CIA strippers.

In the scene where we get a background look at Jack Ruby's club in Don DeLillo's Libra, there's a very interesting parallel that I didn't notice until I was leading the class discussion of that chapter. This parallel has to do with double lives, and specifically those of the CIA agents and the strippers.

In the cases of both the CIA agents and the strippers, each have a public and private persona and life. With people like Larry Parmenter, the public life has to do with day to day household chores, and there is even a scene where we see him helping his wife carry groceries into the house. When you contrast this mundane task that everyone does with Parmenter's secret CIA life, the difference is striking. Parmenter has to lead such a double life because he can't even tell his wife about the things he does at work. To think that there are all of these ideas and this secret knowledge stored up in his head when on the outside, he just looks like a helpful husband helping with chores.

I drew a parallel between this juxtaposition with Parmenter and with the strippers at Ruby's club. When we first see the strippers, we see them backstage discussing things like wages. This seemed striking to me because when we think of strippers, the first image that pops to mind is a woman performing on a stage of some kind. As Mr. Mitchell pointed out, even though they are revealing their body, in a way they are masking themselves because you don't really get to know who they are by simply watching them. You are much more likely to learn something by listening to their mundane backstage conversations.

I hadn't really drawn this parallel until I asked the class what they thought of the strippers and how we get a view of them that we don't normally see. Nobody seemed to have thought about this, so I figured I should explain why I thought it was interesting. And this is what I told them!