Infinite Jest (81 page)

Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions—twice w/ others—on this continental
day of rest, plus still in a kind of guiltily sickening stomach-pit shock from the
afternoon’s Eschaton debacle and his failure to intervene or even get up out of his
patio-chair, Hal has lost a bit of his grip and has just gotten on the outside of
his fourth chocolate cannoli in half an hour, and is feeling the icy electric keening
of some sort of incipient carie in the left-molar range, and also now as usual, after
swinishness with sugar, finds himself sinking, emotionally, into a kind of distracted
funk. The puppet-film is reminiscent enough of the late Himself that just about the
only more depressing thing to pay attention to or think about would be advertising
and the repercussions of O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry.
Mario’s film executes some rather over-arty flash-cuts between the erections of Lucite
fortifications and ATHSCME and E.W.D. displacement installations along the new U.S.
border, on the one hand, and the shadowily implied Rodney-Tine-disastrous-love-interest
element with the voluptuous puppet representing the infamous and enigmatic Québecois
fatale
known publicly only as ‘Luria P———,’ on the other. Tine’s puppet’s tiny brown felt
hand is on Luria’s voluptuously padded little Popsicle-stick knee in the famous Vienna,
Virginia Szechuan steakhouse where, according to dark legend, Subsidized Time was
conceived on the back of a chintzy Chinese-zodiac paper placemat, by R. Tine. Hal
happens to know the fall and rise of millennial U.S. advertising exceptionally well,
because one of the only two academic things he’s ever written about anything even
remotely filmic
¹⁶¹
was a mammoth research paper on the tangled fates of broadcast television and the
American ad industry. This was the final and grade-determining project in Mr. U. Ogilvie’s
year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies in May of Y.P.W.; and Hal, a seventh-grader
and only up to R in the
Condensed O.E.D.,
wrote about TV-advertising’s demise with a reverent tone that sounded like the events
had taken place at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts instead of just
four years prior, more or less overlapping with the waxing of the Gentle Era and Experialist
Reconfiguration Mario’s puppet-show makes fun of.

There’s no question that the Network television industry—meaning, since PBS is a whole
different kettle, the Big Three plus the fast-starting but low-endurance Fox—had already
been in serious trouble. Between the exponential proliferation of cable channels,
the rise of the total-viewer-control hand-held remotes known historically as zappers,
and VCR-recording advances that used subtle volume- and hysterical-pitch-sensors to
edit most commercials out of any program taped (here a rather chatty digression on
legal battles between Networks and VCR-manufacturers over the Edit-function that Mr.
O. drew a big red yawning skull next to, in the margin, out of impatience), the Networks
were having problems drawing the kind of audiences they needed to justify the ad-rates
their huge overhead’s slavering maw demanded. The Big Four’s arch-foe was America’s
100-plus regional and national cable networks, which, in the pre-millennial Limbaugh
Era of extraordinarily generous Justice Dept. interpretation of the Sherman statutes,
had coalesced into a fractious but potent Trade Association under the stewardship
of TCI’s Malone, TBS’s Turner, and a shadowy Albertan figure who owned the View-Out-the-Simulated-Window-of-Various-Lavish-Homes-in-Exotic-Locales
Channel, the Yuletide-Fireplace Channel, CBC-Cable’s Educational Programming Matrix,
and four of
Le Groupe Vidéotron
’s five big Canadian Shop-at-Home networks. Mounting an aggressive hearts-and-minds
campaign that derided the ‘passivity’ of hundreds of millions of viewers forced to
choose nightly between only four statistically pussified Network broadcasters, then
extolled the ‘empoweringly American choice’ of 500-plus esoteric cable options, the
American Council of Disseminators of Cable was attacking the Four right at the ideological
root, the psychic matrix where viewers had been conditioned (conditioned, rather deliciously,
by the Big Four Networks and their advertisers themselves, Hal notes) to associate
the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.

The A.C.D.C. campaign, brilliantly orchestrated by Boston MA’s Viney and Veals Advertising,
was pummelling the Big Four in the fiscal thorax with its ubiquitous anti-passivity
slogan ‘
Don’t Sit Still for Anything Less
’ when a wholly unintended coup de grâce to Network viability was delivered in the
form of an unrelated Viney and Veals side-venture. V&V, like most U.S. ad agencies,
greedily buttered its bread on every conceivable side when it could, and started taking
advantage of the plummeting Big Four advertising rates to launch effective Network-ad
campaigns for products and services that wouldn’t previously have been able to afford
national image-proliferation. For the obscure local Nunhagen Aspirin Co. of Framingham
MA, Viney and Veals got the Enfield-based National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation to
sponsor a huge touring exhibition of paintings by artists with crippling cranio-facial
pain about crippling cranio-facial pain. The resultant Network Nunhagen ads were simply
silent 30-second shots of some of the exhibits, with NUNHAGEN ASPIRIN in soothing
pale pastels at lower left. The paintings themselves were excruciating, the more so
because consumer HDTV had arrived, at least in the very upscale Incandenza home. The
ads with the more dental-pain-type paintings Hal doesn’t even want to think back on,
what with a fragment of cannoli wedged someplace upper-left he keeps looking around
for Schacht to ask him to have an angle-mirrored look at. One he can recall was of
an ordinary middle-class American guy’s regular face, but with a tornado coming out
of the right eyesocket and a mouth at the vortex of that tornado, screaming. And that
was a mild one.
¹⁶²
The ads cost next to nothing to produce. Nunhagen Aspirin sales went nationally roofward
even as ratings-figures for the Nunhagen ads themselves went from low to abysmal.
People found the paintings so excruciating that they were buying the product but recoiling
from the ads. Now you’d think this wouldn’t matter so long as the product itself was
selling so well, this fact that millions of national viewers were zapping or surfing
to a different channel with their remotes the moment a silent painted twisted face
with a hatchet in its forehead came on. But what made the Nunhagen ads sort of fatally
powerful was that they also compromised the ratings-figures for the ads that followed
them and for the programs that enclosed the ads, and, worse, were disastrous because
they were so violently unpleasing to look at that they awakened from their spectatorial
slumbers literally millions of Network-devotees who’d hitherto been so numbed and
pacified they usually hadn’t bothered to expend the thumb-muscle-energy required to
zap or surf away from anything on the screen, awakened legions of these suddenly violently
repelled and disturbed viewers to the power and agency their thumbs actually afforded
them.

Viney and Veals’s next broadcast cash-cow, a lurid series of spots for a national
string of walk-in liposuction clinics, reinforced the V&V trend of high product-sales
but dreadful ad-ratings; and here the Big Four were really put on the spot, because—even
though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were denouncing
the LipoVac spots’ shots of rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures that
resembled crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed autopsies
and cholesterol-conscious cooking shows that involved a great deal of chicken-fat
drainage, and even though audiences’ flights from the LipoVac spots themselves were
absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows around them—Network execs’
sweaty sleep infected with vivid REM-visions of flaccid atrophied thumbs coming twitchily
to life over remote zap and surf controls—even though the spots were again fatally
potent, the LipoVac string’s revenues were so obscenely enhanced by the ads that LipoVac
Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene,
sums the besieged Four now needed in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran
and ran, and much currency changed hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump
as if punctured with something blunt. From a historical perspective it’s easy to accuse
the Network corporations of being greedy and short-sighted w/r/t explicit liposuction;
but Hal argued, with a compassion Mr. Ogilvie found surprising in a seventh-grader,
that it’s probably hard to be restrained and far-sighted when you’re fighting against
a malignant invasive V&V-backed cable kabal for your very fiscal life, day to day.

In hindsight, though, the Big Four’s spinal camel-straw had to have been V&V’s trio
of deep-focus b&w spots for a tiny Wisconsin cooperative firm that sold tongue-scrapers
by pre-paid mail. These ads just clearly crossed some kind of psychoaesthetic line,
regardless of the fact that they single-handedly created a national tongue-scraper
industry and put Fond du Lac’s NoCoat Inc. on the Fortune 500.
¹⁶³
Stylistically reminiscent of those murderous mouthwash, deodorant, and dandruff-shampoo
scenarios that had an antihero’s chance encounter with a gorgeous desire-object ending
in repulsion and shame because of an easily correctable hygiene deficiency, the NoCoat
spots’ chilling emotional force could be located in the exaggerated hideousness of
the near-geologic layer of gray-white material coating the tongue of the otherwise
handsome pedestrian who accepts a gorgeous meter maid’s coquettish invitation to have
a bit of a lick of the ice cream cone she’s just bought from an avuncular sidewalk
vendor. The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed,
coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid’s face going slack with disgust
as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers.
The nightmarish slo-mo with which the mortified pedestrian reels away into street-traffic
with his whole arm over his mouth, the avuncular vendor’s kindly face now hateful
and writhing as he hurls hygienic invectives.

These ads shook viewers to the existential core, apparently. It was partly a matter
of plain old taste: ad-critics argued that the NoCoat spots were equivalent to like
Preparation H filming a procto-exam, or a Depend Adult Undergarment camera panning
for floor-puddles at a church social. But Hal’s paper located the level at which the
Big Four’s audiences reacted, here, as way closer to the soul than mere tastelessness
can get.

V&V’s NoCoat campaign was a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals. It
towered, a kind of Überad, casting a shaggy shadow back across a whole century of
broadcast persuasion. It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable
by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely, given the vulnerable psyche
of an increasingly hygiene-conscious U.S.A. in those times.

The NoCoat campaign had three major consequences. The first was that horrible year
Hal vaguely recalls when a nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when
people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency backup
tongue-scraper than they’d fail to wash and brush and spray. The year when the sink-and-mirror
areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be. The NoCoat co-op folks traded
in their B’Gosh overalls and hand-woven ponchos for Armani and Dior, then quickly
disintegrated into various eight-figure litigations. But by this time everybody from
Procter & Gamble to Tom’s of Maine had its own brand’s scraper out, some of them with
baroque and potentially hazardous electronic extras.

The second consequence was that the Big Four broadcast Networks finally just plain
fell off the shelf, fiscally speaking. Riding a crest of public disaffection not seen
since the days Jif commercials had strangers shoving their shiny noses in your open
jar, the Malone-Turner-and-shadowy-Albertan-led cable kabal got sponsors whose ads
had been running as distant as seven or eight spots on either side of the NoCoat gaggers
to jump ship to A.C.D.C. U.S. broadcast TV’s true angels of death, Malone and Turner
then immediately parlayed this fresh injection of sponsorial capital into unrefusable
bids for the rights to the N.C.A.A. Final Four, the MLB World Series, Wimbledon, and
the Pro Bowlers Tour, at which point the Big Four suffered further defections from
Schick and Gillette on one side and Miller and Bud on the other. Fox filed for Ch.
11 protection Monday after A.C.D.C.’s coup-announcements, and the Dow turned Grizzly
indeed on G.E., Paramount, Disney, etc. Within days three out of the Big Four Networks
had ceased broadcasting operations, and ABC had to fall back on old ‘Happy Days’ marathons
of such relentless duration that bomb threats began to be received both by the Network
and by poor old Henry Winkler, now hairless and sugar-addicted in La Honda CA and
seriously considering giving that lurid-looking but hope-provoking LipoVac procedure
a try….

And but the ironic third consequence was that almost all the large slick advertising
agencies with substantial Network billings—among these the Icarian Viney and Veals—went
down, too, in the Big Four’s maelstrom, taking with them countless production companies,
graphic artists, account execs, computer-enhancement technicians, ruddy-tongued product-spokespersons,
horn-rimmed demographers, etc. The millions of citizens in areas for one reason or
another not cable-available ran their VCRs into meltdown, got homicidally tired of
‘Happy Days,’ and then began to find themselves with vast maddening blocks of utterly
choiceless and unentertaining time; and domestic-crime rates, as well as out-and-out
suicides, topped out at figures that cast a serious pall over the penultimate year
of the millennium.