On Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the ending of Gravity's Rainbow. And Grigori's ramble?

[Mark Kohut]

>From Ira Nadel's *Leonard Cohen, A Life in Art. *

Cohen's major novel, 1966.

The System theatre, as both the location for the remarkable movies that are
witnessed and the scene of the frenzied eroticism of the telephone dance,
is the metaphor of this creative process. In this world of shadows, the
cinema becomes reality, and therefore essential: "… I’ve got to get to a
movie…, A movie will put me back in my skin…“ says the narrator at one
point. Yet the system – whether theatre, language, or even thought---
breaks down at the end, through the surreal, inverted world of the text ,
in which even inanimate objects, such as "the Danish Vibrator", which
rumbles out of the hotel room and down the beach out to see, or the radio,
transpose themselves into what they desire: " (CLOSE UP OF RADIO EXHIBITING
A MOTION PICTURE OF ITSELF)"  Deconstructing The illusion becomes a literal
exercise at the end when, in the movie theater, the narrator synchronize
his blinking eyes with the shutter of the projector. The screen goes black,
the movie is invisible, and some in the audience realize they are “in the
presence of a Master of the Yoga of the Movie Position“ . Not suspense, but
blankness occurs, establishing a purity of vision. It is the achievement,
if only for a moment, of “the Clear Light",  that, if one cannot dwell in
it, nevertheless forces one to "deal with symbols". Dissolve at the end
into a movie of Ray Charles, whose singing of “Ol' Man River," provides the
epigraph to the book, “Somebody said lift that bale".


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