Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 46

inexplicably, whenever the camera moved one way or the other,
palm trees could be seen behind the actors.” Always, we are aware,
the stage set (or the California location) is more real than the “real”
place that is represented. Walker Percy, in The Moviegoer, showed
us too that a movie star walking down our neighborhood street
makes our own place seem more real. Hollywood lends authentic
ity to the places moviegoers live.
W e cannot say that Hollywood tricked us into illusion. Holly
wood is ostentatiously fake. It was the 19th century “realistic”
novel that taught us not to notice that its “reality” was faked. When
Deanna Durbin goes to a small brownstone house for dinner, and
is led to sing— and is instantly surrounded by a symphony orchestra
and 40 tuxedo-clad dancers— we know that the stage set is what is
real, not the brownstone house that is represented.
W ho created the myth of California? Thomas Pynchon in The
Crying o f Lot 49 showed us aspects of it. Oedipa Maas, an ordinary
bright woman from California, her psychiatrist at the ready, be
comes obsessed with interpretation: creating meaning where it
didn’t exist. She notices coincidences, evidence builds, as she sees
it, that she has stumbled onto a centuries-old political organization
called Trystero. It is an underground mail system. Its acronym is
W.A.S.T.E. Once clued in, she finds evidence everywhere, dis
guised as trashcans. Her supreme evidence she finds in a corrupt
text in a Jacobean tragedy (reminding us that literary interpretation
is the supreme autoerotic activity). Her detection is flawless.
Pyncheon has caught the obsession to know and understand that is
particularly strong in California. Oedipa Maas, the supreme
interpreter, reaches the detective’s ultimate epiphany: she has
understood, well,—anything? Meaning is the perfect illusion, and
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