A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  image-fiction

  The particular fictional subgenre I have in mind has been called by some editors post-postmodernism and by some critics Hyperrealism. Some of the younger readers and writers I know call it Image-Fiction. Image-Fiction is basically a further involution of the relations between lit and pop that blossomed with the ’60s’ postmodernists. If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction, and if in the ’70s and early ’80s this appeal to the features of mass culture shifted from use to mention—i.e. certain avant-gardists starting to treat of pop and TV-watching as themselves fertile subjects—the new Fiction of Image uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters. 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.

  But in the late ’80s, despite publisher unease over the legalities of imagining private lives for public figures, a real bumper crop of this behind-the-glass stuff started appearing, authored largely by writers who didn’t know or cross-fertilize one another. Apple’s Propheteers, Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, Coover’s A Night at the Movies, or You Must Remember This, William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, Stephen Dixon’s Movies: Seventeen Stories, and DeLillo’s own fictional hologram of Oswald in Libra are all notable post-’85 instances. (Observe too that, in another ’80s medium, the arty Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, and sex, lies, and videotape, plus the low-budget Scanners and Videodrome and Shockers, all began to treat of mass-entertainment screens as permeable.)

  It’s in the last year that the Image-Fiction scene has really taken off. A. M. Homes’s 1990 The Safety of Objects features a stormy love affair between a boy and a Barbie doll. Vollmann’s 1989 The Rainbow Stories has Sonys as characters in Heideggerian parables. Michael Martone’s 1990 Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List is a tight cycle of stories about the Midwest’s pop-culture giants—James Dean, Colonel Sanders, Dillinger—the whole project of which, spelled out in a preface about Image-Fiction’s legal woes, involves “questioning the border between fact and fiction when in the presence of fame.” 19 And Mark Leyner’s 1990 campus smash My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, less a novel than what the book’s jacket copy describes as “a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took,” features everything from meditations on the color of Carefree Panty Shield wrappers to “Big Squirrel, the TV kiddie-show host and kung fu mercenary” to NFL instant replays in an “X-ray vision which shows leaping skeletons in a bluish void surrounded by 75,000 roaring skulls.” 20

  One thing I have to insist you realize about this new subgenre is that it’s distinguishable not just by a certain neo-postmodern technique but by a genuine socio-artistic agenda. The Fiction of Image is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but an actual response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability on a state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers and in which more Americans every evening watch Wheel of Fortune than all three network news programs combined.

  And please see that Image-Fiction, far from being a trendy avant-garde novelty, is almost atavistic. It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ’90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Walls fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, Image-Fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

  That’s the good news.

  The bad news is that, almost without exception, Image-Fiction doesn’t satisfy its own agenda. Instead, it most often degenerates into a kind of jeering, surfacey look “behind the scenes” of the very televisual front people already jeer at, a front they can already get behind the scenes of via Entertainment Tonight and Remote Control.

  The reason why today’s Image-Fiction isn’t the rescue from a passive, addictive TV-psychology that it tries so hard to be is that most Image-Fiction writers render their material with the same tone of irony and self-consciousness that their ancestors, the literary insurgents of Beat and postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context. 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.

  A quick intermission contra paranoia. By saying that Image-Fiction aims to “rescue” us from TV, I again am not suggesting that television has diabolic designs, or wants souls, or brainwashes people. I’m just referring again to the kind of natural Audience-conditioning consequent to high daily doses, a conditioning so subtle it can be observed best obliquely, through examples. And so if a term like “conditioning” still seems hyperbolic or hysterical to you, I’ll ask you to consider for a moment the exemplary issue of prettiness. One of the things that makes the people on television fit to stand the Megagaze is that they are, by ordinary human standards, extremely pretty. I suspect that this, like most television conventions, is set up with no motive more sinister than to appeal to the largest possible Audience—pretty people tend to be more appealing to look at than non-pretty people. But when we’re talking about television, the combination of sheer Audience size and quiet psychic intercourse between images and oglers starts a cycle that both enhances pretty people’s appeal and erodes us viewers’ own security in the face of gazes. Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences. The whole U.S.A. gets different about things it values and fears. The boom in diet aids, health and fitness clubs, neighborhood tanning parlors, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, steroid-use among boys, girls throwing acid at each other because one girl’s hair looks more like Farrah Fawcett’s than another… are these supposed to be unrelated to each other? to the apotheosis of prettiness in a televisual culture?

  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 r
elation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes. No one’s going to claim that a culture all about watching and appearing is fatally compromised by unreal standards of beauty and fitness. But other facets of TV-training reveal themselves as more rapacious, more serious, than any irreverent fiction writer would want to take seriously.

  irony’s aura

  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. Commercials targeted at the ’80s’ upscale Boomers, for example, are notorious for using processed versions of tunes from the rock culture of the ’60s and ’70s both to elicit the yearning that accompanies nostalgia and to yoke purchase of products with what for yuppies is a lost era of genuine conviction. Ford sport-vans are advertised with “This is the dawning of the age of the Aerostar”; Ford recently litigates with Bette Midler over the theft of her old vocals on “Do You Wanna Dance”; the CA Raisin Board’s claymation raisins dance to “Heard It Through the Grapevine”; etc. If the cynical re-use of songs and the ideals they used to symbolize seems distasteful, it’s not like pop musicians are paragons of noncommercialism themselves, and anyway nobody ever said selling was pretty. The effects of any one instance of TV absorbing and pablumizing cultural tokens seem innocuous enough. The recycling of whole cultural trends, and the ideologies that inform them, is a different story.

  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. For its first twenty or so years, it seemed as though television sought to appeal mostly to the Group-Belonging side of the equation. Communities and bonding were extolled on early TV, even though TV itself, and especially its advertising, has from the outset projected itself at the lone viewer, Joe Briefcase, alone. (Television commercials always make their appeals to individuals, not groups, a fact that seems curious in light of the unprecedented size of TV’s Audience, until one hears gifted salesmen explain how people are always most vulnerable, hence frightened, hence persuadable, when they are approached solo.)

  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. This is why those of us over 21 can remember all those interchangeable old commercials featuring groups of pretty people in some ecstatic context, all having just way more fun than anybody has a license to have, and all united as Happy Group by the conspicuous fact that they’re holding a certain bottle of pop or brand of snack—the blatant appeal here is that the relevant product can help Joe Briefcase belong:…”We’re the Pepsi Generation….”

  But since at least the ’80s, the Individualist side of the great U.S. conversation has held sway in TV advertising. I’m not sure just why or how this happened. There are probably great connections to be traced—with Vietnam, youth culture, Watergate and recession and the New Right’s rise—but the point is that a lot of the most effective TV commercials now make their appeal to the lone viewer in a terribly different way. Products are now most often pitched as helping the viewer “express himself,” assert his individuality, “stand out from the crowd.” The first instance I ever saw was a perfume vividly billed in the early ’80s as reacting specially with each woman’s “unique body chemistry” and creating “her own individual scent,” the ad depicting a cattle-line of languid models waiting cramped and expressionless to get their wrists squirted one at a time, each smelling her moist individual wrist with a kind of biochemical revelation, then moving off in what a back-pan reveals to be different directions from the squirter. (We can ignore the obvious sexual connotations, squirting and all that; some tactics are changeless.) Or think of that recent series of over-dreary black-and-white Cherry 7-Up ads where the only characters who get to have color and stand out from their surroundings are the pink people who become pink at the exact moment they imbibe good old Cherry 7-Up. Examples of stand-apart ads are pretty much ubiquitous now.

  Except for being sillier (e.g. products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals), these ads aren’t really any more complicated or subtle than the old Join-the-Fulfilling-Group ads that now seem so quaint. But the new Stand-Out-From-the-Pack ads’ relation to their mass of lone viewers is both complex and ingenious. Today’s best ads are still about the Group, but they now present the Group as something fearsome, something that can swallow you up, erase you, keep you from “being noticed.” But noticed by whom? Crowds are still vitally important in the stand-apart ads’ thesis on identity, but now a given ad’s crowd, far from being more appealing, secure, and alive than the individual, functions as a mass of identical featureless eyes. 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. The lone viewer’s isolation in front of his furniture is implicitly applauded—it’s better, realer, these solipsistic ads imply, to fly solo—and yet it’s also implicated as threatening, confusing, since after all Joe Briefcase is not an idiot, sitting here, and knows himself as a viewer to be guilty of the two big sins the ads decry: being a passive watcher (of TV) and being part of a great herd (of TV-watchers and Stand- Apart-product-buyers). How odd.

  The surface of Stand-Out ads still presents a relatively unalloyed Buy This Thing, but the deep message of television w/r/t these ads looks to be that Joe Briefcase’s ontological status as just one in a reactive watching mass is at some basic level shaky, contingent, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in Joe’s becoming one of the images that are the objects of this great herd-like watching. That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching.

  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. Advertising scholar Mark C. Miller puts it succinctly: “TV has gone beyond the explicit celebration of commodities to the implicit reinforcement of that spectatorial posture which TV requires of us.” 21 Solipsistic ads are another way television ends up pointing at itself, keeping the viewer’s relation to his furniture at once alienated and anaclitic.

  Maybe, though, the relation of contemporary viewer to contemporary television is less a paradigm of infantilism and addiction than it is of the U.S.A.’s familiar relation to all the technology we equate at once with freedom and power and slavery and chaos. For, as with television, whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause—see e.g. catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for nuclear missiles, transplants for assorted rot.

  And as with tech, so the gestalt of television expands to absorb all problems associated with it. The pseudo-communities of prime-time soaps like Knots Landing and thirtysomething are viewer-soothing products of the very medium whose ambivalence about the Group helps erode people’s sense of connection. The staccato editing, sound bites, and summary treatment of knotty issues is network news’ accommodation of an Audience whose attention span and appetite for complexity have naturally withered a bit after years of high-dose spectation. Etc.

  But TV has technology-bred problems of its own. The advent of consumer cable, often with packages of over 40 channels, threatens networks and local affiliates alike. This is particularly true when the viewer is armed with a remote-control gizmo: Joe B. is s
till getting his six total hours of daily TV, but the amount of his retinal time devoted to any one option shrinks as he remote-scans a much wider band. Worse, the VCR, with its dreaded fast-forward and zap functions, threatens the very viability of commercials. Television advertisers’ entirely sensible solution? Make the ads as appealing as the programs. Or at any rate try to keep Joe B. from disliking the commercials enough that he’s willing to move his thumb to check out 2½ minutes of Hazel on the Superstation while NBC sells lip balm. Make the ads prettier, livelier, full of enough rapidly juxtaposed visual quanta so that Joe’s attention just doesn’t get to wander, even if he remote-kills the volume. As one ad executive underputs it, “Commercials are becoming more like entertaining films.” 22

  There’s an obverse way, of course, to make commercials resemble programs. Have programs start to resemble commercials. That way the ads seem less like interruptions than like pace-setters, metronomes, commentaries on the shows’ theory. Invent a Miami Vice, where there’s little annoying plot to interrupt but an unprecedented emphasis on appearances, visuals, attitude, a certain “look.” 23 Make music videos with the same amphetaminic pace and dreamy archetypal associations as ads—it doesn’t hurt that videos are basically long music-commercials anyway. Or introduce the sponsor-supplied Infomercial that poses, in a lighthearted way, as a soft-news show, like Amazing Discoveries or those Robert Vaughn-hosted Hair-Loss Reports that haunt TV’s wee cheap hours. Blur—just as postmodern lit did—the lines between genres, agendas, commercial art and arty commercials.

  Still, television and its sponsors had a bigger long-term worry, and that was their shaky détente with the individual viewer’s psyche. Given that television must revolve off basic antinomies about being and watching, about escape from daily life, the averagely intelligent viewer can’t be all that happy about his daily life of high-dose watching. Joe Briefcase might have been happy enough when watching, but it was hard to think he could be too terribly happy about watching so much. Surely, deep down, Joe was uncomfortable with being one part of the biggest crowd in human history watching images that suggest that life’s meaning consists in standing visibly apart from the crowd. TV’s guilt/indulgence/reassurance cycle addresses these concerns on one level. 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.