Heres an Essay I Wrote About The Bleeding Edge Book Trailer

[Curtis Rawling-Endicott]

Thanks for sharing! And don't let the cool kids get you down.

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Oedipa Maas <jumpman23g at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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].
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l