Book 10: Moving Pictures

Perhaps the most sly and backhanded of Pratchett's modern satires, 'Moving Pictures' describes the rise and fall of the Disc's film industry in terms of an invasion by a world-changing alien idea, which affects the minds and behaviour of the Disc's chattering classes. It is tempting to view the book as a collection of old movie references and gags held together with a loose overall plot, but this is the reverse of the truth. Like a good postmodern film, the true signal here is the story, and the movie references are carefully and craftily grafted into the narrative stream. More, they are overlapped and entwined, submerging and then reappearing out of sequence, so that the reader is engaged in a metaconceptual game of Pooh-sticks from page to page.

What is this story? An idea from another world, which has brought terrible destruction in the past, is kept in check by eternal vigilance; when the vigil is relaxed, the idea breaks through and seduces otherwise normal, reasonable people to its cause. The parallel with communism in the heyday of American cinema is too obvious to dwell upon, but more telling perhaps is the allusion to Lovecraft, so cunningly hidden in the frames between the scenes ('not in the spaces we know, but between them they walk').

This notion of auto-completion, of false continuity and self-delusion, is central to the book. The true secret of 'moving pictures', as Victor discovers, is that they are not truly moving at all, but a sequence of stationary pictures viewed in a flickering light. Each image exists only for an instant, then is replaced by another that builds upon it; the step from one frame to the next is invisible, and the conscious mind will never even realise that it was there. Yet it is in that space that the real action happens: the pictures themselves are still.

The book itself uses its movie references in a similar way. The most cursory analysis will show references to at least a dozen classic films and several legendary Hollywood characters, from Sam Goldwyn to Fred Astaire to Marlene Dietrich to Donald Duck. But these are just momentary flashes in the story; the action takes place between them all, in the space that we don't see because we are too busy looking at the pictures.

Mike Kew

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