Book 12: Throat Sprockets

I was not planning on having this book affect me as much as it did. I picked it up because I really just wanted something breezy that I could knock out and forget. This was not that book.

The book is about obsession and how media can change your life. It's also about our culture's need for violence and despair to power our lives.

A married advertising man eats his lunch in a run down porn theater, which used to be a movie palace. There he catches a film, Throat Sprockets, which grainy, edited, cut together with the narrative spliced apart focuses on women's necks. Seeing this film, the narrator is changed. First in his sexual desires, then in subtler ways which change him to the point where his wife leaves him. He develops new philosophies on life and he begins to think about the movie more until the hunt for the film becomes his only desire in life.

He captures another showing here, incomplete. Another chance showing elsewhere under a different name reveals different cuts, different scenes.

The hunt for the whole leads him to black market dupe culture (which is an almost unbelievable thing to think about now in the age of torrents) and importing video, where the author's knowledge of home video and film marketing really come to the forefront.

It seems that the film hasn't touched just him alone, and an entire near vampiric subculture has sprung to the mainstream where it leaves the world irrevocably changed in a really surprising coda.

I don't really want to say too much, but FIND THIS BOOK, READ THIS BOOK. You can find it for less than $10 at Amazon and Alibris.