Pynchon’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Vineland, Film, and the Tragedy of the American Activism of the 1960s

Introduction

In Vineland (1990), Pynchon delineates two components of the filmic object: its affective nature upon the spectator and its metaphorical status as a medium of time. Regarding the first, as a component of the mass media along with, and in the novel exclusively through, television, the viewed film is depicted as having an existential effect on the behavior of the spectator through the colonization of thought. With the second component, Pynchon addresses the physical medium of film itself. Temporalized by virtue of its physicality-endowing historicity, in the novel celluloid is employed as an analog of lived experience: the eyes as camera lens. As the film strip runs through the camera, each frame captures the present moment, becoming a past that can be re-viewed as memory, with the frames yet to pass behind the aperture constituting the future to be recorded.

These two components are indicated by Pynchon through their presentation in the prose. The inclusion of the release dates for (some of) the films has often been taken as a stylistic quirk, among other “mock scholarly references,” but this is to ignore the consistency of the differentiation between the films that are dated and those that are not throughout the novel.¹ In Vineland, real films—meaning films that exist outside of the novel and that were made in reality—are referred to by characters but are never actually watched by them. Such references take an academic form, with their release dates given in brackets beside their titles. These references fix the films into time, situate them in history, with the effect of drawing our attention to the relationship between film and time. In contrast, the movies that the characters do watch in the novel are all purely fictional—for example, a TV movie about basketball play-offs starring Paul McCartney and Sean Penn. These movies are exclusively watched on “the Tube”—the television set—and are given no such reference dates, which for the sake of consistency in a fictional novel would of course be reasonable and perhaps expected.

The fiction is intentionally disrupted by Pynchon to delineate between these two components of film—as historical, physical object (dated) and as an object of the mass media (watched)—as this distinction further informs his treatment of politics in the novel. Whereas the film that former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Hector Zuñiga aspires to make is of the blockbuster variety, whose budgetary demands require it to appeal to and to be watched by a mass audience, Pynchon presents his opposite number to be the 24fps, a radical filmmaking collective that supports direct cinema, working with lightweight cameras to record nonfiction events. Their films record incidents of state terror that, through their verisimilitude, counter the “government-defined history” that is promoted through the mass media.² By escaping the government-endorsed ideology of the mass media, the 24fps film footage acts as a memory of an era denied to the masses, a memory that belongs to the filmmakers and, as will be argued, to the film itself as a metaphorical medium of time.

It is the slippage from one component to the other, from film as a historical object to film as an object of the mass media, that informs the tragedy of American activism in the novel. When, in the novel’s present day of 1984, Zuñiga approaches former 24fps filmmaker Frenesi Gates about making an antidrugs movie concerning the sixties— having obtained an “agreement on this movie deal, or, as Ernie liked to say, film project” (337)—she responds incredulously to his proposal: “Oh, ‘film,’ well, ‘film,’ I thought you said Triggerman and Liftoff, I hope you aren’t mistaking what they do for ‘film,’ or even a class act” (349). Frenesi dismisses the project as a “movie,” a product of the mass media with its numbing effect on its viewers, as opposed to a “film,” which, for her, was once a political statement. This dichotomy is elaborated by an account of Frenesi’s disillusionment with filmmaking:

He...