’s time-tracker, the setting that this video captures, coupled with
the content of the Pynchon impersonator’s words enhance the distortion
between what can be viewed as credible information and far-fetched play.
The video opens with a pan-shot overlooking the upper west side from a
rooftop. Then, for the first time in the video, our Pynchon-imitator
exclaims, “Listen”, quite arrogantly, “they call me the king of the upper
west side”. The opening line of this video contains the juxtaposition of
farce and classic Pynchon creativity, which is found throughout the video.
Next, the sun is shining on this young man wearing a pair of party glasses
with palm trees attached, an unbuttoned shirt, while holding a blunt in his
hand. He goes on to say, in Pynchon’s self-mocking style, that “I’m not
sure how comfortable I am with the whole hierarchy thing” and views himself
as a “power player from the margins, kind of like Karl Rove, if Karl Rove
were liberal and Jewish”. This is followed by our impersonator claiming to
be an upper west side staple and involved in the pastrafia, which prompts
the camera man to chime, “Whaaaaa, what’s that?”, to which the young man,
who later identifies himself as Sleazus, replies punningly, “pastrami
mafia”. The next shot we find Sleazus walking down an upper west side city
block, chest bowed out, clearly displaying his “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon” shirt
and pronouncing that usually his morning routine involves occupying
Zabar's, a famous upper west side grocery store, for five to six hours.
After walking the length of the block, this Sleazus character walks by the
camera and whispers, “This is my neighborhood”. Then, viewers find Sleazus
inside Zabar’s doing a half-lotus tree pose, in the way of other customers
and claiming that he went to summer camp with a Zabar’s family member and
as a result has the nepotistic hook-up at the place. To add credibility to
the statement above, Slezus says that the employees call him “Precebe”,
which he himself admits to not knowing the meaning, but adds “It sounds
cool”. Well, as it turns out right when Sleazus finishes that sentence, on
the screen comes text defining the Yiddish word, which means “twit or
barnicle”. Jokes like this continue and are perplexing because with all the
elements that decrease the video’s ethos are at the same time shrouded in
play that makes it hard to get at what is legit information about the
author or is just a joke.
During the middle half of the video, viewers watch Sleazus rudely order lox
from Zabar’s and head back on the street, where he reminisces about when
the upper west side was still a real melting pot. He adds that he remembers
when “[the neighborhood] was still filled with Jews, Boricuas, and
Dominicanos and then Robert Moses” at which point Sleazus breaks out into a
politically incorrect song which goes, “Kick those Puerto Ricans out on the
street/ it’s just a slum / tear it all down”.
The latter half of the trailer is full of subtle references to the novel
the video is promoting, including allusions to the novels protagonist
Maxine Tarnow, the computer program “DeepArcher” (pronounced departure).
Sleazus goes on to describe Maxine as a “grade A MILF” and name drops the
stories antagonist “Gabriel Ice”. In the promotional videos penultimate
scene, viewers watch Sleazus on a park bench blend the reality of this
world and the reality of the novel’s by reffering to Maxine as if she were
a real person and adds that the last thing he heard about her was that she
was chasing down leads and he actually doesn’t know where the story ends
and that “[It’s] something to look into, if are examining the
neighborhood”. In the final scene, the camera zooms in on Sleazus as he
opens the lox he bought from Zabar’s earlier and claims that they are a
natural exfoliant that the moisturizing conglomerates don’t want you to
know about, before putting the lox on his face. Then a jumpcut brings
viewers to the iridescent cloth-bound edition of Bleeding Edge with
September 17th displayed next to it. The places filmed, jokes cracked and
language communicated in this video advertisement cleverly distorts the
credibility of the information that Sleazus provides himself, or as his
shirt says “Tom Pynchon”, and clues about the Bleeding Edge which works as
a very inventive form of enticement that increases the more the trailer is
examined.
When watching this book trailer for the first or second time, maybe third
time, the video seems to lack any sort of logic because of it’s origins,
impersonation, farce and dirty jokes aside the production value and amature
film-making while this apparent lack of logic may be the case for the
seminal viewings of this book trailer, it seems that as the number of views
increases so does the amount of logos that the video contains. This
ultimately entices the viewer to go out and read this thing in order to see
what it’s all about. For example, it has been known that Pynchon lives on
the upper west side because of the release of the 2002 documentary, A
Journey Into the Mind of P, so when Sleazus is walking down the street in
his ironic t-shirt proclaiming that he spends five to six hours a day in
Zabar’s, this is a hyperbolic joke, but it would not be surprising if
Pynchon did shop there since it’s one of the famous grocery stores in the
neighborhood. The same can be said about comments like “This is my
neighborhood”, “I went to summer camp with a Zabar”, I’m a “power player
from the margins”. All these comments seem to be only done in jest, but all
of these things are highly likely despite being hidden beneath a layer of
jokes.
One of the most subtle, but at the same time most telling moments in the
video, in regards to the clever logic behind the creator’s motives is the
song. If one reads Pynchon they are sure to meet characters that
spontaneously break-out into song and here, although put in very slyly,
viewers find Sleazus breaking out into song. The mere four seconds of the
video this song takes up is a perfect example of how Pynchon’s wits are
really at work. So, a song that at first appears racially charged, actually
can transform into a reminder that maybe this is something Pynchon will be
working with in the novel. And as it turns out, he does. The song mentioned
above is actually the first song a character sings in the novel and does so
in a less playful context. The blunt which Sleazus holds turns out to be
connected to the story’s plot, along with the mention of Maxine as being a
MILF and the allusion to DeepArcher which the book and Maxine’s journey
revolves around. Before the purchase of this book, people would only be
able to gleen from the information provided by the trailer in order to make
connections. This is how Pynchon and the press came up with an ingenious
ad. They cloak the whole thing in a cloud of illogical, rude and
illegitimate smoke, but made the trailer funny and puzzling enough for
viewers to desire more information. As viewers watch the video more, they
realize the only way to affirm their speculations is to go out, get the
book and read it.
In closing, it is apparent that Pynchon, with the help of some of his
buddies, came up with a promotional video that succeeded in weeding out the
non-Pynchon-fans or those who lack a normal level of curiosity by layering
the video with hoaxy, self-mocking and funny elements while maintaining
underneath these layers a clever, witty, and logical advertisement that
reeks of Pynchon and most importantly, advertises something to the consumer
in an uncommon and unoppressive way.
Works Cited
[Pynchon], [Thomas ]. [Gravity’s Rainbow]. [New York New York] [Viking],
[1973].
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