Infinite Jest (29 page)

In contrast, Captain Frank Furillo is what used to be designated a ‘
post
’-modern hero. Viz., a hero whose virtues are suited to a more complex and corporate
American era. I.e., a hero of
re
action. Captain Frank Furillo does not investigate cases or single-mindedly home in.
He commands a precinct. He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with
a genius for navigating cluttered fields. In each broadcast episode of ‘Hill Street
Blues,’ Captain Frank Furillo is beset by petty distractions on all sides from the
very beginning of Act One. Not one but eleven complex cases, each with suspects and
snitches and investigating officers and angry community leaders and victims’ families
all clamoring for redress. Hundreds of tasks to delegate, egos to massage, promises
to make, promises from last week to keep. Two or three cops’ domestic troubles. Payroll
vouchers. Duty logs. Corruption to be tempted by and agonized over. A Police Chief
who’s a political parody, a hyperactive son, an ex-wife who haunts the frosted-glass
cubicle that serves as Frank Furillo’s office (whereas Steve McGarrett’s B.S. 1970s
office more closely resembled the libraries of landed gentry, hushed behind two heavy
doors and wainscotted in thick, tropical oak), plus a coldly attractive Public Defendress
who wants to talk about did this suspect get Mirandized in Spanish and can Frank stop
coming too soon he came too soon again last night maybe he should get into some kind
of stress counselling. Plus all the weekly moral dilemmas and double binds his even-handed
bureaucratic heroism gets Captain Frank Furillo into.

Captain Frank Furillo of ‘Hill Street Blues’ is a ‘post’-modern hero, a virtuoso of
triage and compromise and administration. Frank Furillo retains his sanity, composure,
and superior grooming in the face of a barrage of distracting, unheroic demands that
would have left Chief Steve McGarrett slumped, unkempt, and chewing his knuckle in
administrative confusion.

In further contrast to Chief Steve McGarrett, Captain Frank Furillo is rarely filmed
tight or full-front. He is usually one part of a frenetic, moving pan by the program’s
camera. In contrast, ‘Hawaii Five-0’ ’s camera crew never even used a dolly, favoring
a steady tripodic close-up on McGarrett’s face that today seems more reminiscent of
romantic portraiture than filmed drama.

What kind of hero comes after McGarrett’s Irishized modern cowboy, the lone man of
action riding lonely herd in paradise? Furillo’s is a whole different kind of loneliness.
The ‘post’-modern hero was a heroic
part of
the herd, responsible for all of what he is part of, responsible to everyone, his
lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow’s face. The jut-jawed hero of action
(‘Hawaii Five-0’) becomes the mild-eyed hero of reaction (‘Hill Street Blues,’ a decade
later).

And, as we have observed thus far in our class, we, as a North American audience,
have favored the more Stoic, corporate hero of reactive probity ever since, some might
be led to argue ‘trapped’ in the reactive moral ambiguity of ‘post-’ and ‘post-post’-modern
culture.

But what comes next? What North American hero can hope to succeed the placid Frank?
We await, I predict, the hero of
non
-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried
here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.

ENORMOUS, ELECTROLYSIS-RASHED ‘JOURNALIST’ ‘HELEN’ STEEPLY’S ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED
ARTICLE BEFORE BEGINNING HER SOFT PROFILE ON PHOENIX CARDINALS PUNTER ORIN J. INCANDENZA,
AND HER ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED ARTICLE TO HAVE ANYTHING OVERTLY TO DO WITH GOOD OLD
METROPOLITAN BOSTON, 10 AUGUST IN THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FOUR
YEARS AFTER OPTICAL THEORIST, ENTREPRENEUR, TENNIS ACADEMICIAN, AND AVANT-GARDE FILMMAKER
JAMES O. INCANDENZA TOOK HIS OWN LIFE BY PUTTING HIS HEAD IN A MICROWAVE OVEN

Moment
Magazine has learned that the tragic fate of the second North American citizen to
receive a Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart has, sadly, been kept from the North
American people. The woman, a 46-year-old Boston accountant with irreversible restenosis
of the heart, responded so well to the replacement of her defective heart with a Jarvik
IX Exterior Artificial Heart that within weeks she was able to resume the active lifestyle
she had so enjoyed before stricken, pursuing her active schedule with the extraordinary
prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse. The heart’s ventricular
tubes ran up to shunts in the woman’s arms and ferried life-giving blood back and
forth between her living, active body and the extraordinary heart in her purse.

Her tragic, untimely, and, some might say, cruelly ironic fate, however, has been
the subject of the all too frequent silence needless tragedies are buried beneath
when they cast the callous misunderstanding of public officials in the negative light
of public knowledge. It took the sort of searching and fearless journalistic doggedness
readers have come to respect in
Moment
to unearth the tragically negative facts of her fate.

The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart was actively
window shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ fashionable Harvard Square when a transvestite
purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well known to public
officials, bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered
feather boa, and auburn wig, brutally tore the life sustaining purse from the woman’s
unwitting grasp.

The active, alert woman gave chase to the purse snatching ‘woman’ for as long as she
could, plaintively shouting to passers by the words ‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’
on the fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers, reportedly shouting repeatedly,
‘She stole my heart, stop her!’ In response to her plaintive calls, tragically, misunderstanding
shoppers and passers by merely shook their heads at one another, smiling knowingly
at what they ignorantly presumed to be yet another alternative lifestyle’s relationship
gone sour. A duo of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrolmen, whose names are being withheld
from
Moment
’s dogged queries, were publicly heard to passively quip, ‘Happens all the time,’
as the victimized woman staggered frantically past in the wake of the fleet transvestite,
shouting for help for her stolen heart.

That the prosthetic crime victim gave spirited chase for over four blocks before collapsing
onto her empty chest is testimony to the impressive capacity of the Jarvik IX replacement
procedure, was the anonymous comment of a public medical official reached for comment
by
Moment.

The drug crazed purse snatcher, informed officials passively speculated, may have
found even his hardened conscience moved by the life saving prosthesis the ill gotten
woman’s Aigner purse revealed, which runs on the same rechargeable power cell as an
electric man’s razor, and may well have continued to beat and bleed for a period of
time in the rudely disconnected purse. The purse snatcher’s response to this conscience
appears to have been cruelly striking the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart repeatedly
with a stone or small hammer-like tool, where its remains were found some hours later
behind the historic Boston Public Library in fashionable Copley Square.

Is medical science’s awe inspiring march forward, however, always doomed to include
such tragic incidents of ignorance and callous loss, one might ask. Such seems to
be the stance of North American officials. If indeed so, the victims’ fate is frequently
kept from the light of public knowledge.

And the facts of the case’s outcome? The 46-year-old deceased woman’s formerly active,
alert brain was removed and dissected six weeks later by a Brigham and Women’s City
of Boston Hospital medical student reportedly so moved by her terse toe tag’s account
of the victim’s heartless fate that he confessed to
Moment
a temporary inability to physically wield the power saw of his assigned task.

ALPHABETICAL TALLY OF SÉPARATISTEUR / ANTI-O.N.A.N. GROUPS WHOSE OPPOSITION TO INTERDEPENDENCE
/ RECONFIGURATION IS DESIGNATED BY R.C.M.P. AND U.S.O.U.S. AS TERRORIST / EXTORTIONIST
IN CHARACTER

(Q=Québecois, E=Environmental, S=Separatist, V=Violent, VV=Extremely Violent)

—
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
(Q, S, VV)

—
Le Bloc Québecois
(Q, S, E)

—Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (E, V)

—
Les Fils de Montcalm
(Q, E)

—
Les Fils de Papineau
(Q, S, V)

—
Le Front de la Libération de la Québec
(Q, S, VV)

—
Le Parti Québecois
(Q, S, E)

WHY—THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE’S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF
LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING
(A.K.A. ‘VIDEOPHONY’) ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY—CALLERS THRILLED
AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION
PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAN
FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE
THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THEY HAD THAT LITTLE ‘INTELLIGENT-AGENT’
HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM
AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE
MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING
UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING
VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE ICONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST
UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR
ICONS—BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE
FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE
DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS
UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES,
THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY
PREFERRED
THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A
PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED
ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT
HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE
MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S
MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY
ENTREPRENEUR… AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY
TELEPHONING?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical
vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics
of consumer high-tech.

(1) It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone
interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone
consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but
wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed
it before, the delusion—it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced
only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations
allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention
to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete
attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation—utilizing a hand-held phone
whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly,
it later seemed) contained (6
²
) or 36 little pinholes—let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue:
while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits
of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the
stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression
type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming
to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet—and this was
the retrospectively marvelous part—even as you were dividing your attention between
the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow
never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might
be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let’s say performed
a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought
that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to
a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally
supported: the phone-line’s other end’s voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored
right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice’s owner’s attention was
similarly compressed and focused… even though your own attention was
not
, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely
gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody’s
complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight,
the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being
able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to
compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they
had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit
succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude,
absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned
or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at
the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.