Last week I discussed the film Tristram Shandy – a potential candidate for the top-spot on my year-end list – and it got me thinking; being that the source material for the film had previously been considered as unfilmable, when will film makers finally brave an adaptation of my all-time favorite unfilmable novel Gravity’s Rainbow?

I suppose many view the task as somewhat daunting given the novel’s 800-page length. But Shandy at just 20-pages shy of Pynchon’s magnum opus proved manageable under Winterbottom’s post-modern rubric, why not do the same with Gravity’s Rainbow? The book does slip into lucid moments every now and then, but these incredibly coherent points also demonstrate a wicked sense of humor at times approaching the zany comic situations of surrealist master Luis Buñuel. I confess, however, that attempting to grasp at all the disparate elements of the book and sculpt them into a single coherent narrative would result in disaster, but why attempt anything unified? The book approached its material with a fractured sense of narration; why not approach the film in a similar fashion?

I presume someone has had this idea by now but not possessed the audacity to proceed with it. To confirm my suspicions I turned to the Internet. A quick search for Thomas Pynchon on imdb produces two results: one a documentary apparently about the author called Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of P., the other some obscure German film called Prüfstand 7 in which – what’s this?! – Thomas Pynchon apparently co-wrote the screenplay! Further probing on the issue led me to the film’s website where I learned the film is a psuedo-documentary dealing with the first German rocket shot into space and loosely relating a fictitious tale of the ghost of the Rocket – Bianca. Most interesting of all the website further informs me that “for Prüfstand 7 the US autor Thomas Pynchon has for the first time given permission for a partial filming of his rocket novel Gravity’s Rainbow.” Exactly how much of the novel appears in the film I cannot say for sure, but I’d love to track this one down and see for myself.

Unfortunately this appears to be one of those foreign films that flies so far under the radar that it fails to materialize here in the States. I see that it is available for purchase in a European format, but I remain unsure as to whether it would be worth the investment. At present I shall hold off on such a purchase on the off chance that I run across it elsewhere. Until that time, I recommend to all reading this to put aside whatever other activities you may be involved in; sit down, clear your head and read that damn novel immediately! If such a task appears impossible at the present juncture, then perhaps you can listen to Pat Benetar’s album of the same name. Having never heard it, however, I nevertheless maintain that the novel will likely be the more entertaining option.