Riscrittura della storia

Riscrittura della storia is the recurring process by which public events and private lives are revised, concealed, and reconstructed. In the novel, history is not merely a settled record waiting to be consulted: it is reshaped by political power, by family silence, and by the surviving documents and images through which later generations try to understand what happened. The contrast between Frenesi Gates’s haunted memory and Prairie Wheeler’s archival search makes that process both intimate and material.

History as an Edited Account

For Frenesi Gates, the past does not remain safely behind her. In the quiet of a home where her son Justin sleeps in the glow of the Tube, she returns mentally to earlier events and to the life she once shared with Flash. Other people may treat old experience as something dead and buried, but the past follows Frenesi like a zombie: it remains present, unresolved, and capable of intruding on ordinary domestic life. Her experience gives historical revision a personal cost. What is forgotten by others is not necessarily gone for the person who lived it.

The transition out of the 1960s shows how readily a person’s account of political history can be overtaken by events. As the era’s bright clothes and visible countercultural styles give way to a more subdued atmosphere, Frenesi mistakes her own particular subjection for a newly won freedom. She embraces a world organized around action and the stark division between life and death, without imagining that Nixon and his circle would pass or that the Watergate scandal would end what she and Flash had experienced as a golden age. The later perspective exposes the gap between a moment’s self-description and the larger historical forces that shape it.

Watergate changes the couple’s circumstances as well as Frenesi’s understanding. Flash watches the hearings on television for weeks, following the broadcasts during the day and reviewing highlights at night. He anticipates cuts to expenses and privileges, while the political apparatus continues under changing personnel. Their assignments become less glamorous and more sordid: traps, blackmail, and frame-ups directed at increasingly less powerful targets. The shift shows how an official rationale can persist while its practical uses change. The machinery outlasts the story told to justify it, and those caught inside it are made to perform new, diminished versions of their roles.

Family Memory and the Hollywood Past

The novel places this history within a family already shaped by competing political memories. Frenesi recalls her parents, Sasha Gates and Hubbell Gates, revisiting the 1950s and the Hollywood blacklist era, then lapsing into silence. Their acquaintances had betrayed one another across political lines; both parents had also suffered at the hands of the same powerful figure. Their discussions did not produce a single shared account. They circled backward through old injuries, and their exchanges could end in shouting and thrown food.

Sasha understands the Hollywood past through the language of film. To her, the blacklist was an extension of the film industry’s ordinary practices, now conducted politically: people altered their stories to improve their own reputations and discredit others. She sees the period’s history as a screenplay revised by many hands. Characters and events are switched around, sincere speeches are flattened or removed, and the resulting account is like a silent film because no one speaks openly. This image makes revision more than a metaphor for error. The public story is actively edited, while the silence surrounding it helps conceal who changed it and why.

Frenesi’s childhood education in politics is therefore incomplete until she connects her parents’ reactions to the old films they watch on television. Names in opening credits that mean little to younger viewers provoke disgust, anger, or a change of channel from Sasha and Hubbell. Their responses reveal that the apparent entertainment carries traces of conflicts the films do not explain. By learning to notice those reactions, Frenesi begins to recognize a subtler drama beneath the visible one: a political history that was present in family life but not plainly narrated to her.

Archives, Photographs, and Partial Recovery

Prairie Wheeler encounters Frenesi’s past through a dossier assembled over many years from uneven sources. It includes official documents with stamps and reference numbers, Federal Bureau of Investigation memoranda marked in felt pen, clippings from now-defunct underground newspapers, transcripts of Frenesi’s radio interviews on KPFK, and material concerning the 24fps collective in which Frenesi and DL once worked together. The file is neither a unified biography nor a neutral voice. Its mixed contents preserve different kinds of evidence, gathered from different points of view and at different times.

As Prairie moves through it, the dossier feels like an eccentric scrapbook as much as an official file. She knows that even spaces between characters can matter when reading computer records, and this attention to small marks becomes part of the larger question of how evidence acquires meaning. She can summon personal and published photographs of her mother: Frenesi carrying a camera at demonstrations, being arrested, standing beside recognizable movement figures, and looking toward a riot-gear policeman by a wire fence. In one image, her fingers appear to touch the barrel of an assault rifle. These pictures make the young woman Prairie is seeing difficult to reconcile with the mother she knows only indirectly, while their stillness also leaves gesture and circumstance open to interpretation.

One photograph shows Frenesi and DL walking across what may be a university campus. Their long shadows fall across the grass; a pedestrian bridge, palms, stairs, a volleyball court, and windows give the scene a specific setting, while their relaxed faces suggest a moment outside the public masks required elsewhere. Prairie reads the image for clues to their friendship and to the quality of that unguarded instant. The photograph preserves an encounter, but it cannot supply everything that happened before or after it. Its apparent quiet becomes meaningful precisely because the record is partial.

Film as Witness and Inheritance

The 24fps reels extend Prairie’s encounter with the past from still images to moving records. Night after night, she watches footage of strikes, police lines beside an artichoke field, the eviction of a Texas commune, arrests and assaults, burning cannabis crops, and campuses turned into military parking areas. The images also retain incidental details—a policeman’s arm shining with backlit sweat, an agricultural worker’s face, a flowering lawn, a sunset—that resist any account in which political conflict can be reduced to slogans or cleanly arranged scenes. Their accumulated force comes from showing what the footage insists must be seen, including violence that an edited public memory might exclude.

Prairie gradually understands that Frenesi was often behind the camera. By concentrating on the images, she imagines sharing her mother’s eyes: not only seeing the scene, but sensing the fatigue, fear, or nausea that makes the frame tremble, and the decision to move closer and keep filming. The film offers Prairie a mediated form of contact, but not an unfiltered return of the dead or an all-knowing account of the past. It allows her to approach Frenesi through the choices embodied in each shot while making clear that a camera’s view remains situated and selective.

At one point, Prairie and Ditzah Pisk recognize a briskly walking man in a double-breasted suit in tribunal footage. They rewind the film and identify him as Brock Vond; Prairie asks for the image to be stopped on a single frame. The recognition joins the archive to the family and political histories Prairie has been assembling. Across dossiers, photographs, parental memories, and film reels, Riscrittura della storia thus works in two directions: power and silence revise the past, while the fragments they leave behind enable a later generation to challenge those revisions without pretending that any one fragment can restore the whole.