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

by David Foster Wallace

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.

One big claim of this essay is going to be that the most dangerous thing about television for U.S. fiction writers is that we don’t take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan’s lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as “just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.” 3

“We may be hearing about ‘real life’ only on television shows made up of fifteen-second sound bites (in which ‘real people’ not only speak in brief, neat truisms but actually seem to think that way, perhaps as a result of having watched too much reality-molding television themselves).”

I dont understand

The important question about U.S. television is no longer whether there are some truly nasty problems involved in Americans’ relation to television but rather what might possibly be done about them. On this question pop critics and scholars are resoundingly mute.

The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever have dreamed of.

We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.”

The emergence of something called Metafiction in the American ’60s was hailed by academic critics as a radical aesthetic, a whole new literary form, literature unshackled from the cultural cinctures of mimetic narrative and free to plunge into reflexivity and self-conscious meditations on aboutness.

Streaming, podcasts equivalent today?

It will take a while, but I’m going to prove to you that the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious irony. Irony is, of course, a turf fictionists have long worked with zeal. And irony is important for understanding TV because “TV,” now that it’s gotten powerful enough to move from acronym to way of life, revolves off just the sorts of absurd contradictions irony’s all about exposing. It

Critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that TV’s lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a “contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to the mass market and necessarily to mass taste” 8 can be refuted by observing that their Propter Hoc isn’t even Post Hoc: by 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude” that aimed “to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.” 9 Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster w/pictures.

Specific to america?

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Argent that modern tv (internet) could be better bc more specialized

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.

Since television must seek to attract viewers by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV’s whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory (“Joe, Joe, there’s a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture”) while reinforcing television-watching in practice (“Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV”).

Why different for fiction?

Or here’s part of poet Bill Knott’s 1974 “And Other Travels”: … in my hand a cat o nine tails on every tip of which was Clearasil I was worried because Dick Clark had told the cameraman not to put the camera on me during the dance parts of the show because my skirts were too tight 15 which serves as a great example because, even though this stanza appears in the poem without anything you’d normally call context or support, it is in fact self-supported by a reference we all, each of us, immediately get, conjuring as it does with Bandstand ritualized vanity, teenage insecurity, the management of spontaneous moments.

My two big premises are that, on the one hand, a certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television; and that, on the other hand, televisual culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. Television, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism that television requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day.

Early uses of Imagist tactics can be seen in the DeLillo of Great Jones Street, the Coover of Burning, and in Max Apple, whose ’70s short story “The Oranging of America” projects an interior life onto the figure of Howard Johnson.

Wish i understood these

And the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative. How TV’s done this is blackly fascinating to see.

It’s widely recognized that television, with its horn-rimmed battery of statisticians and pollsters, is awfully good at discerning patterns in the flux of popular ideologies, absorbing those patterns, processing them, and then re-presenting them as persuasions to watch and to buy.

Parallel to big tech?

U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging.

The lonely grandeur of Stand-Apart advertising not only sells companies’ products, then. It manages brilliantly to ensure—even in commercials that television gets paid to run—that ultimately it’s TV, and not any specific product or service, that will be regarded by Joe B. as the ultimate arbiter of human worth. An oracle, to be consulted a lot.

The advent of consumer cable, often with packages of over 40 channels, threatens networks and local affiliates alike.

But might there not be some deeper way to keep Joe Briefcase firmly in the crowd of watchers, by somehow associating his very viewership with transcendence of watching crowds? But that would be absurd. Enter irony.

The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us. 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 fact the ad is unctuous in its flattery of only one person: the lone viewer, Joe B., who even with an average brain can’t help but discern the ironic contradiction between the “Choice” slogan (sound) and the Pavlovian orgy around the van (sight). The commercial invites Joe to “see through” the manipulation the beach’s horde is rabidly buying. The commercial invites a complicity between its own witty irony and veteran viewer Joe’s cynical, nobody’s- fool appreciation of that irony. It invites Joe into an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him.

Though the ads never said much of anything about why Isuzus are in fact good cars, sales and awards accrued. The ads succeeded as parodies of how oily and Satanic car commercials are. They invited viewers to congratulate Isuzu’s ads for being ironic, to congratulate themselves for getting the joke, and to congratulate Isuzu Inc. for being “fearless” and “irreverent” enough to acknowledge that car ads are ridiculous and that Audience is dumb to believe them.

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

Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”

For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world.” The fibrous TC “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck” of television’s One Over Many structure of image-dissemination. Now everybody’ll get to be his own harried guy with earphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S. television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and “profitable” without being “exploitative.”

it’s arguable that the biggest TV-tech “advances” of recent years have done little but abet this fantasy of escape from the defining limits of being human. Cable expanded our choices of evening realities; handheld gizmos let us leap instantly from one reality to another; VCRs let us commit experiences to an eidetic memory that permits re-experience at any time without loss or alteration. These advances sold briskly and upped average viewing-doses, but they sure haven’t made U.S. televisual culture any less passive or cynical.

Stream chats, video calls as contrary examples

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.

Central problem

Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

But so I theorize to Native Companion (who worked detassling summer corn with me in high school) that the Illinois State Fair’s animating thesis involves some kind of structured interval of communion with both neighbor and space—the sheer fact of the land is to be celebrated here, its yields ogled and stock groomed and paraded, everything on decorative display. That what’s Special here is the offer of a vacation from alienation, a chance for a moment to love what real life out here can’t let you love.

We hunker down and have a look upward, and I suddenly for the first time understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I’d heard but never truly understood till just now, prone and gazing upward in some blend of horror and awe.

More perv dfw

We tourists get to indulge our tender Animal Rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon. I don’t know how keen these sullen farmers’ sense of irony is, but mine’s been honed East-Coast keen, and I feel like a bit of a schmuck in the Swine Barn.

He’s been at this gig five years, touring with this one here same company here. Couldn’t rightly say if he liked it or not, the gig: like as compared to what?

The crowd’s adults are either pale or with the pink tinge of new burn, thin-haired and big-bellied in tight jeans, some downright fat and moving by sort of shifting their weight from side to side; boys minus shirts and girls in primary-colored halters; littler boys and girls in squads; parents with strollers; terribly pale academics in Bermudas and sandals; big women in curlers; lots of people carrying shopping bags; absurd floppy hats; almost all with ’80s-fashion sunglasses—all seemingly eating, crowded together, twenty abreast, moving slowly, packed in, sweating, shoulders rubbing, the air deep-fried and spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone, jowl to jowl.

Something adult and potentially integral strikes me. Why the Fairgoing tourists don’t mind the crowds, lines, noise—and why I’m getting none of that old special sense of the Fair as uniquely For-Me. The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You. The Fair’s deliberately about the crowds and jostle, the noise and overload of sight and smell and choice and event. It’s Us showing off for Us.

Thus the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight- toward. Thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd. To see something besides land and corn and satellite TV and your wife’s face. Crowds out here are a kind of adult nightlight. Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event. High school football, church social, Little League, parades, Bingo, market day, State Fair. All very big, very deep deals. Something in a Mid-westerner sort of actuates at a Public Event.

“Varsity Twirlers from the [why?] University of Kansas.”

“Your Boldness of Nature is Ofset With The Fear Of Taking Risk” (sic2).

The atmosphere’s the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come in here.

the theme of multiple/ambiguous identity has been almost as much a Lynch trademark as ominous ambient noises on his soundtracks.

A kind way to put it is that Lynch seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche, expressions presented with very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e. presented with something like a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness.

This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.”

One reason it’s sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics 48 object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” or “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, 49 troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior.

Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won the Palme d’Or, was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, 40 and also the most demanding.