Fear and Paranoia as a Postmodern Condition in Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”

Abstract

Th is paper centers on the politics of fear and paranoia in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 and David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. These artists posit narrative critiques of American culture of consumption and history of imperialism, complicating traditional ideas of race and nationhood. They provoke the very roles, rules and institutional practices that shield oppression and unfairness, enable displacement and alienation, deny subjectivity and personal identity. By underscoring a sense of uncertainty and conspiracy, Pynchon and Lynch attempt to understand paranoia as a symptomatic condition of postmodernity. They approach it in terms of the psycho-cultural processes that induce paranoid anxiety within the depthlessness and fragmentation in postmodern society. Th roughout their work, they explore the notions of fear and terror, suggesting that America has become a world of paralysis, cultural exhaustion and death. Th e society’s rubbish and its waste, the contact with the disadvantaged, a series of objects which, like the hieroglyphic streets, have to be decoded, represent the path typically chosen by Pynchon and Lynch’s major characters. These authors produce images imbued with the apocalyptical chaos and nihilism, referring to the erosion of values, the decline of civility, the denial of truth.