The critic Edward Mendelson once observed that

Virtually every event in Gravity’s Rainbow is involved in a political process: specifically, the transformation of charismatic energy into the controlled and rationalized routine of a bureaucracy. These terms are of course borrowed from Max Weber, to whom Pynchon twice attributes the phrase ‘the routinization of charisma’. (168)

The treatment that Mendelson gives to Gravity’s Rainbow has been mostly ignored and forgotten since the essay’s publication, even by other literary critics—predictably, I think, given that the work is buried as a gravestone chapter in a scholarly edited collection. In spite of this, I want to resurrect a point that Mendelson makes, because he expresses it better than me. In his reading, Mendelson goes on to trace this ‘routinization of charisma’ in and through the metaphor of language. Discussing the chapter of the novel in which Pynchon describes the Soviet Union’s introduction of Latin script in Soviet Central Asia (a thing that did happen, around 1926-1940), Mendelson writes:

The history of language in Gravity’s Rainbow illustrates one version of this process of political organization. For the Kirghiz people, before the arrival of Tchitcherine and his bureaucracy, language “was purely speech, gesture, touch … not even an Arabic script to replace” (338). With the introduction of the New Turkic Alphabet, or NTA, whole systems of committees. subcommittees, various divisions of labor and authority now organize and reticulate themselves over the buried strata of the local folk culture. Unlike the language of Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun,” the NTA docs not develop according to an organic model, but is shaped deliberately by the forces of government, forces which are themselves ultimately directed and initiated by the cartels which organize the book’s secular world.

[…]

The NTA is shaped by processes that are not merely linguistic, and its effects are felt outside of language. The availability of a written language permits more than the simple act of writing: it makes possible new events not limited to the realm of signs. Pynchon’s parenthetical joke gets to the heart of the matter:

On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian … kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way … (355-356)

The shamans worked curses and blessings through incantations or spells, but now language, formulated into writing, operates “in a political way.” The consequences of this realization have a tragic force. All the book’s efforts at truth-telling, all its thrusts at the increase of freedom through the revelation of necessity, are infected by the inevitable fact that the book itself must use a language that is, unavoidably, a system shaped by the very powers and orders that it hopes to reveal. Language can never be liberated from lies. One cannot speak outside of language, and one cannot directly speak the truth within it—this not only in the reflexive sense proclaimed by rccent critical theory, but in a political sense as well. To separate oneself from language, in an attempt to be free from its imposed order, is to enter a world of chaos and vacancy. This tragic realization is at the ideological center as well as on the stylistic surface of the book. Gravity’s Rainbow does not propose—with the romantic fervor appropriate to such proposals—that you escape the systems of pain and control that occupy and shape the world: the book insists that it is impossible to escape those systems yet retain any decency, memory, or even life—just as it is impossible to escape from language yet communicate. If the connectedness of the world has its metonym in paranoia—“nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation” (703)—then Slothrop’s detachment from the world’s order and the order of language (he is in the end unable to speak or even to hear) may be called “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long” (434). (168-9)

As you rightly point out, there are a lot of things going on in SAS: Rogue Heroes. There’s the myth-making of post-war Britain, the high definition footage of shirtless and sweaty and exceptionally attractive young men, and a dozen other cinematic offerings besides. Yet, at a meta-theatrical level, one of the things that I find most interesting is the extent to which such dramatisations necessarily sell to us a kind of (forgive me!) ‘Trojan Horse’ fantasy: on the one hand, they characterise the idealised lifeworld of the British SAS soldier as being not so much rule-breaking as rule- indifferent, as somehow anarchic, as radically ‘free’ ‘from’ ‘bureaucracy’; on the other hand, simultaneously, they smuggle in the assumption that ‘bureaucracy’ is ultimately synonymous with order, with language, with meaning, and with the very possibility of coherent action at scale. In the opening scene, our born-to-fight hero—who is, of course, both desperately agentic and desperately handsome—sees that the convoy needs to refuel to reach Tobruk. He sees, too, just as immediately, that the paper- pushing Officer Class has failed to achieve the bare minimum level of competent contact-with-reality. And, in relating to this system, he naturalises for us the idea that there is a need for bureaucratic logistics at all ; he shepherds us into believing that fractalised planning committees are the necessary pre-condition for coordination and movement at scale. (If only an isolated fuck-up hadn’t been allowed to sully the elegance of the Ideal Military Convoy!) We fantasise about his exceptional competence and lawlessness — if he is so attentive to the physical necessities of a long and sweaty journey towards dangerous explosions, here, imagine such a mindset elsewhere — and then, distracted by the jawline, we buy the layered lies.

David Graeber says, of Dungeons & Dragons, that it is “on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything,” with the role-played characters acting very much like “what anarchists would call an ‘affinity group’”, and yet it on another level (with its endless rules and catalogues of stat-blocks) “the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy” (293-4).

It is the same here: the charisma of the individual is transformed in such a way as to contain, within our fantasy, a presumed necessity of interviews, paperwork, and little red rubber stamps on forms that mark “S.A.S.” beside the names of the men who are appropriately (ie, State-usefully) independent. How else would you turn ‘independent agency’ to ‘pro-social’ ends? And, really, how could anyone be like this and not be psychopathic in their violence?

Fisher’s account generalises. Our resistance and opposition to The System is commodified in fantasy and sold back to us. Or, just as fitting, Žižek:

Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. (30)

Like the dog that eats the pill because it’s smeared in peanut butter, we fall for it every time:

‘There is no alternative.’