Okay, for today the question is going to start with one big Glossy ring around 'connect' becoming an obscenity, and some of the more obscure "how does it relate to the world" dilemmas Mary raises like the foam outside the End Zone Hotel.
One of the big deals about the world of Noir is that it's a severe dystopia: a world not simply in decline, but near collapse. The Gloss has lost its innocence, and in a big way. In that vein, whatever the syllables you speak it with, you can't really understand the word fuck, or use it properly, until you know in your gut what it means in terms of cheapening; of using-and-throwing-away, a la the "cheap-and-nastiverse" that McNihil has shut out by customizing his eyes; a la Connect 'Em Till They Bleed: Pimp-Style Management for a New Century; a la "You are well and truly connected, my friend."
...And that's the whole point: forming connections in Noir's world is a stupid, an obscene endeavor that endangers and cheapens a person. That's what makes the skin-dissolving goo outside the EZ Hotel so horrifying to November, and so titillating to the rest of the world that it commands news time, despite being a quasi-regular occurrence: it's the ultimate in obscene connection, having started with hundreds of copulating bodies, and become an embodiment of homogeneity and the untilmate in surrender and loss of self. One of the whole points of the existence of prowlers is that they keep risky connection safely at arm's length. What does it say about a culture, when it develops machines to do its "fucking"?
It's worth noting that November's introduced to us in as tawdry and debased a way as possible: her fast-forward lifestyle has forced her to make truly horrid 'connections' (in the back rooms of the Gloss's trains) to survive, and they're epitomes of just how obscene connecting can be in her world.
...And yet connection remains inevitable; Harrisch winds up forging a connection with both McNihil and November, in order to consummate his dealings around TOAW. The DZ execs were rumored to have their business-card-handshakes wired to their genitalia. The cube-bunnies survive among the cubapts through their ability to facilitate connection on all levels. And what's the point of a better audio cable, if not a more effective connection? ;-D Layers and layers.
...Which plays into the rather grisly depiction of the penalties exacted by McNihil and his fellow asp-heads for copyright infringement. The need to prosecute copyright violators so viciously arose from too much connectivity, in a way... The "all information wants to be free" attitude dances pretty close to the attitudes of the neo-hippie commune in the 747 that McNihil destroyed, too - for them 'connect' wasn't a nasty word... And look what they got!
I personally think Jeter could have done a lot more with language than focus obsessively on the change in one word's meaning, but he certainly got his mileage out of this one. Anyway, end of lecture (boy, I do go on).
On to the question: between the 'every person is an island' linguistic gymnastics and the weird narrative riffing that Jeter does, never giving a clear, unambiguous decription of some concepts or scenes (that "sight" thing again), it's telling that so much is left unclear about stuff like the Wedge after reaching the end of Noir. Is this just poor storytelling, or is Jeter doing something more interesting with "disconnected" points of view and objectivity?
-Rich
