Demystifying the Created Art of Film in Gravity's Rainbow
In the postmodern novel Gravity’s Rainbow, set in Europe during WWII, author Thomas Pynchon attempts to explain the convoluted social condition which allowed the rise of German Nazism on such a large scale. Of the many rationales Pynchon explores, the popularity of cinema in pre-war Europe stands out as a dynamic force behind the German people’s acceptance of fascism. Specifically, Pynchon brings forth in the reader’s mind the German directors Fritz Lang and Leni Riefenstahl (invoked through the novel’s characters Franz and Leni Pökler), both directors whose films helped promote authoritarianism to the German people during Hitler’s rise to power. Throughout his narrative, Pynchon attempts to strip film of its ideological power as a creative art form, or what Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of an art work, which is akin to the “sacred object in religious ritual.” Pynchon seeks to expose cinema as a technical and scientific production which can be manipulated. His technical representation of the art of film as only the sum of its parts, emulsion and light, deprives cinema of the socially created aura and also attempts to expel the myth of realism associated with cinematic art. Thus Pynchon is both demystifying the art form and challenging his reader to examine the realism portrayed in cinema, which results in a social acquiescence to the medium, as occurred during WWII. This challenge is illustrated through two types of cinematic references, those to the technical production aspects of cinema and those to existing films. The films Pynchon weaves into his narrative strategically serve as warnings of the great ideological power cinema can hold over a readily capitulating public.
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