Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 8: Cowboys and Aliens

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 8: Anarchists on the U-boat, Squalidozzi Meets Waxwing and Der Springer, Martin Fierro and Emulsion J, the John E. Badass and Oneirine

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As a short recap: back in Zürich, Slothrop had met with Squalidozzi, an Argentinian recently come to Europe from his home country, fleeing Perón and the rise of fascism within, with a group of likeminded Anarchists. Squalidozzi, in a cafe, had talked with Slothrop, telling him of their arrival on a U-boat and how their goal, here, was to achieve the goals they had failed at achieving in their own land. Now that Europe, and especially Germany, has been fractured, wiped clean, and divided up into Zones, the Anarchists believe that they could bring their own goals here and have a greater success, one that could hopefully spread. To start their quest, Squalidozzi convinced Slothrop to deliver a message to one of their contacts in Geneva for a nice monetary reward — half up front even. And Slothrop took this mission, completed it successfully — even involuntarily, though not to Slothrop’s chagrin, losing Pointsman’s tails along the way — but upon his arrival back in Zürich, Squalidozzi was nowhere to be found (2.7).

Well, here is the U-boat, though for right now without Squalidozzi, only currently housing the other Anarchists — El Ñato, Beláustegui, Luz, Felipe, and Graciela Imago Portales. We learn a bit about each of these members. Portales, along with being one of the original hijackers of the U-boat, was friends with Cipriano Reyes (a Peronist and Anarchist who eventually abandoned Perón upon the clarity that he was not a true Leftist as he had run as), worked at Acción Argentina (a movement by the Argentinian Socialist Party — a Center Left movement which was eventually set back by Perón — which attempted to push Argentina to enter WWII), and was admired by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges¹. El Ñato speaks in Gaucho² slang, and occasionally “Felipe has to translate for him” (383). Felipe has a mild adoration of El Ñato given he, Felipe, is a poet and romanticizes the symbol of the Gaucho. He is also currently in a relationship with Luz despite her being in a relationship with Squalidozzi prior to him going missing in Zürich. And Beláustegui is the positivist³ of the group.

Where has Squalidozzi been all this time? He showed up again in Bremerhaven, a port city in Germany, having recently been chased across the near entirety of Germany by British Military Intelligence. Likely, this intelligence was The White Visitation, or at least an associated group, given Squalidozzi had been the last known person to interact with Slothrop before the Visitation had lost him. Squalidozzi reveals this to them: that he had found a man whose name he did not even know, and sent him to their Genevan contact, Ibargüengoitia, before realizing that he was, as Portales calls him, hot — i.e. either in alliance with or also being pursued by British Military Intelligence. It seems They will pursue those who even involuntarily hinder their plans.

After escaping Zürich, Squalidozzi crossed the German border into Bavaria where he was followed by the same Rolls Royce which once followed Slothrop and still haunted his dreams. Here, he came across a group of gangsters watching a Bob Steele film in an abandoned harmonica factory. Among them is Blodgett Waxwing, the same who was at Perlimpinpin’s party on the Riviera and who procured Slothrop’s zoot suit along with the business card (2.6) which led him to Zürich in the first place (2.7). Back at the party, Waxwing was described as an expert in “phonying documents of various sorts […] whilst dealing in Army hardware also as a sideline” and a lover of movies “provided they’re westerns” (246). So here he is again, watching Westerns with a group of zoot suiters, asking Squalidozzi, “‘They after you, amigo?’” (385).

Waxwing is accompanied by none other than Gerhardt von Göll, otherwise known as der Springer — the man Säure, before sending him off to Potsdam, told Slothrop he should (and would) meet in order to procure more information on the Schwarzgerät (3.7). Waxwing, von Göll — a “film director turned marketeer” (386) — and their people had been travelling together, no specific destination in mind. Given von Göll has the economic means to do so, he offers to help Squalidozzi’s Anarchist project in return for the allowance to shoot a film on the U-boat, specifically a film about Martin Fierro, a gaucho who is the “hero of a great Argentine epic poem” (386). The story and character of Fierro speak deeply to the U-boat Anarchists, and they see him as the opposition to standard centralized government, something the Anarchists are obviously and definitionally against. So the Anarchists, with Squalidozzi back on the U-boat and now well acquainted with von Göll, have begun working on a rendition of the story of Fierro:

The recorded story parallels many of the genocides seen throughout the world’s history. Fierro, a gaucho, lived on the Argentinian pampas, living a simple life. But, as Frans Van der Groov did to the Dodos (1.14), the colonizers to the Native Americans, and the Germans to the Herero and any non-Aryans living within or near their territories, so too did General Roca come to the pampas, desiring to slaughter the natives of this land in order to turn the “open plain and sky” (264) into labyrinths, labor camps, a place to control⁴. Here, in Part I of the story, Fierro abandoned Roca who had conscripted him to assist in this genocide, but years later, Part II told of Fierro giving in, assimilating. Even the authors of these epics seem to realize that the modern-day heroes are no longer extant — that we have romanticized the idea of heroism, and in the modern day, assimilation is the easiest and most often chosen route forward. Von Göll realizes this fact, so does not see the harm in deviating from the Anarchists’ beliefs.

Portales knows von Göll specifically as a man who has connections with those chemical, weapon, and plastic groups so carefully interconnected within Chapter 2.7. IG Farben had various outlets named there, such as Psychochemie AG, but here we learn that von Göll is tied to other IG subsidiaries, namely, Anilinas Alemanas (translation: German Anilines — anilines being a synthetic chemical used largely in production within both the rubber and pharmaceutical industry, plastics and drugs), and Spottbilligfilm AG (first mentioned in 1.19 on page 163 as the subsidiary who was punished by IG for creating an “airborne ray weapon which could turn whole populations […] stone blind” because of the negative impact it would have on the dye market). Spottbilligfilm AG attained a film stock (a type of film strip) known as Emulsion J, invented by Laszlo Jamf who had his hands in a little bit of everything — Imipolex G, Oneirine and Methoneirine, Slothrop’s conditioning, much of what IG Farben did before he passed, and now Emulsion J. This film stock had the ability to see beneath the flesh of those whom it filmed, rendering them skeletal and ghostly on the produced film, giving them a sheen of death. Von Göll used this film stock for his movie Alpdrücken.

Alpdrücken will be an important name to remember. It was first mentioned not as a film, but as the last name of a dog in a nightmare of Pointsman’s (1.17, pg. 142), Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken. In his dream, the dog (and Slothrop simultaneously) was compared to the minotaur at the center of Minos’ maze — the minotaur, or dog, being a thing that was put there as an unattainable goal which Pointsman would always strive to attain but never would. Alpdrücken literally translates to nightmare: it stemmed from Pointsman’s nightmare, itself (the dog) was a nightmare, and the film both presents the people within it as nightmarish, skinless beings while also, as we will see throughout the rest of the novel, tying together a series of plots and characters in a nightmarish fashion. And not only that, but the other aspect of the dog’s name, Thanatz, will similarly be given life from Pointsman’s mind.

The effects of Emulsion J in this film gave von Göll the idea to use it in Martin Fierro as well, given it would allow him to explore the breakdown of racial disputes by digging beneath the skin of the actors and revealing them to be simply human — a highly reductive and privileged way to achieve this idea. But it is no surprise von Göll believes himself to be capable of such feats, for he does see himself as a sort of God, able to incarnate aspects of film into real life given he was the one who shot the Schwarzkommando film as a part of Operation Black Wing for The White Visitation before he or they knew that a real Schwarzkommando actually existed. To him, it was not a coincidence they were discovered, but an actual feat of power. He truly believes that the creation of this group within his film brought them to life within the Zone. And in truth, while the Schwarzkommando is a real group in the Zone who likely would have been present without him, his ideas are not fully outlandish, though it is not because he is a god. Instead, with the Zone being a blank canvas — a country wiped clean — even filmmakers and other artists, those with funding from the right places and who know the best way to sway a population’s mind, will find a way to literally bring their ideas to life. This is how von Göll convinces Squalidozzi, who thus convinces the rest of the Anarchists, that the Martin Fierro film is something that must be made. For if he can bring the Zone Herero to life, real Africans in Germany, then he can also easily bring back their “open plain and sky” (264). But if this director can bring such beauty back to the world, then could he just as easily take it away? Why else would he desire to also film Part II?

Suddenly, upon the radar on the U-boat, Pig Bodine’s ship, the U.S.S. John E. Badass, appears, and, fearful for their own safety, the U-boat launches a torpedo directly at the vessel. This could have been the end for the Argentinian Anarchists — dead before the movie they desired even had a chance to begin filming — or for Bodine and his crew, but, somehow, it was not. For, Pig Bodine, quite the prankster, laced the coffee on his ship with Oneirine, the drug which was synthesized by Jamf and sold by Wimpe (3.5). While this drug was initially synthesized in the project that was meant to develop an opiate which would “kill intense pain without causing addiction,” (358) it apparently had a “property of time-modulation” (389) as well. The two vessels did, in fact, see each other on their respective radars, as did the torpedo appear. However, this was merely within the first three dimensions, not the fourth: time. Because of Oneirine, the crew of the John E. Badass was able to avoid the U-boat’s missile not by any special maneuver, but by having been there at a different time despite having been there in the same third dimension.

The time modulation effect of Oneirine and its effect on the destruction/non-destruction of the meeting vessels seems to be a commentary on the cyclical nature of destruction and atrocity. Events leading to destruction often occur at a whim, started by a simple blip on a radar. If some group, especially one in power, is threatened, then the torpedo will, inevitably, be launched. Yet, just as often, these events come to no apparent conclusion or climax — the missile is launched, nothing occurs. Or does nothing occur? Could it be that our world has been so heavily drugged by substances that alter our minds and ease our pain — things that may not be pharmaceutical drugs necessarily, but are addictive and mind-altering, nonetheless? Because no, nothing ended up occurring between these two vessels, yet the vessel that did take the brunt of an attack was “a North African [one] which the crew on the [John E. Badass’s] aft 3-inch gun mount spent half an hour blowing to pieces” (389). Has something led us to ignore less important atrocities in the hopes that we will celebrate over near misses that we consider more important? Just because an atrocity or destruction may have been prevented somewhere does not mean that it is not occurring somewhere else. Time will always cycle, and events, holocausts, genocides, will reoccur under new names perpetrated by different, or the same, groups. So, the question remains: “Will you go to the Heath⁵, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?” (390) — do you expect the solution for all of this to be solved by the miracle of art alone, of a director who has the ability of bringing fiction to life, of sitting around wishing or ranting or crying? Or do you plan on going out there to the Heath — the launch site of the 00000 — putting your life on the line, and truly setting out to end the cycle?

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Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 9

1. A great author who you should also read if you have not.

2. An Argentinian folk symbol, riders of horses on the plains of the undeveloped (in the capitalist sense of the word) country. It calls to mind those who would have lived on what Squalidozzi called the “open plain and sky” as opposed to the “labyrinths” (2.7, pg. 264) we have built.

3. Positivism being a philosophical branch holding that previous thought (especially metaphysical, theological, and a priori knowledge) did not express true knowledge, but that true knowledge stemmed from more logical, observable, and empirical data.

4. Though this is in the story of the fictional Martin Fierro, the genocide is a real historical event occurring in the 1880s.

5. The final chapter (4.12).