The Cinematic Imagination in Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

Author(s): Antonio Marquez

Source: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979),
pp. 165-179
Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347666
Accessed: 30-11-2016 02:19 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION IN THOMAS
PYNCHON'S GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

by Antonio Marquez*

(plYPI

165
ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION IN THOMAS
PYNCHON'S GRA VITY'S RAINBOW

by Antonio Marquez*

You will see that this clicking contraption with the

revolving handle will make a revolution in our life-in
the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the methods of
literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the
shadow screen and to the cold machine. A new form of
writing will be necessary. I have thought of that an
feel what is coming...Listen-it may turn out to be a
powerful thing!
Leo Tolstoy

It is indisputable that cinema has become a powerful

cultural force. Restricting the discourse to the literary arts,
cinema and film techniques have influenced the development
of modern literature and revolutionized the writer's craft. One
critic succinctly puts it:

The history of the novel after 1922-the year Ulysses

appeared-is to a large extent that of the development of a
cinematic imagination in novelists and their frequently
ambivalent attempt to come to grips with the "liveliest
art" of the twentieth century.'

Thomas Pynchon is an exemplary case of the

contemporary writer's attempt to "come to grips with the
liveliest art." Gravity's Rainbow's expansive use of
cinematic motifs attests to Pynchon's fecund cinematic
imagination. The novel is strewn with bits of movie newsree
and cartoons, scenes from movie musicals of the 30's and 40's,
flashes of memorable faces amd images-Dumbo, Cary
Grant, Bela Lugosi, Bette Davis, Frankenstein, Bugs Bunny,
Wizard of Oz, King Kong, etc.-and a gaggle of songs, jokes,
dialogue from countless movies. Much of the humor in the
novel is derived from the wacky pastiche of familiar films,
and one can understand Gravity's Rainbow's enthusiastic
acceptance among film-freaks (and film critics like Richard
Schickel). At its worst, Pynchon's appropriation of movie
cliches is silly and capricious. His insouciant cinematic
1. Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination: Writers and the Motion
Pictures (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972), p. 4.
*ANTONIO MARQUEZ is a member of the Department of English Language
and Literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

166 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

similes and metaphors-e.g. a woman who "looks a bit like

Rita Hayworth," another woman with "eyes black and soft as
those of Carmen Miranda," a character who winks "like a
blond crewcut Groucho Marx"-become tiresome. There is
little invention here. This manner only serves to confirm that
Pynchon is a child of his times; his mind and novelistic
imagination are saturated with cinematic images.
However, in its best moments Pynchon's cinematic
imagination is complex and compelling. Cinema is equated
with or placed among the other cultural and scientific-
technological forces that have shaped modern consciousness.
Suzanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key observed that
new ways of conceptualization root in men's minds without
their awareness or understanding. Immersed in the ideas and
inventions of the times, men unconsciously accept and adapt
to the elements that constitute the present culture. Pynchon's
treatment of cinema is an interesting correlative to Langer's
point. A forceful argument is advanced that cinematic images
have achieved archetypal dimensions and nourished
profound fantasies, fears, and aspirations. In tapping the
psychological and cultural influences of cinema, Pynchon
adroitly uses, for example, German expressionistic films of
the 20's to foreshadow the aberration that would seize
Germany and nourish Nazism; and re-works the
psychological undercurrents of King Konk to underscore
sociopolitical themes, to dramatize Western colonialism and
explore the neuroses of racism. In refurbishing the cinematic
images that have become deeply ingrained in our
consciousness, Pynchon presents cinema as a force that has
assumed the age-old functions of folklore and mythology, a
cultural phenomenon that is an integral part of twentieth-
century thought and life.
An additional complexity arises when Pynchon
incorporates cinema into the scientific-technological
construct in his novel. We can recall that James Joyce, a
seminal influence on the modernism that Pynchon inherits,
perceived "that cinema is both a science and an art, and
therefore the most characteristic expression of our times."2
The confluence between science and art that Joyce states is
amplified in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon reminds us that

2. Quoted in Harry Levin's James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk,

Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p. 89.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 167

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
cinema is a twentieth-century invention and makes the acute
point that this easily accessible technological and aesthetic
invention has had a profound influence on the conscious and
unconscious mind of mass culture. These aspects of Gravity's
Rainbow-(1) cinema as a psychological and cultural
influence on modern thought and behavior (2) cinema as a
technological invention and an extension of
technologique-are major components of Pynchon's
cinematic imagination and the thematic thrust of his most
ambitious and important novel.
The dramatic, surrealistic opening of Gravity's Rainbow,
a nightmare dreamt by "Pirate" Prentice, with its memorable
trope-"A screaming comes across the sky"-establishes
Pynchon's cinematic style and imagination. Prentice's
dream, a passage reminiscent of the surrealistic nightmare
that opens Fellini's 8 1/2, introduces the connection between
psychology and cinema that Pynchon will work throughout
his novel. In Prentice's dream we can see that cinematic
experience affects even the subconscious. Prentice views the
faces of the evacuees in cinematic terms: "only the nearer
faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered
images in a view finder."3 (my italics). Pynchon's erudition
leads one to suspect that he devours scientific and technical
journals-for that matter, any printed matter that reaches his
hands. One can make the plausible assumption that Pynchon
has some knowledge of the scientific research that has
investigated the linkage between psychology and cinema.
The association between dreams and film experience was
suggested in early psychological studies; Freud, for instance,
observed that "our dreams think essentially in images."
Recently, more elaborate research has been made exploring
the relationship between cinema experience and dreams;
scientists have discovered that dreams are

characterized by a particular patterning of electrical

activity of the brain and by rapid movements of the
eyeball, as if the eye were watching the pictorial content
of a dream. When awakened from the stage of sleep, which
occurs periodically through the night, subjects almost
always are able to recall a vivid, perceptual

3. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: The Viking Press,

Inc. 1973). All references are to this edition and will be cited hereafter in the
text.

168 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

hallucinatory (at the same time it seemed real), and

somewhat distorted drama that would unhesitatingly be
called a dream.4

The shifting, erratic and often perplexing nature of the novel

is in large part due to the characters' minds-and the
narrator-functioning like cinematographical mechanisms,
projecting kaleidoscopic images that interweave dreams,
fantasies, and nightmares.
Paul Monaco's psycho-historical investigation of cinema
and its psychological effects on mass culture makes
interesting evaluations that bear on Pynchon's treatment of
cinema as a cultural phenomenon. Monaco describes certain
elements that constitute the movie viewer's psychology: "The
dark magic environment of the movie theater, the continuous
uninterrupted nature of film-showing, rhythmic luminosity
of the projection itself, and the social isolation of the
spectator."5 The psychological conditions that Monaco
investigates are metaphors and situations in Gravity's
Rainbow, especially the last one. The narrator describes
contemporary man's isolation and tragic seperation in
precise cinematic terms:

Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what

it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming
strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both
loved and we're strangers at the films, condemned to
seperate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings. (663)
Pynchon's use of moviehouse metaphor to depict the
social alienation of our times is direct and universal-we
have all sat in the darkness of the moviehouse, close yet
separate from the stranger next to us, collectively looking up
at the magic screen projecting images and fantasies to
nourish our imaginations. In the novel's conclusion, the
narrator urges us to reach out to that stranger-"There is
time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to
you"-as a last gesture before the apocalypse and our
collective death. Pynchon's analogy of the moviehouse to the

4. William David Foulkes, The Psychology of Sleep (New York: Charles

Scribners Sons, 1966), p. 3.
5. Paul Monaco, "The Popular Cinema as Reflection of the Group Process
in France 1919-1929," The New Psychohistory, ed. Lloyd de Nuse (New York:
The Psychohistory Press, 1975), p. 152.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 169

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Platonic cave is not original; it has been done before, and it

has been done better, for example, in Richard Wright's The
Man Who Lived Underground. However, Gravity's Rainbow's
invention does not rest on such simple analogies. Pynchon
treats cinema as a cultural phenomenon, and sees its
influence on almost every aspect of human thought and
action. Scott Simmon's observation that "Pynchon seems to
be the first writer to have taken full advantage of the fact that
all of our artistic, even perceptual sensibilities, have been
altered by the cinema" makes an important point.6 Whether
Pynchon is the first writer to imaginatively tap these
resources is debatable, but there is no doubt of the emphasis
that Pynchon places on cinema as an influence on human
cognition. When the love interest of the novel (Roger Mexico
and Jessica Swanlake) melancholily dissipates, Jessica
reflects on her disenchantment by thinking of her situation
and the seasonal period as "a bad cinema spring, full of paper
leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting..."(628).
The morose description of Jessica's state of mind and
environment is one of the many situations where Pynchon's
characters reflect the impact of cinema on modern
consciousness.7
Pynchon's most remarkable utilization of cinema to
augment his psychological, scientific, and philosophical
themes surrounds the story of Franz Pokler. Pokler's
marriage is a wretched situation; it is even sexless, but one
night after viewing a rape scene in a sado-masochistic
Margaret Erdmann film entitled Alpdrucken Pokler's
imagination and lust are inflamed and he goes home and

6. Scott Simmon, "Gravity's Rainbow Described," Critique, XVI

(November 2, 1974), 63.
7. Several critics have pointed out that Pynchon refurbishes the
epistemological notion advanced more than fifty years ago by Bergson in
Creative Evolution.Bergson wrote: "We take snapshots, as it were, of the
passing reality, and as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to
string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the
back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is
characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so
proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even
perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going as kind of
cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been
saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of
a cinematographical kind."

VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979) 170

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

impregnates his wife. Pokier clearly represents mass culture

vicariously living the movies:

He had come out of the Ufa theatre on the Friedrichstrasse

that night with an erection, thinking like everybody els
only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking he
into some submission. .... God, Erdmann was beautiful.
How many other men, shuffling out again into depressio
Berlin, carried the same image back from Alpdrucken to
some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-
children would be fathered on Erdmann that night? (397)

Pokler's daughter, Illse, is one of the "shadow-children" born

from that night of fantasy and lust. Later Pokier reflects upon
the situation and sees the manipulation and function of film in
his role as procreator: "That's how it happened. A film. How
else? Isn't that what they made of my child, a film?" (398).
Pokler's wife and daughter disappear among the masses
herded into Nazi concentration camps, and he devotes his life
and talent to the goals of the Nazi technocrats who manipulate
his life. Captain Blicero (the Nazi Dr. Caligari of the novel)
supplies Pokier with a "daughter" each summer to placate his
yearning for love and a filial relation. Eventually Pokier
realizes that the girl who appears each summer is not his
daughter, but a replacement brought from the concentration
camp adjoining the research center at Peenemunde. He
tragically discovers that Blicero has manipulated his need for
love into a perverse expediency-"They have used it to create
for him the moving image of a daughter... leaving it to him to
bind the illusion of a single child" (425). Pokler's relationship
with his final daughter-surrogate sadly and perversely ends
in pedophilia. At his pathetic end, Pokier has lost
everything-except the peculiarity of interpreting
everything in cinematic terms and confusing reality with
movies: "When I heard General Eisenhower on the radio
announcing the invasion of Normandy, I thought it was
really Clark Gable, have you ever noticed? the voices are
identical. . ." (577).
The Pokier episode is an important nexus in the novel. It
is fused with Pynchon's criticism of the Faustianism that has
overwhelmed and directed science and technology. Pynchon
equates film and calculus, frequently admixing the
mathematics of calculus with film technology. They are both
"pornographies of flight" and heirs of the same legacy of
abstraction and illusion-making:
ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 171

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

There has been this strange connection between the

German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills
to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries-since
Leibnitz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the
same approach to break up the trajectories of
cannonballs through the air. And now Pokler was about to
be given proof that these techniques had been extended
past images on film, to human lives. (407)

The crux resides in the narrator's warning that scientific

methods of control have been expanded to apply to human
existence-"These techniques had been extended past images
on film, to human lives." Like any technology, film can be
manipulated and extended to control people. Pynchon meets
head-on Jean Luc-Goddard's epistemological-aesthetic belief
that "cinema is truth twenty-four times a second." Film is, in
fact, separate frames manipulated rapidly to create
movement, continuity, coherence, and meaning. It is all
illusion.
Congruently, Pynchon presents a provocative
notion-cinema can inform a Zeitgeist 2and influence the
social and political dynamics of a nation. The Pokler episode
and the entire fabric of the novel are interwoven with specific
references and parodic allusions to the great period of
German cinema. Gravity's Rainbow supplies a clever treatise
on the phantasmagorical films of horror and fantasy that
captured the imaginations of the German nation and the
world during the 20's and early 30's: Caligari (1919), Golem
(1920), Der Mude Tod (1921), Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922).
Nosferatu (1922). Metropolis (1926), Die Frau im Mond (1931),
and other lesser known works. Pynchon's novel, in this
respect, is a striking curiosity-a contemporary work that
delves into cinema history to resurrect the images of evil and
horror fostered by German expressionistic films. He
redefines the Caligari-Mabuse perversities by mingling film
characters and the novel's characters and applying sinister
Caligari coloration to militarists, technocrats, scientists, and
the power lust at large in the modern world: "Metropolitan
inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler, Prof.-
Dr. Lazlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way,
toward a form of death that could be demostrated to hold joy
and defiance..." (579).

To dramatize the impact of cinema on the German mind

Pynchon reaches back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis andDie Frau
172 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

im Mond. In Metropolis, a futuristic fantasy of the twenty-

first century, Lang concocted a politically superficial but
technically brillant film. If Alpdrucken inflamed Pokler's
generation with sexual fantasies, Metropolis inspired their
lust for power and glorious dreams of a technologique fused
with German romanticism:

Great movie. Exactly the world Pokler and evidently

quite a few others were dreaming about those days, a
Corporate City-State where technology was the source of
power, the engineer worked closely with the
administrator, the masses labored unseen far
underground, and ultimately power lay with a single
leader at the top, fatherly and benevolent and just, who
wore magnificent-looking suits and whose name Pokler
couldn't remember, being too taken with Klein-Rogge
playing the mad inventor that Pokler and his codisciples
under Jamf longed to be - indispensable to those who ran
the Metropolis, yet at the end, the untamable lion who
could let it all crash, girl, State, masses, himself,
asserting his reality against them all in one last roarin
plunge from rooftop to street.... (578)

The "curious potency" that Pynchon attributes to these films

is shown in Pokler's response. Pokler extracts from
Metropolis a fantasy to be "the male embodiment of a
technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but
for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark
surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming collapse..."
(578). A few years later when Hitler came into power,
Goebbels enthusiastically praised Metropolis and admitted to
Lang that he and Hitler had greatly enjoyed and were inspired
by the film. The reader of Gravity's Rainbow becomes quickly
responsive to the vast ironies of history, and there is great
irony in Metropolis' remarkable history, Fritz Lang, a Jew
and a leftist, unwittingly created a masterwork that
nourished and sustained the insane fantasies of types like
Goebbels and Hitler. In 1933 Lang made his political
sentiments clear when he made Das Testament des Dr.
Mabuse (a sequel to his first Mabuse of 1922), allego
equating the criminal actions of Mabuse with the terrorism
and psychotic politics of Hitler's party. Goebbels, of course,
banned the film, and Lang very wisely left Germany.
Lang's Die Frau im Mond (The Girl on the Moon) also has
an interesting history. Lang's fantasy film of space flight
ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 173

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

likewise captured engineers, scientists, and the German

intellectual scene of the late 1920's. Willy Ley, the renowned
rocket scientist who was later to play a part in the American
space program, served as technical assistant on Lang's film
and recounts the impact of Lang on his contemporaries:

The news that Fritz Lang was going to make a film on

space travel was very good news. It is almost impossible
to convey what magic that news had on Germany at that
time. The first showing of a Fritz Lang film was
something for which there was no equivalent anywhere
as a social event.... It is not an exaggeration to say that a
sudden collapse of the theater building would have
deprived Germany of much of its intellectual leadership
at one blow ... 8

Sixteen years later when the first A-4 rocket (later to

the V-2) was successfully fired across the Baltic Sea, the
insignia on the rocket was a girl straddling the moon ("Die
Frau im Mond") - a curious salute to Lang and his film. In
Gravity's Rainbow, Franz and Leni Pokier view the movie,
and Leni accurately perceives the significance behind "the
dream of flight" inspired by Lang's film:

They saw Die Frau im Mond. Franz was amused,

condescending. He picked at tecinical points. He knew
some of the people who'd worked -on the special effects.
Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many possible. Real
flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the
same movement. (159)

Science-technology (real flight) and Art (the dream of flight)

are parts of the "same movement," complementary forms of
illusion-making - whether it be life imitating art or art
imitating life.
In his preoccupation with German history, roughly the
period from 1920 to 1945, and his rendering of the German
mind during this cataclysmic period, Pynchon is dramatizing
in a novelistic framework a phenomenon which has
preoccupied film and cultural historians: the films of a nation
shape and reflect its mentality. Bohn and Stromgren in their

8. Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (New York: The Viking
Press, 1958), p. 124.
174 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

history of world cinema observe that "a Gotterdammerung

mentality seethed throughout the German period, a filmic
epoch given to explication of emotions and passions out of
control, as if a preamble to the rise of Nazi power and
holocaust the nature of which was to terrorize the world."9
Siegfried Kracauer's celebrated work, From Caligari to
Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (a work
which one can plausibly assume Pynchon has read), offers the
most perceptive and eloquent expression of this concept:

Irretrievably sunk into retrogression, the bulk of the

German people could not help submitting to Hitler. Since
Germany thus carried out what had been anticipated by
her cinema from its very beginning, conspicuous screen
characters now came true in life itself.... Self-appointed
Caligaris hypnotized innumerable Cesares into murder.
Raving Mabuses committed fantastic crimes with
impunity, and mad Ivans devised unheard-of tortures.
Along with this unholy procession, many motifs known
from the screen turned into actual events. In Nuremberg,
the ornamental pattern of Nibelungen appeared on a
gigantic scale: an ocean of flags and people artistically
arranged .... By day and night, millions of feet were
marching over city streets and along highways. The blare
of military bugles sounded unremittingly, and the
philistines from the plush parlors felt very elated. Battles
roared and victory followed victory. It all was as it had
been on the screen. The dark premonitions of a final doom
were also fulfilled.10

Pynchon frequently creates obstacles that impede the

reader's understanding and appreciation of his cinematic
imagination. His cinematic motifs are often diffused in the
parodic texture of the novel, and Pynchon's cinematic
technique and his commingling of film with social-political
events give his novel an erratic, montage-like effect. The
reader must be a wary of ignoring or abandoning convoluted
- and seemingly insignificant - scenes, and must constantly
keep in mind the basic clue to the novel: everything is

9. Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren, Light and Shadows: A

History of Motion Pictures (Port Washington, New York: Alfred Publishing
Co., 1975), p. 148.
10. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History
of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 272.
175
ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

connected. A pertinent illustration occurs in pages 92-113, a

series of fade-outs and fade-ins enjambing comic action,
anguished interior monologues, and cinematic business. The
passage opens with "a secret cameraman" filming short
frames of the leggy, sensuous Katje, attended by the zany
dopester, Osbie Feel. The scenes shift back and forth from
Osbie Feel's comic preparation of hallucinogenic mushrooms
to the mysterious filming of Katje's provocative poses and
her recollections of her perverse menage a trois with Blicero
and Gottfried. When Osbie Feel opens the oven to remove the
baked mushrooms, the sight of the opening oven triggers
memories of when she played Gretel to Gottfried's Hansel in
Blicero's psycho-erotic death games, and the reader receives
a fifteen-page fragment of Katje's mysterious past and her
relationship with the demonic Blicero.
The phantasmagorical, sadomasochistic images of
Katje's tortured reverie overlap to Osbie Feel's shenanigans
in the present. Osbie Feel, one of Pynchon's goofiest
characters, appropriately is a film-freak; his speech and
mannerisms are borrowed from his weird fascination with
movies: "... with a fluid passage of fingers and wrist based on
the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of doped wine to
some fool of a juvenile lead in White Zombie, the first movie
Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his all-time
list along with Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to
Rio and perhaps Dumbo ..." (106). The narrative shifts again
from Osbie to Katje's consciousness to frame the story of her
seventeenth-century ancestor Franz van de Groov, who
dedicated his life to the extermination of the dodo. These
seemingly haphazard narrative bits are actually thematic
fragments, vital clues and part of the gigantic puzzle that
surfaces in Gravity's Rainbow. The peculiarity in this
instance - and throughout the novel - is Pynchon's use of
cinema as a point of reference; both the serious and comic
passages are interspersed and enveloped by cinema chatter
and film-making.
What is happening in this particular episode, the reader
later discovers, is "The White Visitation's" attempt to use film
to implement its realpolitik. The machinations of "The White
Visitation" are buffoonish but one can detect a serious point
being made. The mysterious filming of Katje is part of
"Operation Grigori." Grigori, an octopus, takes center stage
in Chapter II (Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering) in a
staged monster movie scene where it moves threateningly
176 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

towards Katje and Slothrop heroically comes to her rescue. It

is a ploy to observe Slothrop's reactions and to arrange his
meeting with Katje. Katje plays her part of swooning heroine
perfectly and lures Slothrop into the conspiracy: "Katje
squeezes Slothrop's arm and tells him just what he wants to
hear about now: 'Perhaps, after all, we were meant to -
meet...'" (189). The reader has to backtrack 76 pages to see the
connections and make sense of this episode. The purpose
behind the secret cameraman's mysterious filming of Katje
becomes clear. The films were shown to Grigori to condition
his response:

At "The White Visitation," because of erratic funding,

there is only one film projector. Each day about noon,
after the Operation Black Wing people have watched their
fraudulent African rocket troops, Webley Silvernail
comes to carry the projector back down the chilly scuffed-
wood corridors again to ARF wing, in to the inner room
where octupus Grigori oozes sullenly in his tank. In other
rooms dogs whine, bark shrilly in pain, whimper for
stimulus that does not, will never come .... The reel is
threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori's attention is
directed to the screen, where an image already walks. The
camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere
longlegged about the rooms, her hair not bluntly Dutch at
all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old,
tarnished silver crown ... (113, my ellipsis)

The satire is quite obvious in the parodic treatment of

Pavlovian classical conditioning and the usage of a Russian-
named octopus instead of dogs. Most novel and interesting is
the use of film to establish the desired conditioned response -
a great sophistication over the crude mechanical tools that
Pavlov employed in his historic experiments.
In the novel's narrative design, "Operation Grigori" is
fused with "Operation Black Wing," another outlandish
stratagem of "The White Visitation." Gerhardt von Goll is
hired to produce a fake documentary film. Using the scientists
and technicians of "The White Visitation" in black face, he
concocts a film depicting African troops serving the Third
Reich, thus discrediting Nazi racial ideologies. Later the
reader is treated to vast comic irony when it is disclosed that
there is actually an African rocket unit - the
Schwarzkommando - serving in Germany under Blicero's
Command. The convolution of film and reality is comically
177
ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

treated in Gerhardt's emulation of Lang's Metropolis:

Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in

the Zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have
nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando
footage he shot last winter in England for Operation
Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a
controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that
his film has somehow brought them into being. "It is my
mission," he announces to Squalidozzi, with the profound
humility that only a German movie director can summon,
"to sow in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical
moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My
images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation.
(388)

The irony comes back reinforced; Gerhardt's bogus film

parallels the "real" movies, like Caligari and Metropolis,
which indeed projected images which later achieved insane
and monstrous incarnation.
The manifestations of Pynchon's cinematic imagination
in his massive novel are too numerous to cover in a study of
this scope. Appropriately, the novel's closure offers the most
telling evidence of his cinematic imagination and the crucial
role of cinema in Gravity's Rainbow. In the apocalyptic
ending, the rocket's descent is pinpointed on the Orpheus
Theater in Los Angeles. The manager of the theater is a
paranoid-schizophrenic character named Richard M. Zlubb.
Pynchon's parodic roman a clef exhibits a certain ingenuity;
he goes beyond the cliche of Zhlubb-Nixon as a Los Angeles
used-car salesman, and makes him the paranoid manager of a
moviehouse. Aside from Pynchon's pungent satire, the
novel's conclusion more importantly reveals the cinematic
point of view of Gravity's Rainbow:

The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and

silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned
out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always
been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the
darkness swept in. (760)

The novel abruptly shifts and we find ourselves in a

moviehouse. The projection of the movie - and the novel! -
has been discontinued. The lights go on in the theater, and the
"lights go on" in the reader's perception of the novel. Is
178 VOL. 33, NO. 4 (Fall 1979)

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Antonio Marquez

Pynchon telling us at the end that his novel has been a

"movie?" A case can be made that Gravity's Rainbow is a
film-novel of sorts, an oddly spliced gigantic
cartoon/newsreel of a period of modern history. It is
maneuver - which can be interpreted either as novelistic
invention or as literary sham - and one of Pynchon's intrepid
risks.

Critical Inquiry
IN VOLUME 6
Rudolf Arnheim A Plea for Visual Thinking
Quentin Bell Bloomsbury and "The Vulgar Passions"
Max Black How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson
Nelson Goodman Metaphor as Moonlighting
Michael Holroyd George Bernard Shaw: Women and the Body Politic
Roger Scruton Photography and Representation
Stephen Toulmin The Inwardness of Mental Life
Critical Inquiry regularly publishes the finest articles on criticism, the visual arts,
history and culture, film, music, and literature.
edited by W. J. T. Mitchell Wayne C. Booth Robert E. Streeter
Elizabeth Abel Robert von Hallberg

The University of Chicago Press

Critical Inquiry Published quarterly
One-year subscription: ] Indiv. $16.00 [ Instit. $24.0
Add $2. 00 for subscriptions mailed outside the USA and i
Name

Address

City State/Country Zip

Master Charge or Visa/Bank Americard acc
number (Master charge only), expiration da
U. S. bank), international postal money ord
11030 Langley Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60628. 7/9
RMR
__~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 179

This content downloaded from 103.246.106.10 on Wed, 30 Nov 2016 02:19:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms