In any world where identity is important, the camera is going to be a focal point of observation. In Slow River, in response to Tok’s “Find something,” an admonishment to keep Lore sane with the parents she has, Lore acquires a camera and edit board. Lore’s filmography becomes a very important part of the book. It shows not only the fluidity of identity, but shows first how perception of identity can change things. “Lore’s first projects are wish fulfillment,” and are of her parents happy together. This scene is the first that really spells out how poor her parent’s relationship is. Then she moves on to porn with her parents faces on the bodies. From a very early age, she has sexualized the camera and the things she looks through it to see. The identity through the camera becomes desensitized, and not as real. This is one of the reasons that lead to the creation of porn with Lore’s movie making skill. Because her parents never touch, even the touch of porn seems better than no touch at all.
Shifting forward chronologically, Lore’s camera becomes a defense mechanism. She carries it around with her all the time, and avoids both her mother and father’s presences. Her father stops taking her fishing, and her mother stops trying to talk business with her. This is when a mutable object defines her identity. Lore’s identity is defined through her camera, which allows anything seen through its lens to be changed. This doesn’t allow for a strong sense of identity by lore. This is also the period of her life where Lore starts dying her hair, another change to her identity that the camera led to. The identity and defense mechanism comes to a head at Spanner’s home. During the sex orgy brought about by the drug, Lore is shielded from the action only by her camera. That is when she realizes that the camera is not truly a shield. She is still affected by her actions, even years later. While Ruth nominally gave her permission, Ruth was still hurt by her act, which led to a break down in their relationship anyway. Even with the identities changed on the other side of the camera, people can still be hurt in their true selves.
The last and most important camera scene is the creation of the charity ad. It creates a huge problem first off, because the equipment is so expensive. It seems to say that it is extremely difficult to try to perceive things differently than they are. Spanner gets all of her limbs forcibly dislocated and relocated to try to get the money for the equipment. That just says another thing about the false identity that the camera can create. It shows how much Spanner is reaching and trying for that false identity. As this stage of the novel however, Lore is not making nearly the effort to try to get the equipment for the falsehood. She has matured in enough ways that she no longer feels the need to hunt out the material to achieve falsehoods. The charity ad itself is a large falsehood. Starting with a false charity, where all the money goes to Spanner and Lore, and then being a false advertisement, in place of the show because the rest of the commercial space was filled, to being about a problem which, while real, was not personified by the person used to portray it. Lore was trying to show the plight of the person born before 1960. Her subject however, Tom, was fully integrated into his world and had no trouble at all living in it. In fact, he quite enjoyed it. The camera had to create a complete falsehood to be successful. Then, when the ad was given to Tom along with his share of the cut, he did not watch it. Instead he started on at the news with his impossibly clear eyes, full of truth, and did not watch the falsehood. That was the last straw, and helped Lore to finally start to realize her true identity, and not an identity created through any kind of construction or lens.