Winston Churchill once called Russia "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The same could perhaps be said for the author Thomas Pynchon, whose cult popularity derives as much from his obsessive reclusiveness as such seminal, impenetrable novels as "V" and "Gravity's Rainbow".
Maybe that's part of the appeal for Swiss documentarians Donatello and Fosco Dubini, in that it gives them free rein to link Pynchon to every international conspiracy since the Second World War.
Combining archive film and anecdotage with talking head interviews with literary critics,
acquaintances, and cybernerds, they implicate the writer in everything from the Cuban missile crisis and President Kennedy's assassination, to early experiments in mind control using consciousness-expanding drugs.
On the basis of this meandering thesis, one suspects the Dubinis have been experimenting a little themselves. It surely takes a peculiar mind to connect Pynchon's alleged penchant for book-shopping in drag with government footage of a cat tripping on LSD, or a pilgrimage to the author's old home with the Nazis' infamous V2 facility at Camp Dora.
And you can't help thinking of Oliver Stone when one paranoid net-head blames all of America's ills on "the military industrial complex".
The film is at its best when revelling in the absurdity of a celebrated scribe shunning his own celebrity, a paradox that reached its zenith at the 1973 National Book Awards when comedian Irvin Corey accepted a gong on Pynchon's behalf.
Fascinating as this journey is, though, you leave feeling the Emperor should get some new clothes.
Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of [p.] (2003)
