Day 16 - DF Wallace on TV

I know it grows tiresome with my incessant quoting of other people's commentary on TV, but it's finally spring after a long lonely winter. I've gone simple for the outdoors, with no patience for chin-stroking in front of the screen.

David Foster Wallace, who wrote E Unibus Pluram : Television and U.S. Fiction (which you can find in his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) had this to say in an interview when asked about TV:

One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship…

…viewers' relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what's seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV's seductions are. It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound…

…all I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes...

...it'd be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that these problems are traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other. Because I liked to read, I probably didn't watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main goals of art is simply to "entertain," give people sheer pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving? Because, of course, TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.