Frenesi Gates—Brock Vond

Frenesi Gates and Brock Vond’s relationship is both intimate and political: Vond’s access to Frenesi is bound up with his power over the institutions that have shaped her life. Their connection develops amid the exposure of Weed Atman’s betrayal, Frenesi’s own complicity, and Vond’s management of the PREP program. What might appear to be a private affair repeatedly carries consequences for Frenesi’s freedom, loyalties, and family ties.

Deception and the PREP machinery

Vond’s account of Weed Atman’s visits to San Diego reveals the kind of power on which his relationship with Frenesi rests. He describes the visits as therapeutic sessions, but explains that the purpose was to break down Atman’s resistance through coercive treatment until he accepted Vond’s side. Frenesi recognizes that Atman had deceived her, but also that Vond had concealed the deception from her. The disclosure does not simply correct her understanding of Atman: it exposes Vond as someone who knew what was happening and chose to keep her outside the truth.

That revelation sits within a broader program Vond has designed to turn political dissent into federal leverage. PREP is his career-making project: people detained for public disturbances could be sent to Department of Justice reservations and pressed to choose between prosecution and covert work as informants. After training, recruits could be placed in the FBI and infiltrated into campuses and radical groups. In that system, Vond’s relationship with Frenesi cannot be separated from his official power. He has helped create the machinery that classifies, confines, and recruits people like her, while also treating her as someone whose decisions he can direct.

Reunion and unequal intimacy

Vond’s memory of the PREP camp frames Frenesi’s return as an encounter he has been anticipating. He watches the people brought before him through a crude classificatory outlook informed by Lombrosian criminology, yet imagines an unlabelled sixth category when Frenesi approaches. She arrives thinner, disheveled, and without her camera; the absence of that instrument of witnessing marks how far she has been displaced from her earlier work. Their reunion renews their intimacy, but the scene is not a meeting between equals: Vond controls the setting, while Frenesi approaches with few of the tools and affiliations that had once defined her.

The relationship also has an asymmetry of knowledge. In the year before their reunion, Frenesi has met and married Zoyd Wheeler and given birth to Prairie Wheeler. Vond knows none of this, and Frenesi does not volunteer it when they meet again. Her silence preserves a separate part of her life from him, even as she considers returning to PREP because she can no longer return to 24fps or become the person she was before Weed Atman’s killing. The relationship therefore joins concealment to dependence: Vond has withheld consequential truths from Frenesi, while she withholds her new family from Vond.

Private attachment and family consequences

After being dropped at Las Suegras, Frenesi considers calling Vond and going back to PREP. She sees no way back to 24fps or to her former identity, and understands herself to be marked by her role in Atman’s killing and by her status in federal records. Her choice is presented against a narrowing set of alternatives, not as a simple return to a lover. Vond represents both a personal connection and a route back into the federal world that has already claimed her.

Frenesi briefly imagines a different future in which caring for Prairie could become a form of protection and a new identity. She hopes to live as a mother, make harmless family films, and leave behind Vond, the siege, and the bloodshed surrounding Atman. But Vond returns to her life, and their renewed affair has an immediate cost: Frenesi’s visits to her mother, Sasha Gates, become less frequent. When she does visit, she carries the signs of her connection to Vond, and the possibility that Sasha understands what is happening hangs over their encounters. The affair thus reaches beyond its two participants, deepening the distance between Frenesi and a mother with whom she longs to recover their former openness.

Control, choice, and the confrontation with Zoyd

Vond’s authority over Frenesi becomes explicit when he confronts Zoyd. He tells Zoyd that Frenesi is no longer his concern and asserts that he knows how to deal with her. Later, he presents her as having granted him legal authority to act for her, claiming that this authorization preceded their physical relationship. The sequence makes his intimacy with Frenesi part of an argument for control: he invokes her supposed consent while using threats and the prospect of imprisonment to force Zoyd to choose whether to remain in custody or disappear and begin again elsewhere.

Zoyd’s question about what Frenesi wants exposes the gap between Vond’s claimed authority and her own voice. Vond answers with his own instruction rather than evidence of a choice she has made freely. His appeal to what Frenesi would supposedly have done to Zoyd further turns the relationship into leverage, using Zoyd’s knowledge of their past against him. In this encounter, Vond’s private access to Frenesi and his official power work together: he presents himself as the person entitled to decide what happens to her and to the family life she shares with Zoyd.

Narrative significance

The relationship is marked by a recurring imbalance between intimacy and information. Vond conceals Atman’s coercion, initially knows nothing of Frenesi’s marriage and child, and later speaks as if he can represent her wishes to Zoyd. Frenesi, meanwhile, moves among possible lives—former filmmaker, implicated informant, mother, and Vond’s lover—without being able to restore the past or secure an uncomplicated future. Her secrecy shows that she retains some private knowledge and choice, but the consequences of the affair narrow her connections to others.

Through Frenesi and Vond, the novel links sexual attachment to political power without treating the former as an escape from the latter. Their relationship is renewed at moments when Frenesi is isolated from her former community and uncertain where she can go; Vond’s institutional position makes that vulnerability consequential. The later confrontation with Zoyd gives the connection its starkest practical meaning: what Vond calls authority over Frenesi becomes a means of separating her from the choices and relationships through which she might define her own life.