Illuminating the Blue Spotlight

The spotlight that randomly appears to track Gunnar the night of Yoshiko's "first craving" is perhaps one of the most unlikely aspects of Beatty's novel.  Even Gunnar acknowledges how bizarre it is by introducing himself to the 7-Eleven clerk like an alien, "with a robotic 'Take me to your leader' " (216).  Interestingly, the spotlight begins to attract attention and allow for Friday-night parties, instead of scaring everyone away.  Even more strange is that "drug dealers have their say" and "hoodlums...bare their souls [with] black gunny-sacks stretched over the heads of the wanted ones to prevent the police from using an overhead skycam to identify them" (221) at these gatherings.  The people probably know that the police could easily capture and arrest these people, but for some reason they keep their distance and never intervene.

What is going on here?  Beatty could literally be implying that Gunnar's and Yoshiko's lives are now "spotlighted" in the national eye, no matter what they are doing.  In fact, they advertise and consciously gather an audience for what might otherwise be a very private, family-level experience: giving birth to a baby.  Perhaps they imagine their whole community as family, and that everyone should come to celebrate the life of the community.....but then how does this mesh with Gunnar's active work to convince the world to end the life of this entire community?  Perhaps the end is less fatalistic than one's emotions might imply.  Objectively, Gunnar and Yoshiko have finally found meaning in their lives, as evidenced by their willingness to die...so, paradoxically, they can now celebrate the life of their child.  To each his own...I guess....but their conviction that Gunnar feels he must die in order to fully live will never cease to be heart-wrenching.

In any case, back to the spotlight.  I wondered -- why "blue-white"?  Why not, say, green?  Or red?  Or...only white?  Blue was probably not Beatty's random choice.  As I considered Beatty's reasoning, I remembered that the first color that defined Gunnar's Elementary School view of the world was blue.  Specifically, the profanities, fantasies, municipal bus, toilet-paper grenades, and the ocean were blue.  Interestingly, Gunnar connects the blue spotlight that showed up at the end of the book when he was buying a blue slushie for Yoshiko's craving to his description of Gunnar's Elementary School definition of blue.  The Elementary School Gunnar had a "Slurpee blue" tongue (34).  And Eileen, who was Gunnar's only other love in life besides Yoshiko (and, apparently, first-base baseball player Stan "the Man" Musial (33)), had "light-saber blue eyes" that "cut through [him] like lighthouse beacons lancing in the midnight" (34).

So the spotlight in the end of the book that illuminate's Yoshiko's midnight birth is the blue of Eileen's laser-lighthouse eyes.  In both cases, Gunnar is being watched.  As Eileen watches him, he hopes that she approves of what he does, because he has a crush on her, and she is probably judging him.  But as the police watch him, they seem to care less what he does.  When Gunnar is first spotlighted, he waits for the "standard drill" of the police, but recieves "nothing" in the way of response at all (216).  As Gunnar grows more comfortable with the light's presence, he really could care less whether or not the police approves of what he does.  And neither does he try to hide away from the light.  Yoshiko describes it as "cool" (217), and both embrace (or ignore?  or take advantage of?) its presence from that point onward.

Perhaps Gunnar is trying to convince the LAPD, or anyone, for that matter, to disapprove of what he does, like Monsieur de la Croix in Bamboozled.  After Naomi's birth, when the LAPD warns that the child should have "a respect for authority," unlike Gunnar, his response is to hold up the afterbirth in defiance and state, "Thus behold the only thing mightier than yourself" (219).  But after initial trepidation for the light and Gunnar's defiant stance toward the LAPD and the world in general, everyone seems accepts everything Gunnar says and does, just like they did with his poetry.

A more sinister reading of the spotlight could view it as more of a cage than an acceptance and illumination.  "If [he] moved two feet to the left, the spotlight moved two feet to the left," keeping him "at its center" (216).  Interestingly, in Gunnar's Elementary School "abstract impressionism coloring books," he spends his time "trying [his] hardest not to stay inside the lines" (34).  So if coloring outside the lines is Gunnar's goal in life, perhaps his goal in writing poetry, then it is interesting that at the end of his life he is kept contained in the center of the beam of light.  In expanding this idea, we realize that as Gunnar's published outside-the-lines poetry becomes bestselling, what Gunnar does and says actually becomes the mainstream understanding.  He no longer even has the option of doing anything outside the lines.  Even if he is asking to plunge outside of history, he no longer can.  He is spotlighted, and his advertised plunge has gained awareness....so it becomes important to the world.

With this in mind, let us consider the fact that the beam of light is not only blue, but also white.  In Gunnar's Elementary School color definition, he defines white as "the expulsion of colors encombered by self-awareness and pigment" (35).  So we obtain the final aspect of the significance of the blue-white beam that the LAPD shines on Gunnar at night as his life draws to a close.  Along with the inside-the-lines existence that the light forces Gunnar to live, it also asks him to recognize his life as important and having worldwide significance.  There is no way around self-awareness when you are literally spotlighted.  So Gunnar's actions and experiences become all the more poignant for readers, because they understand that the whole world will see what Gunnar says and does.  But Gunnar thumbs his nose at the idea that the presence of the spotlight could affect how he views himself.  By the end of the book, Gunnar seems almost as existentialist as Meursault.  But unlike Mersault, he should recognize that the LAPD is right: his life is clearly significant to billions, and his existentialist attitude is being broadcast on national television.  Along with his stable and apparently happy family life, this should, by modern logic, absolutely cancel out Gunnar's paradoxical belief that all that matters about his life is that it ends.  But it doesn't.