Synchronicity or shared worlds or something in art

[IdleRich]

Obviously it's not as literal as that, loads of Pynchon happens at night and Lynch in the day of course. It's just if you mention say Inherent Vice - not his best book but a good example here I think - my mind sees a hippy on the beach, driving to get pizza in these weird diners and stuff, but it's during the day.

 

[version]

Ah, fair enough. I haven't seen Silver Lake yet so I'll defer to you on that one. The day/night thing's definitely something I see re: Lebowski/Long Goodbye/Pynchon vs. Lynch/Ellroy. It's almost like the two parties of Eyes Wide Shut.

 

[version]

LA through the looking glass.

 

[IdleRich]

Actually reading back what I wrote I hadn't made that clear.
But yeah, two groups

Group one which I'm calling night: Lynch, Too Old To Die Young, Ellroy, pretty much all noir films in fact....

Group two which I'm calling day: Pynchon, Lewbowski, definitely Lodge 49

Groups are related but I fully agree that they are different. I move that, pace your suggestion, Silver Lake be placed in group one rather than group two, what do you say?

 

[version]

I haven't seen Silver Lake yet so I'll defer to you on that one.

 

[IdleRich]

Ah, cross posts, but yeah I reckon there is a lot of stuff in Silver Lake that says night to me. The weird naked owl woman who kills people (maybe) and so on. in fact (having checked) it's called The Owl's Kiss... maybe it's not what it seems.
Although... having said all that, there is that techno-hippy-new age thing that surfaces. It's a tricky one.

 

[version]

Ballard and DeLillo feel like their novels could exist in the same universe. One's just in Britain, the other the US. I think those two more than anyone have locked into white middle-class dread, news coverage etc. The coronavirus stuff feels as though it could have come from the imagination of either of them.

 

[version]

Ballard seems to occupy the body and the physical, DeLillo the mind and the metaphysical, but they're both mining a particularly white and professional/middle-class response(s) to catastrophe. DeLillo's characters implode, Ballard's explode.

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah I hear that... especially when everyone was inside and not that many people had been infected or died or whatever - I can totally imagine everyone hiding from an almost imaginary disease in their books. Although - full disclosure - I have read very little Ballard to be honest.

 

[version]

DeLillo's characters are trapped in their heads, Ballard's in their bodies.

 

[IdleRich]

As an aside; pissed off that there will be no more of Lodge 49, there was a feeling at times as though they were just making it up as they went along, but I was enjoying and prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Then it got dropped by the Network, there were stories of others picking it up... but ultimately they didn't and so it just ends like that... with that thing that happened and we'll never know what was next. Really shit. Same with this thing that was on telly here, thing called The Kettering Incident which I think was a joint BBC/NZTelly venture about alien abduction or something in this rural town in NZ. Intriguing set up for the second series... which never came cos it was cancelled after one.

 

[IdleRich]

DeLillo's characters are trapped in their heads, Ballard's in their bodies.

The first is certainly true, the second I couldn't say but I suspect you're right.

 

[version]

I still need to watch S2 of Lodge 49 but I loved S1. I liked how (relatively) low the stakes were and the grappling with debt. I also liked that there was all the stuff about alchemy etc if you wanted to dig into it, but you didn't have to for the show to work.

 

[IdleRich]

Ooh that was close. I assumed that you had seen the second one and almost mentioned the ending... but I just thought that someone else might be reading it who hadn't seen it. Yeah I agree it worked on several levels.. I like that guy, Kurt Russel's son, something so pure and funny in his innocence. Strange, I saw him in some other film as a totally evil bastard making snuff films and he was sort of the same person but it worked.

 

[version]

Wyatt Russell. I quite liked him in Everybody Wants Some too.

 

[IdleRich]

I don't know that... but sometimes this kinda hollywood second generation person is actually talented.

 

[version]

It's Linklater's "spiritual" sequel to Dazed & Confused about a bunch of college baseball players in 1980.

 

[IdleRich]

Slightly weird one, not sure if it's what I meant at first but.... just about counts, think it does identify a theme of sorts.
We've been watching this series Devs and SPOILERS it turns out to be about a quantum computer that uses probability to predict the future. The story comes down to a battle between free-will and determinism and - to me - I'm not sure that their philosophy made sense. They don't really deal with the issue - raised at one point and then dismissed - of what will happen if you watch what you're supposed to do two minutes in the future and simply don't do it. And ultimately there is no satisfying resolution of the issue.
At the same time I'm reading the Wheel of Time series every now and again when I need a break from proper books. The basic premise is that there a kind of cycle of history that effectively repeats itself until each age is ended by a battle between the reincarnted big goodie and the resurrected big baddie. Along the way everything happens according to the "pattern" and the book is filled with quotes such as "the wheel weaves as it will" and suchlike. Again the book is stuffed with prophecies and dreamers who can see the future... but at the same time it's all very vague and they do explicitly say that there are variations within the pattern and ways in which the wheel can be totally derailed. But once more the book faces a tension between wanting to be about this huge cycle of time and prophesy and so on - and writing an unpredictable story involving the characters who seemingly have free-will and who need to have unpredictable adventures to make the book of interest. In my opinion WofT deals with this better than Devs which is hamstrung by insisting on an entirely deterministic universe where every single event is entirely predictable, whereas WofT suggests merely predictable large events leaving open the path to how they occur. Devs fails to properly take account of the issue of whether knowing the future can allow one to change it, it simply dismisses that possibility without any real argument.
I've always liked ones where someone is told of a future event and does everything they can to avoid it - and yet ultimately their actions are what lead them to this eventuality (eg the one where someone sees death staring at him in the market one day and runs away and rides like hell to a distant city, and then deaths turns to a friend and says "I'm surprised to see that guy here cos I've got an appoint with him tonight in [distant city]") but this doesn't work when you have every single miniscule event mapped out and you could consciously choose to avoid it.
Anyway, what with the threads about Intuitional Maths and Wolfram stuff both being about how the universe evolves and the first of those (particlarly) being about the tension between determinism and probabilistic universes (before we even get to the question of free-will) it feels as though it is something that is in the air (or at least my air) right now.

 

[IdleRich]

Also I should say that these maybe divide into two types - the Twelve Monkeys (or La Jetee) type where fate closes vice-like on the protagonist and the inevitable circle is completed - and the one where free-will and that magical human spirit somehow breaks the deterministic rules and overcomes fate (as in Gattaca which is slightly different but which has the apt tagline "There is no gene for the human spirit").
Needless to say the latter ones tend to be more trite and popular (although that's a completely unsupported statement).

 

[WashYourHands]

I've always liked ones where someone is told of a future event and does everything they can to avoid it - and yet ultimately their actions are what lead them to this eventuality (eg the one where someone sees death staring at him in the market one day and runs away and rides like hell to a distant city, and then deaths turns to a friend and says "I'm surprised to see that guy here cos I've got an appoint with him tonight in [distant city]").

Have you heard of geasa? Apologies for wiki link, knee deep in lego & paints. Point is how multiple geasa fuck everyone given them (eventually). “If I do x, y will happen. If y happens, that opens up the monsters of z. There’s no way out.” Different from morality though.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geas