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. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

Classic television commercials were all about the Group. They took the vulnerability of Joe Briefcase—sitting there, watching his furniture, lonely—and capitalized on it by linking purchase of a given product with Joe B.’s inclusion in some attractive community.

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.

Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?

Indifference is actually just the ’90s’ version of frugality for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it.

suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish.

What Hix offers as a resolution to the debate is a combination of a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence and a Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do.

Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face.