A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (8 page)

1990

television and U.S. fiction

act natural

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers.
They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is
because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks:
they covet a vision of themselves as
witnesses
.

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely
how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come
across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out of their fly, whether
there’s maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they’re ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers
and starers.

The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention. Dislike
being watched. The exceptions to this rule—Mailer, McInerney—sometimes create the impression that most belletristic types
covet people’s attention. Most don’t. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us watch.

Most of the fiction writers I know are Americans under 40. I don’t know whether fiction writers under 40 watch more television
than other American species. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American
household. I don’t know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually
I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

Right away you can see a couple of things that look potentially great, for U.S. fiction writers, about U.S. television. First,
television does a lot of our predatory human research for us. American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real
life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on. But television comes equipped with just such a handle. It’s an
incredible gauge of the generic. If we want to know what American normality is—i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal—we
can trust television. For television’s whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It’s a mirror. Not the Stendhalian
mirror that reflects the blue sky and mudpuddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors
his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is simply invaluable
in terms of writing fiction. And writers can have faith in television. There is a lot of money at stake, after all; and television
owns the best demographers applied social science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans
in the 1990s are, want, see—what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire.
And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

The second great-seeming thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch
people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve.
We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also
appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S.
six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of
hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely
these attributes. 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. Let’s call the average U.S. lonely person Joe
Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when
other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear, come across,
to watchers. He chooses to sit out the enormously stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.

But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the
screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism. I happen to know lonely people who regard television as a veritable
deus ex machina for voyeurs. And a lot of the criticism, the really rabid criticism less leveled than sprayed at networks,
advertisers, and audiences alike, has to do with the charge that television has turned us into a nation of sweaty, slack-jawed
voyeurs. This charge turns out to be untrue, but it’s untrue for interesting reasons.

What classic voyeurism is is espial, i.e. watching people who don’t know you’re there as those people go about the mundane
but erotically charged little businesses of private life. It’s interesting that so much classic voyeurism involves media of
framed glass—windows, telescopes, etc. Maybe the framed glass is why the analogy to television is so tempting. But TV-watching
is different from genuine Peeping-Tomism. Because the people we’re watching through TV’s framed-glass screen are not really
ignorant of the fact that somebody is watching them. In fact a whole
lot
of somebodies. In fact the people on television know that it is by virtue of this truly huge crowd of ogling somebodies that
they are on the screen engaging in broad non-mundane gestures at all. Television does not afford true espial because television
is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We’re not voyeurs here at all. We’re just viewers. We are
the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone: E Unibus Pluram.
¹

One reason fiction writers seem creepy in person is that by vocation they really
are
voyeurs. They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody who hasn’t prepared a special watchable self. The
only illusion in true espial is suffered by the voyee, who doesn’t know he’s giving off images and impressions. A problem
with so many of us fiction writers under 40 using television as a substitute for true espial, however, is that TV “voyeurism”
involves a whole gorgeous orgy of illusions for the pseudo-spy, when we watch. Illusion (1) is that we’re voyeurs here at
all: the “voyees” behind the screen’s glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we’re out there. And that
we’re there is also very much on the minds of those behind the second layer of glass, viz. the lenses and monitors via which
technicians and arrangers apply enormous ingenuity to hurl the visible images at us. What we see is far from stolen; it’s
proffered—illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we’re seeing through the framed panes isn’t people in real situations that
do or even could go on without consciousness of Audience. I.e., what young writers are scanning for data on some reality to
fictionalize is
already
composed of fictional characters in highly formalized narratives. And, (4), we’re not really even seeing “characters” at
all: it’s not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it’s Larry Linville of Ojai, California,
actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs berating him
for being a putz from Indiana. And then (5) it’s ultimately of course not even actors we’re espying, not even people: it’s
EM-propelled analog waves and ion streams and rear-screen chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not
much more lifelike than Seurat’s own Impressionist commentaries on perceptual illusion. Good Lord and (6) the dots are coming
out of our
furniture
, all we’re really spying on is our own
furniture
, and our very own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at our gaze’s frame as we contemplate “Korea” or
are taken “live to Jerusalem” or regard the plusher chairs and classier spines of the Huxtable “home” as illusory cues that
this is some domestic interior whose membrane we have (slyly, unnoticed) violated—(7) and (8) and illusions ad inf.

Not that these realities about actors and phosphenes and furniture are unknown to us. We choose to ignore them. They are part
of the disbelief we suspend. But it’s an awfully heavy load to hoist aloft for six hours a day; illusions of voyeurism and
privileged access require serious complicity from the viewer. How can we be made so willingly to acquiesce to the delusion
that the people on the TV don’t know they’re being watched, to the fantasy that we’re somehow transcending privacy and feeding
on unself-conscious human activity? There might be lots of reasons why these unrealities are so swallowable, but a big one
is that the performers behind the glass are—varying degrees of thespian talent notwithstanding—absolute
geniuses
at seeming unwatched. Make no mistake—seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is an art. Take a look at how non-professionals
act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they often spaz out, or else they go all stiff, frozen with self-consciousness. Even
PR people and politicians are, in terms of being on camera, rank amateurs. And we love to laugh at how stiff and fake non-pros
appear on television. How unnatural.

But if you’ve ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how paralyzingly self-conscious
it makes you feel. A harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to “act natural” as your face begins to leap around
on your skull, struggling for a seeming-unwatched expression that feels so impossible because “seeming unwatched” is, like
“acting natural,” oxymoronic. Try hitting a golf ball right after someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing,
or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a green rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you’ll get some idea
of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for a David Duchovny or Don Johnson to act unwatched
as he’s watched by a lens that’s an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called “the gaze of millions.”
²

For Emerson, only a certain very rare species of person is fit to stand this gaze of millions. It is not your normal, hardworking,
quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent
semihuman who, in Emerson’s phrase, “carries the holiday in his eye.” The Emersonian holiday that television actors’ eyes
carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy
to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, for you have to be just
abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear unwatched before cameras and lenses and men with clipboards. This
self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the real door to TV’s whole mirror-hall of illusions, and for us, the
Audience, it is both medicine and poison.

For we gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms
of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them. In
a real Joe Briefcase-world that shifts ever more starkly from some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected
by self-interest and technology, the people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split
what we see. The characters may be our “close friends,” but the
performers
are beyond strangers: they’re imagos, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other,
seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloid, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and
characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so terribly, gloriously
natural
when we watch.

Given how much we watch and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who fancy
ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass—persons who are often the most colorful, attractive,
animated,
alive
people in our daily experience—are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. This illusion is toxic.
It’s toxic for lonely people because it sets up an alienating cycle (viz. “Why can’t
I
be like that?” etc.), and it’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind
of fiction-
consumption
. Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an
attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. 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. Plus the idea that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that
there’s any watching going on. Acting natural. 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.

the finger

Existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding, there’s no denying the simple fact that people in the U.S.A. watch so much
television basically because it’s fun. I know I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51% of the time I do have
fun when I watch. This doesn’t mean I do not take television seriously. 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