A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody who hasn’t prepared a special watchable self.

How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious.

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is, Leavitt’s descriptions really do do the job. In our post-1950s, inseparable-from-TV association pool, brand loyalty really is synecdochic of character; this is simply a fact.

It’s not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in enormous doses affects people’s values and self-perception in deep ways. Nor that televisual conditioning influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes.

The crowd is now, paradoxically, both (1) the “herd” in contrast to which the viewer’s distinctive identity is to be defined and (2) the witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity.

That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching.

This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values.

In other words, the point of this successful bit of advertising is that Pepsi has been advertised successfully.”

the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability.

In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out-transcendence—flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naïve about something at maybe like age four.

In other words, early U.S. TV was a hypocritical apologist for values whose reality had become attenuated in a period of corporate ascendancy, bureaucratic entrenchment, foreign adventurism, racial conflict, secret bombing, assassination, wiretaps, etc.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

This is, after all, what TV does: it discerns, decocts, and re-presents what it thinks U.S. culture wants to see and hear about itself.

I’ve noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures—flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.

You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it—this seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point.

I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially