Of course, the downside of TV’s big fantasy is that it’s just a fantasy. As a Treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As a steady diet, though, it can’t help but render my own reality less attractive (because in it I’m just one Dave, with limits and restrictions all over the place), render me less fit to make the most of it (because I spend all my time pretending I’m not in it), and render me ever more dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.
It’s tough to see how Gilder’s soteriol vision of having more “control” over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy-bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I’m not dependent. Whether I’m “passive” or “active” as a viewer, I still must cynically pretend, because I’m still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic. Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.
The paradox in Gilder’s rosy forecast is the same as in all forms of artificial enhancement. The more enhancing the mediation — see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or “moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images”—the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are. An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging and controllable simulacra paler and more frustrating to deal with, and me just a whole lot more dependent on my furniture. Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture. Umm, insights and guides to value used to be among literature’s jobs, didn’t they? But then who’s going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with?
Oh God, I’ve just reread my criticisms of Gilder. That he is naïve. That he is an ill-disguised apologist for corporate self-interest. That his book has commercials. That beneath its futuristic novelty it’s just the same old American same-old that got us into this televisual mess. That Gilder vastly underestimates the intractability of the mess. Its hopelessness. Our gullibility, fatigue, disgust. My attitude, reading Gilder, has been sardonic, aloof, depressed. I have tried to make his book look ridiculous (which it is, but still). My reading of Gilder is televisual. I am in the aura.
Well, but at least good old Gilder is unironic. In this respect he’s like a cool summer breeze compared to Mark Leyner, the young New Jersey medical-ad copywriter whose My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Fountainhead. Leyner’s novel exemplifies a third kind of literary response to our problem. For of course young U.S. writers can “resolve” the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists “resolve” their hopeless enmeshment in the logos. We can resolve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is new not so much in kind as in degree. It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repellent. You want sendups of commercial culture?
I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.
he picks up a copy of das plumpe denken new england’s most disreputable german-language newsmagazine blast in egg cream factory kills philatelist he turns the page radioactive glow-in-the-dark semen found in canada he turns the page modern-day hottentots carry young in resealable sandwich bags he turns the page wayne newton calls mother’s womb single-occupancy garden of eden morgan fairchild calls sally struthers loni anderson
what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it’s pink — it’s the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick dispenser, y’know that color? no, maam I said it’s the same color they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women… y’know that color? nope well, it’s the same pink as pepto-bismol, y’know that color? oh yeah, I said, well do you have spaghetti?
You want mordant sendups of television?
Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 P.M., and read aloud:… There’s a show called “A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run From the Sauna Screaming Snake! Snake!”… It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren
You like mocking self-reference? The novel’s whole last chapter is a parody of its own “About the Author” page. Or maybe you’re into hip identitylessness?
Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head…. Buzz’s mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature.
I can’t tell if she’s human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don’t care
Parodic meditations on the boundaryless flux of televisual monoculture?
I’m stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. God, these methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then… do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin.
The decay of both the limits and the integrity of the single human self?
There was a woman with the shrunken, wrinkled face of an eighty- or ninety-year-old. And this withered hag, this apparent octogenarian, had the body of a male Olympic swimmer. The long lean sinewy arms, the powerful V-shaped upper torso, without a single ounce of fat….
to install your replacement head place the head assembly on neck housing and insert guide pins through mounting holes… if, after installing new head, you are unable to discern the contradictions in capitalist modes of production, you have either installed your head improperly or head is defective