Vineland

“You’ve turned into exactly the same kind of father that used to hassle you, back when you were a teen hippie freak.”

The closeness between Prairie and her father is evident in her choice of insult. She is trying to manipulate Zoyd, encouraging him to invest in her boyfriend’s business idea. She knows exactly what words to make the old hippie feel obliged to help her: The insult is calibrated to hurt his ego and pride, indicating how well she knows him, but the speed with which the insult is forgotten suggests that they know each other well enough to make such remarks. Their close bond reflects The Importance of Family throughout the novel.

“The vegetarian tostada, which upon its arrival he began to take apart piece by piece and reassemble as something else Zoyd could not identify but which seemed to hold meaning for Hector.”

Hector takes apart his food in an unthinking quest for nourishment, much in the same way that the characters disassemble their world into constituent parts in The Search for Meaning. Whatever meaning they can find in life—and whatever meaning Hector finds in the tostada—is so deeply personal and subjective as to be meaningless to anyone else.

“Hector was the kind of desperado whose ideal assassin was himself.”

Hector exists in a glamorous world of hyper-stylized self-annihilation. He is addicted to television, so he has turned himself into the exact kind of law enforcement officer that he has seen on the small screen. This idealized, televisual police officer is the exact kind of man that Hector could imagine punishing him for the many sins he has committed against men like Zoyd. Hector’s television addiction, combined with his guilty conscience, has prompted him to perform the role of his own ideal and justified reckoning.

“Zoyd’s dream album someday would be an anthology of torch songs for male vocalists, called Not Too Mean to Cry.”

When he thinks about how he might win Frenesi back, Zoyd imagines recording an album of cover songs which he can then sell through a late-night commercial. His emotional plea to his ex-wife is notably couched in the words of other people, as Zoyd is unable to express himself through anything other than pop culture references. These references are then launched into the ether through the commercialized vector of mass media in the desperate hope that Frenesi will glimpse it and understand. Zoyd has internalized the alienation and commercialization of his society and cannot imagine any other form of emotional expression.

“Frenesi might be gone, but there would always be his love for Prairie, burning like a night-light, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long.”

In the initial aftermath of her birth, Zoyd may have abandoned Prairie. In the years following, however, he forged a genuine, sincere relationship with her through hard work, learning The Importance of Family. The bond between father and daughter has not come about easily, but its comfort for Zoyd and its sincerity shows the extent to which both of them have worked hard to be there for one another. This is a deconstruction of the post-hippie archetype of the lazy nihilist. Zoyd is neither lazy nor nihilistic: He has sacrificed a great deal and worked hard to have a meaningful relationship with his daughter.

“He looked old enough to’ve been through it before, but who knew, maybe this was his maiden voyage into the green seas of jealousy.”

When Frenesi leaves Zoyd, he is cut adrift. He is, as the metaphor suggests, lost at sea, lost amid a complexity of emotion that is far wider and far deeper than he could possibly have comprehended. Frenesi leaves Zoyd with Prairie, leaving him to navigate seas that he might never have comprehended before having met her. He is jealous not just of his wife’s other lovers, but of the surety she has in her life to leave him.

“The personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power.”

At first, the hippies convinced themselves that the imposition of control was due to individuals such as Richard Nixon or Brock Vond. As time passed, as these figures disappeared from their immediate lives and the imposition of control remained, they realized that such forces were due to powers that transcend any single person. Nixon, Reagan, and others are merely expressions of subtler, more powerful forces that are so complex as to be almost beyond comprehension. The characters find themselves at the whim of powers such as capital or technology, abstract ideas rather than individuals.

“Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse.”

In the aftermath of the “red scare” against supposed communists, when Hollywood was piecing itself back together, the writers, actors, and other workers invented comforting stories to tell themselves. They wrote these new pasts as they wrote films, creating better versions of their past selves with whom they could live in their increasingly awkward present. These stories helped them to feel better about betraying their friends or their beliefs, amounting to a collective dream that was deemed necessary for the machine of Hollywood to carry on.

“Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family ‘owned’ nothing.”

The Wayvone family is one of the most explicit portrayals of wealth in the novel, yet they do not even own anything. Their actual holdings are obfuscated behind walls of legalese and accounting tricks, masking the way power and wealth truly function in America. Even the wealthy do not own anything; their wealth and power are part of a shared theatre of power.

“She stared into her reflection, at the face that had always been half a mystery to her.”

Prairie has grown up without truly knowing her mother. To her, Frenesi is a distant figure, constructed from various overlapping memories which—as she is about to learn—are not always true. She stares at her reflection because, in her physical appearance and her genetics, she has at least half of a blueprint for her mother’s identity. She studies herself, trying to separate the parts of Prairie which are Zoyd in search of the parts that might be Frenesi.

“Prairie wondered who’d taken the picture.”

The more Prairie studies old films of her mother, the more she is lured into the world of DL and Takeshi, in which nothing is quite as it seems. She begins to grasp the notion of vague structures of power controlling the world around her. She looks at an image of her mother but begins to wonder who took the picture and whether they had any intention or purpose in doing so. She is not only engaged in The Search for Meaning in the content of the picture, but the presentation, the gestation, and the provenance of the image.

“Yeah now it’s group insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us.”

Disillusionment grips everyone in the aftermath of The Failures of the Counterculture, from the hippies to the band of female ninja warriors. As Zoyd has settled into the role of single parent after his youth as a hippie musician, the ninja warriors are now more concerned with pension plans and accounting issues. Age and practicalities dull the most revolutionary ideals, as the inescapable reality of American existence imposes itself on everyone.

“Some of these girls, the market being what it was, were boys, of whom DL’s friend Lobelia was among the most glamorous.”

DL discovers that the criminal world, for nefarious purposes, is ironically more accepting of transgender people than the mainstream society of Reagan’s America. The narrative uses the language of the marketplace in the highly immoral world of sex trafficking to lampoon Reagan’s America, which often operated on the assumption that the invisible hand of the marketplace would self-regulate and was a moral good that favored conservative values; here, it instead self-selects for people vilified by the mainstream.

“‘It was sleazy, slippery man,’ Rochelle continued, ‘who invented “good” and “evil,” where before women had been content to just be.’”

Sister Rochelle’s story of the Garden of Eden deconstructs one of the fundamental stories of the Christian world, suggesting that God created women to be together before the corrosive introduction of men. By telling this story, Rochelle hints that the presumptions and assumptions that govern society are utterly changeable. Even something as fundamental as the story of Adam and Eve, she suggests, is not as fixed as everyone presumes.

“‘Death to everything that oinks!’—which for many was going too far.”

As the revolutionaries try to agree on slogans, Mirage steps up to defend pigs (a pejorative term for police officers). The like-minded radicals become twisted up inside their own figurative language, trying to discern their own individual meaning from linguistic flairs and allusions which are governed by their own experiences and biases. In itself, this inability to settle on the meaning and intent of radical language reflects The Failures of Counterculture.

“Would it be necessary someday for one of them to die for a piece of film?”

In the early days of 24fps, the members debate whether they would die for a piece of film that might (or might not) have the power to change the world. They need to believe in this power, which undergirds their entire project. They need to believe in a cause and a mechanism for change, so they assure one another that the film they are shooting is worth their sacrifice. Ironically, this foreshadows Frenesi’s later betrayal, in which she uses film as a pretext for killing the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll.

“How the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of the cliff, gazing not out to sea but inland, towering above the campus architecture.”

The college campus is situated in the shadow of a giant statue of Richard Nixon. The President infects the campus (and the nation) with his paranoid presence, overlooking, dominating, and gazing relentlessly inward in a totalizing manner. The statue of Nixon is a metaphor for the paranoid influence he has over the country, one which endures beyond his Presidency. The emotional effect of what the statue represents is thus far greater than just Nixon himself (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“She came and lay next to him, but not touching.”

As Frenesi becomes further mired in Vond’s tangle of manipulation, her physical relation to Vond is an echo of her emotional relation to him. She is near to him, but she does not touch him. She is forced to maintain an emotional and physical distance which is determined by Vond. She can affect the appearance of intimacy, but there is a gap between them which—no matter how close they might be—will never be closed.

“Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed.”

After being prompted by Vond, Frenesi conspires with Rex to accuse Weed Atman of betraying the cause of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. This accusation is founded on lies and misguided emotion. Frenesi, convinced that she is in love with Vond, is doing whatever he tells her to do. Rex, increasingly bitter that his revolution has been coopted, has a grudge against Weed. The truth is irrelevant, all that matters is emotional validation, reflecting The Failures of Counterculture.

“Then it was true—he was working for you.”

After Frenesi returns to Vond amid the collapse of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, he tells her that Weed was also a federal informant. Her actions, if this is true, are even more meaningless and her betrayal even more pronounced. Whether this is true or not is immaterial, as Vond can use the suggestion as another way in which to manipulate Frenesi. He can keep her trapped in a world of uncertainty, where nothing is true for sure, but which always empowers him and disempowers her.

“Any sudden attempt to change things would be answered by an immediate misoneistic backlash, not only from the State but from the people themselves—Nixon’s election in ’68 seeming to Brock a perfect example of this.”

Amid the many deaths of the post-counterculture world, optimism is one of the most pronounced losses. The real victory of Vond, Nixon, and Reagan has been to denude the world of optimism that society can change, leaving instead a bristling resentment toward anyone who tries to affect change. This lingering cynicism is a preemptive strike against optimists, a social tool for control that is implanted in the minds of everyone in the country and which reflects The Failures of Counterculture in the novel.

“Only about the time he was pinning the new diaper on remembering that he should have paid more attention, cared more for these small and at times even devotional routines he’d been taking for granted, now, with the posse in the parlor, too late, grown so suddenly precious.”

As a single father, Zoyd has found new meaning and The Importance of Family in small acts. For his younger self, the thought of changing a diaper had little meaning. For his current self, the act of changing a diaper is emotionally significant, another ritual of love and care that he can perform for his daughter to affirm his love for her—an example of how Zoyd constructs meaning which only becomes more pronounced and more significant when it is threatened.

“Or Raygun? No way he’ll ever make president.”

Zoyd laughs at the idea of Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California) becoming President of the United States. Zoyd’s incredulity hints at a deeply buried optimism as, even in his current nadir, he cannot envision a way in which society can continue in this manner. Things must improve, he optimistically (and naively) believes.