...was located in a basic L.A. business/shopping complex of high-rises that stood on a piece of former movie-studio lot. Space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here — she'd watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube — but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&M's, crowds dressed to impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were made high overhead in legal offices that weren't always legal, sharing these altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun and shadow below.

You see this "two worlds" motif in all TP's books, but there's always at least a sliver of hope, of doubt that the World of Reality really is destined to prevail (that sneaky "it was thought"). Here's the duality even more in-your-face, as Hippie nemesis Brock Vond (whose name is second in villain-vibes only to Against the Day’s Scarsdale Vibe) cajoles Frenesi into introducing into her underground film collective the weapon that will kill countercultural figurehead Weed Atman. Frenesi protests, "I can't bring a gun in the house." And Vond, object of her degrading lust for authority, tells her:

But you can bring a camera. Can't you see, the two separate worlds - one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real? What if this is some branch point in your life, where you'll have to choose between worlds?

"So either I pussy out or become a courier of death, wow, this is some swell choice you're giving me" complains Frenesi, but she chooses the latter.

Frenesi (descended from the Against the Day's anarchist Traverses) is one of Pynchon's most interesting characters, even though for most of the book she's in the background or on the periphery. "Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it." In Pynchon, political power games always have a sexual analogue, and vice versa. Frenesi blames her Vond-induced betrayals on "my pussy runnin' the show", a bit like what Cyprian Latewood in Against the Day succumbs to with the Nazi Theign. Both Frenesi and Cyprian are drawn to fascist authority figures out of some kind of suppressed nostalgia, or "unacknowledged desire" maybe not so much for order as for clarity. They're Pynchon's answer, I think, to the question of why the Preterite always end up stomped or manipulated into self-stymying by the Elect. Of course it might just be a case of assholes being assholes, as ultra-badass DL tells her sister in cinema Ditzah:

Ditzah: Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — 'I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?

DL: You always did look at things more historically. What I just figure is is he's a mean mother fucker, that's a technical term, and a lot of these MMF's as we call 'em tend to be spoilers which if there's somethin' they can't have, or they know they've already lost, why, they'll just go try and destroy as much as they can anyway, till it's over.

Yet another question as relevant now in 2025 as ever. But I'm not some kind of weirdo who reads Pynchon for psychosexual power-political insights, or even, really, for the abrupt intrusions into his narratives of the fantastical, the Godzilla footprint in the "World of Reality". I'm the kind of weirdo who reads TP primarily for the "check's in the mayo" joke, for the glorious coinage "octogenarihexation" meaning the act of being 86'd (which appears by the way on page 186), for the "Noir Mall" which is one extended pun:

Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n' the Lox.

and more than anything, for sentences like this that seem to redeem through poetry alone the "broken world":

So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.