A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (16 page)

Note that Gilder’s semiconducted vision of a free, orderly video future is way more upbeat than postmodernism’s old view of
image and data. The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections,
the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal. Gilder would call their gloom outmoded,
their metaphor infected with the deficiencies of the transistor:

In all networks of wires and switches, except for those on the microchip, complexity tends to grow exponentially as the
number of interconnections rises, [but] in the silicon maze of microchip technology… efficiency, not complexity, grows as
the square of the number of inter- connections to be organized.

Rather than a vacuous TV-culture drowning in cruddy images, Gilder foresees a TC-culture redeemed by a whole lot more to choose
from and a whole lot more control over what you choose to… umm… see? pseudo-experience? dream?

It’s wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices
from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronie alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television’s grip on mass attitudes. It seems,
rather, that Gilder sees the ’90s’ impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers’ graduation from passive reception of facsimiles
of experience to active manipulation of facsimiles of experience. It’s worth questioning Gilder’s definition of televisual
“passivity.” His new tech would indeed end “the passivity of mere reception.” But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence
inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.

The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy. And contemporary TV has gotten vastly better at enabling the
viewer’s fantasy that he can transcend the limitations of individual human experience, that he can be inside the set, imago’d,
“anyone, anywhere.”
³⁴
Since the limitations of being one human being involve certain restrictions on the number of different experiences possible
to us in a given period of time, 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.

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

In fact, one
of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
’s unifying obsessions is this latter juxtaposition of parts of selves, people and machines, human subjects and discrete objects.
Leyner’s fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder’s prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved
by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine however we wish. Leyner’s world is a Gilderesque dystopia.
The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters’ reception of images and waves of data. The ability
to
combine
them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply
too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating”
as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct’s quality is its
weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.

Leyner’s own novel, in its amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader, marks the far dark frontier of the Fiction of Image—literature’s
absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television’s whole objective.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
’s sole aim is, finally, to
wow
, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read. The book does this by (1) flattering the reader with appeals
to his erudite postmodern weltschmerz and (2) relentlessly reminding the reader that the author is smart and funny. The book
itself is extremely funny, but it’s not funny the way funny stories are funny. It’s not that funny things happen here; it’s
that funny things are self-consciously imagined and pointed out, like a comedian’s stock “You ever notice how…?” and “You
ever wonder what would happen if…?”

Actually, Leyner’s whole high-Imagist style most often resembles a kind of lapidary stand-up comedy:

Suddenly Bob couldn’t speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn’t total aphasia. He could
speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here’s how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: “Corn
corn corn corn Stuckeys. Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys.”

there’s a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer
and the only food it serves is surf and turf and the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green
berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires

Leyner’s fictional response to television is less a novel than a piece of witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television.
Velocity and vividness replace development. People flicker in and out; events are garishly there and then gone and never referred
to. There’s a brashly irreverent rejection of “outmoded” concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there’s
a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the 45 seconds of near-Zen concentration we call
the TV attention span. In the absence of a plot, unifying the vignettes are moods—antic anxiety, the overstimulated stasis
of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality. And, after the manner of films,
music videos, dreams, and television programs, there are recurring “Key Images,” here exotic drugs, exotic technologies, exotic
foods, exotic bowel dysfunctions. And it is no accident that
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
’s central preoccupation is with digestion and elimination. Its mocking challenge to the reader is the same one presented
by television’s flood of realities and choices: ABSORB ME—PROVE YOU’RE CONSUMER ENOUGH.

Leyner’s work, the best Image-Fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I’m concluding by
talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV has itself absorbed from postmodern
art, Leyner’s book seems like the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction. It seems also to cast the predicament of
Image-Fiction itself into stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre’s produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated,
and extremely shallow—doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already
absorbs all ridicule. Leyner’s attempt to “respond” to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into
the tired televisual ritual of mock-worship. It is dead on the page.