Operation Enduring Jest
First of all, just let me say that I really, really enjoyed the Eschaton game (mainly towards the end). I don't quite see how the Peemster is utilizing the MVT etc. & I guess I felt that seemed a little thrown in there just so IJ could cover a(nother) random topic. Regardless, I really liked the scene. I felt it captured basically everything in Lord of the Flies in a much, much shorter interval and it was... pretty tragic (even though the tragic bit is preceded by moments of comedy beforehand). Of course, it also relates interestingly back to freedom in terms of: can "free" (USA free) people be trusted to submit to a system/rules for long term gain and forgo the urge for short-term gain? Have USA politicians done this?
The EH section seems to relate back to this from another angle. Obviously the kids at Eschaton grossly violate perfectly rational rules for gameplay (eventually) and the situation (beautifully) degrades into chaos. But is the choice always so "obvious?" In EH, it isn't. The addicts there are forced to subsume their intellects (some of which are quite considerable) to a bunch of banal sayings and useless procedures. On the other hand, this is what allows the EH/AA to work. And the irrationally irritating rules do produce an effect.
I'd like to move back to plot/characters for a second.
JVD/Madame P./PGOAT: first off, can someone remind me when/if we're told how/why she & Orin break up? I honestly can't remember. More importantly, though, I am really hankering to know why she wears a veil (& is in the UHID or whatever the acronym is). I've thought of three possible explanations that make sense to me, but I'm very interested in feedback/other suggestions. Oh, & I'll feel silly if it mentioned exactly why she wears it already but it's a risk I'm willing to take...
a) The lame one: she was very pretty and had some sort of horrible accident and wears a veil because of it.
b) JVD thinks her incredible beauty is a "deformity" and so wears a veil (after all, it DID ruin her sex life for a number of years).
c) JVD was never actually pretty. Yes, the narrator told us that she was so pretty that she scared all the other boys away but consider that we don't have to completely trust the narrator. The narrator's job may be to more narrate Orin's perspective and we know that Orin's perspective on women could be/is a bit skewed (I mean, he's going for "Helen" Steeply. Helen... Steeply... really funny addition. Especially considering in the Marathe scene Steeply is described as horribly ugly, so maybe Orin goes for ugly girls?). It would also explain why boys avoid her. It would explain her fixation (on the radio) with scarring diseases in a fairly conventional way. It would also explain why PGOAT is such a sweet name.
Thoughts?
Oh, also on JVD, what makes her and Mario different so that Mario doesn't wear a veil? (self-confidence, obliviousness, innocence all come to mind)
Onto Orin for a second. Any thoughts on why he's such a sometimes? Mario is really nice and very empathetic, oddly. Hal is a pretty OK guy most of the time. So what happened with Orin?
Also on Orin, I guess the fact that Steeply's interviewing him (& that the AFR etc. has come up in their "interviews") & the fact that the AFR stalked/s him suggest that he's in some way related to the Entertainment (possibly through his Dad)?
On Steeply... I was fairly surprised that Steeply got up to defend the good old US of A for a bit. Mostly he seemed to just be taking the punches before. I guess I feel he simplifies the USA "freedom" a bit too much, though. Obviously most things and US society in general require us to give up SOME freedom and most of us take pleasure in reducing others' freedom in small ways (be it winning a game of chess). I guess I also feel that he sort of takes up the defense in the wrong way at first by talking about bidding for the soup. Very corporate. But, really, a society is based around his fall-back argument in which he argues that the two people will be motivated to come to a mutually benficial solution because the bonds (of society) that unite them are stronger than needforsoup. Most societies seem to be based in some part off this: similarities stronger than our differences etc.
Marathe counters by asking if most Americans are really farsighted enough for this to be a sustainable system. Otherwise, why would the government be so keen on keeping the Entertainment unavailable? I guess I was sort of bothered by the use of the Entertainment as the ultimate in long-term decision making. While I can see that it represents that in some ways (life or a cool 10 minute video!), there are perfectly rational reasons for wanting to stop the Entertainment. Some people would want to look because they don't believe, because they don't know, because internet spammers (with twisted minds) would make your computer download and play it... heck, the SMA died from it and he was Canadian... I don't want to bang on the abstractness here, but so far it doesn't seem like a great metaphor.
Questions I have relevant to this: Is US destruction from Entertainment really a "fair" test of our notion of freedom? Couldn't other European nations fall victim to the same fate? Would the US even lose a significant portion of its population after people really figured out that it killed them? Even handing the latter few point to Marathe, do we still violate our notion of freedom in wanting to stop the Entertainment? After all, as even Marathe himself points out, after that first choice to hit "play" you do lose your freedom to pull yourself away. That's a pretty large infringement. (I suppose if most of the US would make that initial choice that's still a bad comment on our society, though. But just thought I'd bring the latter up).
The EH section seems to relate back to this from another angle. Obviously the kids at Eschaton grossly violate perfectly rational rules for gameplay (eventually) and the situation (beautifully) degrades into chaos. But is the choice always so "obvious?" In EH, it isn't. The addicts there are forced to subsume their intellects (some of which are quite considerable) to a bunch of banal sayings and useless procedures. On the other hand, this is what allows the EH/AA to work. And the irrationally irritating rules do produce an effect.
I'd like to move back to plot/characters for a second.
JVD/Madame P./PGOAT: first off, can someone remind me when/if we're told how/why she & Orin break up? I honestly can't remember. More importantly, though, I am really hankering to know why she wears a veil (& is in the UHID or whatever the acronym is). I've thought of three possible explanations that make sense to me, but I'm very interested in feedback/other suggestions. Oh, & I'll feel silly if it mentioned exactly why she wears it already but it's a risk I'm willing to take...
a) The lame one: she was very pretty and had some sort of horrible accident and wears a veil because of it.
b) JVD thinks her incredible beauty is a "deformity" and so wears a veil (after all, it DID ruin her sex life for a number of years).
c) JVD was never actually pretty. Yes, the narrator told us that she was so pretty that she scared all the other boys away but consider that we don't have to completely trust the narrator. The narrator's job may be to more narrate Orin's perspective and we know that Orin's perspective on women could be/is a bit skewed (I mean, he's going for "Helen" Steeply. Helen... Steeply... really funny addition. Especially considering in the Marathe scene Steeply is described as horribly ugly, so maybe Orin goes for ugly girls?). It would also explain why boys avoid her. It would explain her fixation (on the radio) with scarring diseases in a fairly conventional way. It would also explain why PGOAT is such a sweet name.
Thoughts?
Oh, also on JVD, what makes her and Mario different so that Mario doesn't wear a veil? (self-confidence, obliviousness, innocence all come to mind)
Onto Orin for a second. Any thoughts on why he's such a sometimes? Mario is really nice and very empathetic, oddly. Hal is a pretty OK guy most of the time. So what happened with Orin?
Also on Orin, I guess the fact that Steeply's interviewing him (& that the AFR etc. has come up in their "interviews") & the fact that the AFR stalked/s him suggest that he's in some way related to the Entertainment (possibly through his Dad)?
On Steeply... I was fairly surprised that Steeply got up to defend the good old US of A for a bit. Mostly he seemed to just be taking the punches before. I guess I feel he simplifies the USA "freedom" a bit too much, though. Obviously most things and US society in general require us to give up SOME freedom and most of us take pleasure in reducing others' freedom in small ways (be it winning a game of chess). I guess I also feel that he sort of takes up the defense in the wrong way at first by talking about bidding for the soup. Very corporate. But, really, a society is based around his fall-back argument in which he argues that the two people will be motivated to come to a mutually benficial solution because the bonds (of society) that unite them are stronger than needforsoup. Most societies seem to be based in some part off this: similarities stronger than our differences etc.
Marathe counters by asking if most Americans are really farsighted enough for this to be a sustainable system. Otherwise, why would the government be so keen on keeping the Entertainment unavailable? I guess I was sort of bothered by the use of the Entertainment as the ultimate in long-term decision making. While I can see that it represents that in some ways (life or a cool 10 minute video!), there are perfectly rational reasons for wanting to stop the Entertainment. Some people would want to look because they don't believe, because they don't know, because internet spammers (with twisted minds) would make your computer download and play it... heck, the SMA died from it and he was Canadian... I don't want to bang on the abstractness here, but so far it doesn't seem like a great metaphor.
Questions I have relevant to this: Is US destruction from Entertainment really a "fair" test of our notion of freedom? Couldn't other European nations fall victim to the same fate? Would the US even lose a significant portion of its population after people really figured out that it killed them? Even handing the latter few point to Marathe, do we still violate our notion of freedom in wanting to stop the Entertainment? After all, as even Marathe himself points out, after that first choice to hit "play" you do lose your freedom to pull yourself away. That's a pretty large infringement. (I suppose if most of the US would make that initial choice that's still a bad comment on our society, though. But just thought I'd bring the latter up).
posted by Cory at 9:09 PM
3 Comments:
'b.'
p. 290 - "The twirler (JVD, PGOAT,etc.) induced in heterosexual males what the UHID later told her was termed the Actaeon Complex, which is a kind of deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty."
p. 291 - "the girl's Actaeonizingly imploring gaze"
The way I see it, she's so beautiful that people avoid her.
I certainly agree that we are *narrated* the fact that she's stunningly gorgeous and that may, in fact, be the simplest explanation.
I also just wanted to suggest an alternate hypothesis in which we are sort of lied to. Well, not really lied to, per se. Just given Orin's perspective on everything as if it were an objective/omniscient narrator's (Orin's perspective being that ugly women are pretty). Just a thought.
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