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The credo of the revolutionary film collective 24fps provides an
example for the myth of the objective image:
They particularly believed the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about the American freedom, looking into these mugshots of the bought and sold? (p. 195)This view believes in the power of images to speak for themselves, as if they were objective renderings of the world. As in the discourse during the early stages of photography, the role of the photographer/film maker is reduced, his subjective agency dismissed.(128) According to this view, the photographer does not alter reality, but rather presents what is already there, i.e. there is no mediating agency between reality as presented in film and the public which perceives the film.
For N. Katherine Hayles, the philosophy of 24fps "reflects and inverts Brock's belief in criminal physiognomy."(129) Brock Vond "was a devotee of the thinking of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909)" (p. 272) who claimed that the distinctive criminal brain also determined the outward appearance. Both views are alike in positing a "true" self and soul which is visible on the surface of the subject and thus easily recordable.(130) Thus, both 24fps and Brock Vond engage in denying their own subject positions and reflecting on the ways in which their own views and beliefs interfere with their perceiving/recording activities: "The credo is naive also in its belief that the image can speak for itself, without mediation, and that it will speak truly, without distortion."(131)
Pynchon exposes the naivete and resulting danger of this view by showing how easily it can be exploited. While the shooting of Weed Atman is being filmed, the camera is not a simple recording device and Frenesi is not a recording angel who simply captures reality. Instead, the camera itself becomes a weapon which shapes reality. After being "corrupted" by Vond, Frenesi expresses a view much different from the original 24fps-credo: "Once we have him [Weed Atman, V. H.] on film, whether he lies or whether he confesses, he's done for, it doesn't matter." (p. 240) Instead of a truth-recording machine, the camera here appears as an apparatus which renders the question of truthfulness unanswerable. When Frenesi coaxes Weed into talking to the camera she is consciously lying, repeating words that echo the 24fps-credo in which she has already lost her faith: "'no one is judging you, Weed, the camera's only a machine . . .,' and so forth, movie sincerity." (p. 244) "Movie sincerity" here clearly shows that the narrator believes Frenesi is putting on an act, she plays "sincerity" as if she were in a movie.
When Weed finally understands that he was betrayed, a strange thing happens:
what he was slowly understanding spread to his body, a long, stunned cringe, a loss of spirit that could almost be seen on the film, even after all these years between then and the screen in Ditzah's house in the valley [where Prairie watches the footage, V. H.] . . . some silvery effluent, vacating his image, the real moment of his passing. (p. 246, my italics)In this passage the soul, which 24fps and the early photographers believed to be recordable, "almost" presents itself on the film. This single word is important because it indicates that actually nothing can be seen. The scene merely illustrates that all witnesses to this scene (Frenesi, Prairie, the reader) are so emotionally involved that they expect to see something. I would suggest that the "silvery effluent, vacating his image" is not some spiritual entity captured on film, but the material of film itself which can be misinterpreted. Silver-iodine was the first coating used to make daguerreotype-plates light-sensitive.(132) By reminding the reader of the historical and material basis of the medium, Pynchon wants to make him aware of film's ambiguity. It may strongly affect the beholder because it so perfectly mirrors reality, but it also functions according to certain technical constraints (like any other medium of representation) and is thus bound in subjective agency.
In the episode of Weed's death the camera is revealed to be a weapon, although one quite distinct from 24fps' vision of it. It sets things in motion not due to its objective revealing qualities but because it is so easily submittable to interests which have nothing to do with the truth. Following this logic, the "unmediated image did not tell its own story, and the camera's eye did not necessarily tell the truth,"(133) but instead a version best serving the interests of Brock Vond.
Although images cannot directly depict the truth, they nevertheless have the power to communicate something to the viewer. Prairie learns about her own past and that of her mother mostly through films and photographs. Several times in the novel the impact of these images is described, e.g. while Prairie watches images of the People's Republic of Rock and Roll: "Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She'd never seen anything like it before." (p. 210) As the end of the passage shows, the impression of liberation Prairie gathers from the footage is a part of reality as much as it is bound to a certain subjectivity: "And oh how Frenesi, that throbbing eye, was lingering on him, and presently, in time to the music, zooming in and out every chance she got on Weed's crotch." (p. 210) It becomes obvious that the scene is shaped by subjective desires, the liberation of the crowd and that of Frenesi remains inseparable.
The images stored in the computer bank of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives possess the power to reconnect history with the present for Prairie. This recuperative power is not based on an understanding of images as objective artifacts but as subjective perceptions:
The lesson that all camera angles are encoded with presuppositions was devestating in the context of Weed's shooting. As Prairie watches the old films it becomes recuperative [...] when the young woman realizes that the eye selecting the camera shots is the one she most yearns to behold.(134)Frenesi incorporates the paradoxical status of film. Her cinematic view of reality surfaces in her early youth during a quarrel between her parents: "Frenesi found she'd been switching her eyes back and forth, as if cutting together reverse shots of two actors." (p. 80/81) Frenesi's internal editing of unpleasant aspects of reality is an early example of her thoroughly distanced perception of the world. Though on the one hand she was very close to the revolution, Frenesi always created a distance from the movement with her viewfinder. It is this unackowledged distance to reality and the innocent belief in the objective truth of images which makes Frenesi so easily exploitable by Brock Vond. However, what thus may appear at first glance to be the bane of Frenesi's life, is actually what allows Prairie to reconnect with her mother by perceiving her subjective take on the world.
It is precisely this subjective take on the world which David Foster
Wallace considers completely suppressed by television. If subjective visions
exist at all on the tube they are not discernable from the barrage of information
surrounding them. If Prairie recognizes her mother through the close-ups
of Weed's crotch, such option is not available for the TV viewer because
the fragmentary discourse of this medium is not reducible to any one subject
position. TV's raison d'etre is not the representation of singular visions
but the entertainment of millions.
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