In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a film (also called Infinite Jest) so entertaining that anyone who starts watching it will die watching it, smiling vacantly at the screen in a pool of their own soiling. It’s the ultimate gripper of eyeballs. Media, in this absurdist rendering, evolves past parasite to parasitoid, the kind of overly aggressive parasite that kills its host.Wallace himself had a strained relationship with television. He said in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram” that television “can become malignantly addictive,” which, he explained, means, “(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems is causes.” Though I don’t think he would have labeled himself a television addict, Wallace was known to indulge in multi-day television binges. One can imagine those binges raised to the power of Netflix Post-Play and all seven seasons of The West Wing.
That sort of binge-television viewing has become a normal, accepted part of American culture. Saturdays with a DVD box set, a couple bottles of wine, and a big carton of goldfish crackers are a pretty common new feature of American weekends. Netflix bet big on this trend with their release of House of Cards. They released all 13 episodes of the first season at once: roughly one full Saturday’s worth. It’s a show designed for the binge. The New York Times quoted the show’s producer as saying, with a laugh, “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day.” They don’t say what kind of laugh it was.
The scariest part of this new binge culture is that hours spent bingeing don’t seem to displace other media consumption hours; we’re just adding them to our weekly totals. Lump in hours on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and maybe even the occasional non-torrented big-screen feature film and you’re looking at a huge number of hours per person. (...)
In Wallace’s book, a Canadian terrorist informant of foggy allegiance asks an American undercover agent a form of the question: “If Americans would choose to press play on the film Infinite Jest, knowing it will kill them, doesn’t that mean they are already dead inside, that they have chosen entertainment over life?” Of course vanishingly few Americans would press play on a film that was sure to end their lives. But there’s a truth in this absurdity. Almost every American I know does trade large portions of his life for entertainment, hour by weeknight hour, binge by Saturday binge, Facebook check by Facebook check. I’m one of them.
by James A. Pearson, The Morning News | Read more:
Image: Alistair Frost, Metaphors don't count, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Zach Feuer Gallery, New York.
