Films Referenced in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Shadow Ticket’

Oh Cheez! What is fall season’25 if not One Pynchon After Another. 12 years after Bleeding Edge, with Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon apports, what a time to be alive; his books, a glow in the dark. Like nature all the Pynchon novels follow the second law of thermodynamics, “Entropy Management” his term to find some order in world so disordered, not exactly a savoir-vivre as much as “keep cool, but care.” Shadow Ticket follows the same and then some, echoing the themes present in his earlier works, nonetheless it reverberates the same.

It’s 1930s Milwaukee, fascism is in its bloom and Hicks McTaggart, a strike-breaker turned private investigator, deaf & dumb part of his job, his locus in the void the hepcat, April Randazzo, and his buddy and my favourite Skeet “Francis Floyd” Wheeler—Zoyd Wheeler’s padre, as one might assume—being the last ones to witness, Stuffy Keegan board the U-13, are threatened with a discontinuity in their curve of life; and Hicks and discontinuous curve, fawhget about it! Try as he might to obviate getting involved or avoid getting the ticket punched, his path inevitably leads him to search for the Cheese Heiress, Daphne Airmonth, daughter of Bruno Airmont, the Al Capone of Cheese. And so begins the Pynchonian adventure, brimful of noir atmosphere, his way with the 30s language infectiously joyful. Nods to both Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow, his love for Banana-dishes and pigs still going on strong, what’s more is the way it pays-off so satisfyingly w.r.t. the one specific subplot of Gravity’s Rainbow. Whatever I’ve said doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the welt Pynchon has to offer here.

With the atmosphere soaked in 1930s, Pynchon heightens the immersion with the cultural references of the time, films being one of them, real ones and (one) imaginary ones alike. Letting the opportunity knocking at the door in, the following are the films Pynchon referenced in Shadow Ticket:

1. The Black Cat (1934)

“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.”
—Bela Lugosi, in The Black Cat (1934)

2. The Public Enemy (1931)

“The Public Enemy, again? It’s three in the morning.”

3. Dracula (1931)

“So they rode into Chicago, and were spared any Outfit-related violence, but what there was was Count Dracula, big as a movie screen, once or twice during whose activities it was Hicks who considered jumping into April’s lap. By the time it was over she’d eaten six cubic feet of popcorn and was using his tie to wipe the butter off her fingers with.”

4. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

“Sure, quite common in fact, you never heard of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”

5. Check and Double Check (1930)

“And…now we suppose you’ll tell us Amos ’n’ Andy aren’t really Negroes either.”
“Both white guys, sorry, didn’t you see the movie?”
“Check and Double Check, sure, two white guys in blackface.”

6. The Congress Dances (1931)

The Vienna branch of MI3b, daytime, a modest-size office decorated with a movie poster of Lilian Harvey waltzing with Willy Fritsch in Der Kongreß tanzt and an ancient map of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy, bentwood office furniture in the local Workshop style. From a distant open window can be heard an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither. A green and magenta carpet of eye-catching design no one wants to be called up onto, which is where Alf and Pip find themselves at the moment.

Thanks for reading our article on Films Referenced in Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket. For more, stay tuned here at Feature First.