Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender by Chetwynd Ali; Freer Joanna; Maragos Georgios

Author:Chetwynd, Ali; Freer, Joanna; Maragos, Georgios
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2018-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

The Aesthetic

Before we delve into a comparative study of the pornographies of the two novels, it is worth looking at the kind of pornography that informs Inherent Vice, that of the early days of the California porn industry in the late 1950s and 1960s. The first commercially successful porn films were known as the “nudie cuties,” the archetypical film in the genre being Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), which was the first American sex film to be booked by art theaters (Briggs 23). The film itself contains no sex at all. Instead, Mr. Teas uses the X-ray vision he has acquired to spy on a variety of women naked. Lewis and Friedman’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961) likewise features voyeurism, sans the X-ray vision.1 Pynchon incorporates this initial focus on voyeurism into the pornographies of Inherent Vice. Doc Sportello’s adventures in the novel can be read as a series of discrete voyeuristic fantasies. He is the archetypical male within a nudie cutie—hidden, socially awkward, but very horny. He is aroused at the notion of Clancy Charlock’s threesome, he is privy to the 1960s sex comedy pastiche of the antics of Rudy Blatnoyd and his secretary, and he is denied interaction with Jade and Bambi at the Chick Planet Massage Parlor but is content to observe (“Doc thought he should keep watching for a while” [21]). Pynchon frequently depicts Doc’s hard-ons, erections that are never brought to completion. Like Mr. Teas and Lucky Pierre, Doc becomes the hidden observer and, alongside the reader, the viewer of the porn himself. Pynchon’s liberation pornography requires sex between a community of two or more, but Doc is positioned as the isolated outsider, the voyeur, the lonesome masturbator. The pornographies of Inherent Vice produce an internalization of sex rather than promote the external relations we see in Gravity’s Rainbow. No power is exercised and there is no redemption, as the eroticism only occurs inside the imaginative fantasies of an isolated individual. There is no space for the community or resistance that Thanatz theorizes. The power of the porn is what withers, not the state.

What’s more, voyeurism denies power rather than grants it. The frisson of voyeurism derives from seeing that which you were not meant to see. Consent is not a part of the voyeur’s fantasy; in fact those being observed must be unaware that they are being observed: agency is robbed from them and bodies are objectified against their will. The dynamic of the singular onanist is referenced in Gravity’s Rainbow as an apparatus of control, a counter to the more social and communal pornographies that Pynchon explores: “[A]ll these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to the Absolute Comfort […], the self-induced orgasm” (155). Russ Meyer himself was less interested in sex and more in the act of illicitly observing vulnerability. His later films such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Mondo Topless (1966)—which represents the sexual revolution of the

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