Day 14: Write a review of some form of entertainment you recently took in. Whether book or movie or TV show or Broadway play, write out what you liked and didn’t like about it. Were there any lessons to be gleaned, or was it pure entertainment (it’s okay if it was!)?
I just finished Inherent Vice a few weeks ago, so that’s a good a piece of entertainment as any.
The book is not all that different from the movie in any substantial way. It’s easier to follow the action and story, such as it is, with character inner dialogues and the like. There’s an extended trip to Vegas which furthers the story, but is not essential to the plot, and PTA was right to edit it out.
The novel is angrier though. The film is lighthearted and funny, more comedy romp than a product of real pain. Shaggy dog story one reviewer called it. The book’s version of events truly impacts the characters in a more profound way. The hurt is real. Pynchon is angry with the America of the 1970s, and reminds us we have not learned much since then. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. As if on cue, a recent expose on the modern opioid crisis points out that the same companies selling drugs like opana and oxy will in turn sell you drugs to help you kick your addiction to the former.
The key to understanding and appreciating Pynchon is that he doesn’t just go after “The Man”, big government, the military, the old guard Greatest Generation. Not just the usual suspects. He goes after both sides of a system that vies for power and the flow of money while those of us in between just do the best we can to survive and care for one another. The overall tone has real fury within it. It’s a funny book, and Pynchon is in good form, but there’s a real hurt here that I don’t detect from his other works. We’ve let ourselves down, we’ve both co-opted and allowed ourselves to be co-opted by bigger forces. And it’s not a faceless bureaucracy, multi-layered conspiracy of power that’s doing it. It’s us, or those of us, who choose to slip and skip down the trail towards dystopia. But it’s not really dystopia, is it? It’s the 20th century when you boil it down to its essence. Yes, government and bureaucracy and drug companies and The Suits. But it’s us too, those of us who self-select to move into those ranks, and those of us who are too careless or lazy to protect ourselves from them.
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