Summer
of Hate: The Death of the Hippie Dream in Vineland
and Inherent Vice
At
the height of the Hippie movement in 1967, it seemed like the
counterculture was pure energy, an unstoppable force of youth and
idealism destined to rock the system to the core. By 1970 at the
latest, the movement was all but finished, already looking quaint and
naïve to those looking from the outside, idealism spoiled by the
shadow-government policies started by the presidential reign of
Richard Nixon starting in 1969. It is this darkness behind the pastel
rainbow of happiness one usually associates with the hippie movement
that Thomas Pynchon works his magic, and the failure of the '60s
counterculture is the backdrop that informs every moment in his
novels Inherent Vice
and Vineland.
The
specters of both Nixon and Charles Manson loom large throughout
Inherent Vice,
reminders of the failure of the hippie ideal simply in their mere
existence. Vice's Doc
Sportello is the last of dying breed, a shaggy dog hippie in 1970 who
has yet to realize that the rest of the world has already gone on
without him. Doc lives a life that would make Jimmy Buffet envious,
an apartment on the euphoniously-named 'Beachwood Drive', where the
town is “ahoot with funseekers, drinkers and surfers screaming in
the alleys” (Pynchon 4). His beautiful, ethereal ex is known for
wearing “sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded
Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt” (Pynchon 1) and his group of
friends are a bunch of drug-addled nogoodniks who spend their days
scarfing down pizzas with, like, totally far-out toppings. And yet,
for all that Gordita Beach seems to be a kind of hippie paradise,
there is a darkness at its edges that is slowly encroaching, with the
ultimate aim not just to bleach everything to a square shade of
beige, but to enslave it, to reduce it to a cog in the infinite
machine of power and sacrifice.
Stephen
Maher states that “Inherent Vice is
perhaps the most brilliant depiction of...the harsh end of the dreams
of the 1960s generation” (Maher) and his statement rings more true
the further the reader gets from Gordita Beach itself; at Coy
Harlingen's bungalow up on Topanga, Doc and his pal Denis are
assaulted by zombies, not merely addled by drug intake but
straight-up crazed, a cult on a perpetual bad trip that Pynchon
relates to the Manson Family, not the first or last time he does, as
one of “them darker type activities” (Pynchon 135) that have
begun to overtake Southern California. Gordita Beach may seem like a
hippie haven, but once the story moves on, it becomes clear that it's
an illusion, a sort of suspended animation where the residents don't
realize they're already anachronisms.
As
the book goes on, Doc travels out of California entirely, to a dry,
dusty Las Vegas ruled by the almighty dollar, and back to Los Angeles
to be nearly killed by the sociopath in a suit Adrian Prussia, a
perfect amalgamation of Nixon and Manson if there ever was one: a
blood-hungry violence fetishist who works for the physical embodiment
of The Man. Coy Harlingen himself is more indicative of Nixon than
Manson, a junkie-turned-COINTELPRO lackey who by trade sells out his
compatriots to the all-devouring Nixon government, a man who is
rewarded by his good work by being prevented from seeing his family
again, a thousand deaths to someone who only wishes, in his age and
wisdom, to be a family man. In the context of the novel, Coy
“embodies
the confused morality of the late 60s as
he tries to find ways to provide for his family by not being with
them” (Duyfhuizen) and in attempting to provide for his family, he
allows himself to be manipulated by the vast, villainous corporate
and government entity the Golden Fang.
Nowhere
in Vice
is
it more obvious that the hippie dream has been crushed into
absolution than it is under the wheels of the Golden Fang, the
closest Pynchon has ever got to recreating one of H.P. Lovecraft's
Elder Gods; an ineffable, inscrutable being that exists to enslave
and destroy mankind. But Pynchon's Golden Fang is no alien being
slumbering under the waves; it is a demonic being for our time, a
vast, powerful, multinational corporation that has its tentacles in
every aspect of the character's lives. The Golden Fang exists on
every level of society, from the Mafia bums in Vegas to the
informants like Coy to the all-too-human monsters in Adrian Prussia
and Puck Beaverton, an organization which “on one level appears to
be a consortium of dentists
with a diversified portfolio of investments (including cocaine
distribution), but on another appears to be a cartel of highly
connected criminals with a diversified crime portfolio that includes
all stages of the heroin trade, including the rehab centers for those
trying to kick the habit”
(Duyfhuizen). In the Fang, we can see the world of Nixon and Reagan,
the world of corporations and clandestine alliances, the world of a
people so without empathy or scruples that they get you addicted to
heroin only to sell you a clinic to get you clean. This rot exists
deep within Inherent
Vice, a
cancer that actively eats the world Doc and the other lovable hippies
inhabit. There is no room for free love in Nixon's America, where
developer Mickey Wolfmann initially starts the novel as a changed
man, looking to give away his new communities for free, by the end
the Golden Fang has reprogrammed him back into a pitiless Capitalist
once again, his brief flirtation with altruism dead and forgotten. By
the 1970 of Doc and Wolfmann and the Golden Fang, there is no place
for unselfishness; Kennedy is long gone, Vietnam has been raging for
over a decade, and Nixon has interred youthful idealism beneath 6
feet of dirt.
If
Inherent
Vice
is a funeral for the noble hippie, then Vineland
is the hippie thrown in a ditch. If Vice's
Golden Fang was an all-consuming beast that rose from the depths to
squash free love, Vineland
by its in and of itself a machine that exists to end the idealism of
the time that came before it. Skip Willam states that Vineland
“virtually foreshadow[s]
the dangerous reemergence of the countersubversive tradition”
(Willman 1), and the book itself bears this out; while Vice
examines
the corpse of the revolution after the fact,
Vineland
is a book about a revolution actively being co-opted, and while Coy
Harlingen's COINTELPRO ties are just one facet of the Golden Fang's
power, Vineland's
Frenesi Gates and Brock Vond are creatures that exist almost wholly
of the countersubversibe cloth, and we can see Frenesi go from proud
activist to informant for the monomaniacal Vond throughout the body
of the text. The centerpiece of Vineland,
and the scene which best dashes the hopes and dreams of the
counterculture, is an extended flashback where Frenesi falls fully
under Vond's spell, selling out her ideals, in the form of her lover
and hippie leader Weed Atman, to the crushing machinations of the
State. Atman,
leader of the so-called People's Republic of Rock'n'Roll, is a hippie
free spirit in the mold of Doc Sportello and Frenesi's ex-husband
Zoyd Wheeler, but in Vineland's
cynical paranoia, he's doomed, a face being stomped on by a boot
forever, killed by a fellow radical after Frenesi spreads rumors that
Weed is an informant. As countersubversive groups take over the
Republic, the optimistic ideas that founded it are left by the
wayside; Frenesi tells Brock that “It's totally coming
apart...total paranoia” (Pynchon 239). So begins Frenesi's total
inversion of the hippie dream; in her use of her body as a tool to
get left-leaning men to betray their ideals turns the concept of free
love on its head, and in her ignoring her own beliefs, as well as the
beliefs of two generations of family that came before her, Pynchon
seems to be indicating that radical activism is doomed to fail, that
it is simply “paving the way for the triumph of the cynical, rich,
and sun-tanned retro-fascists of San Clemente and Santa Barbara”
(Glover).
As
in the Republic of Rock'n'Roll, as in the shadow-government '80s in
which Vineland
was written, paranoia permeates every aspect of the crumbling hopes
of the hippie world; Zoyd lives in fear of Brock up to modern day (or
at least Vineland's
modern day of 1984) and even Frenesi is tossed out into the cold
after the neuvo-fascist government of Ronald Reagan decides to do a
little house cleaning vis-à-vis the retro-fascist government of
Richard Nixon, with the woman scrambling to escape Vond and his
squadron of black helicopters. Even Pynchon's own structure of the
novel, a light, airy beginning with Zoyd leading to dark, confusing,
manic flashbacks nestled in flashbacks like a matryoshka doll,
invites the reader to feel uncomfortable, the initially easygoing
nature of Vineland (the town) betraying the dark core of Vineland
(the book). Douglas Glover states that “Pynchon puts the blame for
the steamrolling of Hippiedom squarely on the Tube, the Man...and
certain dark forces” (Glover) and there is no doubt that there is
no place in Pynchon's world for the cohabitance between the iron fist
of the government and the happy-go-lucky communes of peaceful
radicals. Pynchon is cynical to the very end: though the story ends
on a happy note, even that is given to us by the government; Brock
has to end his hunt for Zoyd and Frenesi simply because his funding
runs out, not because he is defeated by, or learns to accept, the
power of peace, love, and happiness. Even Pynchon's happy endings are
bittersweet, but at least this one doesn't end with a missile falling
on everybody.
Thomas
Pynchon, born in 1937, became a young adult in the late '50s and
early '60s, and had a front-row seat to the rise and fall of the
radical left during that time. It's clear that the movement has the
author's sympathies; in both novels, the left comes across as
fun-loving and heroic, even at their most inept, while the right
comes across as dominating, villainous, and evil. However, Pynchon is
not a straight-up idealist like his protagonists, he is a realist who
saw how corruption ate the movement from the inside out, and it is
with this realism that Inherent
Vice
and Vineland
were
birthed. At least, as much realism as can be allowed novels featuring
radical biker ninjettes and evil dentists.
Works Cited
Duyfhuizen, Bernard. "God Knows, Few of Us Are
Strangers to Moral Ambiguity." Postmodern
Culture. University of Virginia, n.d. Web. 22
Mar. 2015.
Glover, Douglas. "Mytho-Delirium: Thomas Pynchon's
Vineland --- Douglas Glover." Numro Cinq.
N.p., Apr. 1990. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.
Maher, Stephen. "The Lost Counterculture."
Jacobin. N.p., 10 Feb.
2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.
Pynchon, Thomas. Inherent Vice.
New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland.
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin, 1997. Print.
Willman, Skip.
"Spectres of Marx in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland." Review.
Critique
n.d.: 198-222. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Web. 22 Mar.
2015.
