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the shtoner nonsense ethos.
may expand on this later. all i have now is some past posts, and i feel that this ties into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fairly well too, in that fear and loathing also parodies film genres through use of absurd shtoner dile-eck-tiks, (see i spelled it out funny like that because i'm aware the use of the word is pretentious and probably inaccurate, aren't i cute when i get all self-aware like that?) specifically that sort of stoic yet jaded narration you find in noirs and neo-noirs done by the sly guy nonchalant/badass/gum chewer detective.
excerpts taken from Gravity's Rainbow. commentary taken from an overly elaborate explanation of why i thought they were funny.

so like, it's funny because it parodies how a retard stoner would go about making a shitty amateur film, as well as poking fun at westerns. you have this very long winded, uncut dialogue about whether or not the midget is real without having any sort of plot progressing, as if that's supremely interesting. like going off on a train of thought while stoned and forgetting what you were talking about in the first place. obviously that in and of itself isn't necessarily comedic, but the delivery of it in the text makes it that way. then the western parody element comes in where suddenly, after this shitty dialogue, there's just some abrupt violence and a vague smile that are supposed to resolve the conflict somehow when they clearly don't; only for osbie feel, one of the actual dopers in GR's plot to say: "hey wait, didn't we forget about the greed bit?" adding onto the earlier shit about yknow, going off on a train of thought and how that's parodied in writing here
also, all these surreal mismatched elements added to the western flick further sell you on the amateurism.... like the midget with the german accent (why?), the forced accent and weird contrived named that S.Z. "cuddles" sakall has, the fact that it's just uncut dialogue, the fact that osbie feel, who wrote the film, thinks it's the coolest shit ever clearly, and also the really out of place ending

The midget is active the whole time, reacting to the many subtle and now and then dazzling points presented.
once again poking fun at retard stoner thoughts, how stoners think they're supremely interesting and deep, and how they seem to put reality on hold (here: the reality of the film, its main conflict in the midget sheriff; which they've put on hold by discussing it at length with weird contrived dialogue with wacky random bits thrown in like the accent).

this contributes to a greater irony in GR itself because pynchon seems to do this all the time. the passage is almost self deprecating, really. he will go off on these tangents which in some overly contrived and far-reaching yet really beautiful way illustrate by disconnected metaphors different ideas he is trying to convey in the text. take for example: this segment about a nazi "toiletship", part of the nazi armada, described down to its finest detail, an intricate reality of its own, taking up as much narrative space as any important plot-driving segment, but in the grand scheme of things just an off-hand joke, a tangent, to illustrate a point about this scientist debating whether or not he is responsible for the deaths caused by the V2 rocket because of his, minor but nonetheless essential, contribution to its development. of course, there are many other wacky images and allusions used to illustrate this, such as a reference to a spoof song by a 1960s comedian-singer making fun of wernher von braun for claiming that he only worked on the rocket's ascent and not its descent. also notice how we see the post-modern tendencies of the text here: it creates these sub-realities and gives them as much narrative space as what is meant to be the main reality / plot-line of the text, thus creating a melded hyperreality. it then goes even further into this and parodies itself through the "doper's greed" tangent. i love this fucking book!!!!!!!!!!



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