What makes a person, a person? I have already spoken on the sad truth of individuality in the world of Vineland. Unfortunately, because these characters are presented to us as individuals defenseless against the forces of society and their own pasts, we are forced to see them as nothing more than pawns in the hands of whatever greater power exists in this world. Even Frenesi turns her back on 24fps, her anarchist film collective, for the alluring yet bleak conformity of Brock Vond, representative of the government. Like her mother Serena, a born Communist, she was a leftist at heart but a self-proclaimed lover of a man in uniform. Frenesi is a person drawn from the traits of both her mother and the greater world around her, raised to fight, raised to shake her fists at the injustices of the world, and yet, in the face of all that, Vond is irresistible to her. It's deeply ironic that she becomes a government snitch out of love, as love, clearly associated in the novel with the bygone days of the sixties, is in opposition to the informant heavy culture of the eighties.
It’s a theme seen throughout the novel. The Thanatoids are alive only because of their inability to let go of the past. They congregate together in ghostlike towns such as the one DL and Takeshi stumble upon, Shade Creek, and spend their days glued to the television screen. They feel no emotions besides the ones keeping them from dying. A common one is revenge: a desire to make right the evils of the past. It is a commentary on the futility of everyday life: Thanatoids are so powerless in life (for example, the Vietnam vet Ortho Bob) that even in choosing death, do not even have the power to make that choice. This could also be interpreted as a commentary on the brainwashing quality of media. Tying back to the quote from the other blog posted in a previous entry, just because the government wasn’t legitimately surveilling its citizens around the clock and restricting their every movement doesn’t mean that the ubiquity of media wasn’t harmful. The endless consumption of media creates stagnation. The messages seen repeated over and over on a screen lodge into our psyche, and become a part of how we rationalize our world. A Thanatoid’s reality has effectively been replaced by the falsified reality of television.
Individuality in this book, which I believe to be critical of reactionary governments (framing Vond as the antagonist and the Wheeler family as the main cast of protagonists speaks for itself), is seen not as wrong but as impractical. Within a society that values conformity, someone who sticks out is going to be smacked down a few notches to create a uniform culture. The freewheeling political turmoil of the sixties had been repressed, shown both with Zoyd’s reliance on the government for money and Frenesi’s relationship with the embodiment of facism, Brock Vond.
Even though the shadow of totalitarianism hangs over the Californian coast, the constant flashbacks are both a reminder that our upbringing may be responsible for who we are, but also, even though our past can be instrumental in our present and future, understanding that your past belongs to you and you alone is an assertion of free will, of creativity, of introspective thought. Prairie’s search for her mother is out of a desperate attempt to reconnect with that past, to gain that sense of self that comes with understandment and acceptance of her roots.
So, what is a person, at least in Vineland? A veritable cocktail of political, societal and personal forces, pushing a person forward and backwards at the same time. You can run all you want, but you can't escape your past, you can't escape your government, and most importantly, you can't escape yourself.
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