Monthly Archives: January 2009

I have one. It’s new. Price is negotiable.

After we talked in class about how technological advances might complicate or even alter DFW’s arguments in E. Unibus Pluram, I began to think about how recent television shows might do the same. For example, what would DFW have had to say about 30 Rock? Did he ever say anything about it? It would have made for an interesting essay.

It seems to me that on 30 Rock, the fictional SNL-type “show” is merely a backdrop for the humor of the characters’ “real life.” In essence, the show seems to be about exactly what DFW calls “the agenda of consciousness behind the text” (McCaffery, 22), with the Tracy Morgan Show and the rest of NBC’s line-up serving as the text we never actually get to view/read; we only see the agendas behind that fictional text. That seems especially post-post-modern, because it shows us technique, structure, and method without actually revealing any content whatsoever, though I’m not really sure what to make of that.

While Tina Fey is a master of irony and cycnicism, she is also quite interested and invested in what it means to be human in a consumer-driven, corporate world. Last week’s episode relentlessly satirizes corporate retreats, but the dark humor merely provided a premise to explore and explode certain tensions in Jack and Liz’s multi-faceted relationship. Liz has to overcome her extreme self-consciousness and make a fool of herself to save Jack’s reputation. Even though she (and the show) obviously thinks the whole corporate façade game is ridiculous, she plays along simply because “that’s what friends do.” When she tells Jack this, she clearly “talk[s] out of the part of [her] that loves” (22).

Fey is “terribly self-conscious” (E.U.P., 21), a trait DFW ascribes to fiction writers. She devotes a fair portion of each episode to “Liz Lemon’s” self-consciousness regarding her weight and appearance. In interviews, Fey has admitted to weight-issues and acute self-consciousness (see http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/tina_fey200901 for more on this). She is a born watcher but dislikes being watched. Her doppelganer Liz Lemon longs for a child (Fey has one), but cannot sustain a relationship; she is Jane Briefcase, going home each night to TV and junk food. On the air, Fey is up-front about her self-consciousness, and she writes Liz Lemon in a way that lets the audience know Fey knows she is being watched; she lets the audience know she knows she is all too human. 30 Rock manages to point outside itself into the real world and connect to NBC’s real audience in a very real way. It offers not “the promise of a vacation from human self-consciosness” (E.U.P., 25), but actually asks the viewer to view and interact with its characters much the way a reader would interact with a character in a book.

Fey attempts, I think, to burst open the closed loop between producer (the studio) and product (the show), and allow the formerly outside consumer in on the game. Through this sort of play, and a witty yet ultimately human writing, I believe Fey offers her own “transfiguring assault” (E.U.P., 50) on television and mass-media by writing, not a Fiction of Image, but maybe an Image of Fiction. What do you think?

Hitler’s book sold a lot of copies, just like David Foster Wallace’s, I’m not implying anything, I’m just saying.

I feel like the degradation of TV is an easy target. Yet, right-wing bestsellers are an even easier target, so that’s where I start in a critique of what Wallace calls the “anti-rebel” writers that stick to “single-entendre principles.”

I am of course speaking of Twilight, the bestseller that opens with a quote from Genesis and ends with the 18 year-old protagonist barefoot-and-pregnant. In between you get the generic story of good versus evil (guess who wins?) played out in conservative tones. It’s no surprise that the heroes are as pale as unhumanly possible (get it?, vampires aren’t human) and the dark skinned characters are cursed to a life of losing themselves over to the instinct of a wild animal – not unlike the hero-vampire’s character’s resistance to satisfying his “hunger,” which is a very thinly veiled attempt to promote abstinence.

Did I mention it’s a bestseller? Let’s not this observation escape us while we explore the post-commercialization landscape of popular media. Media that, once free of conservative censorship, became secular and sought to be a platform for pro-human agendas such as equating women and men, pointing out that the humans may be microwaving themselves into extinction, and all kinds of liberal ideas that sound like a good idea when compared to what the right-wing wants you to believe about the world.

But then there’s Twilight. A novel that is essentially a disguised version of some of the key ideas of the Mormon faith, which says (and I’m not exaggerating) humans once lived on a distant planet and were ruled over by a council of deities. On that council was a guy named Jesus and another named Satan. Satan wanted to carry out some kind of wicked plan to do something bad, and Jesus wanted to stop him so they fought a war. Those humans that sided with Jesus became his chosen people (the Latter-day Saints), those who fought with Satan became devils, and those that took neither side were cursed with black skin and nappy hair — you can’t make this stuff up.[1] Okay, maybe you can make this stuff up, but getting people to believe it takes a while (or in Scientology’s case, about 50 years).

The story above is then picked over through in four or so volumes, but by now you get the idea: pale people are saviors, good and evil exist, and thrown in is a bit about the role of women as helpless baby factories with little other use. These are all ideas one would think have disappeared in a time with a president with “Hitler-like popularity” — as the class brought up for some reason — and with women able to prove themselves to be more than baby-factories and to have some use beyond being the victim.

Stephanie Meyer is the anit-rebel and possibly Antichrist Wallace hints at that feeds a new generation right-wing fairytales. And girls, young and old, are eating this stuff up — as observed by the outcries heard in class the day before at the insistence that this book is better used to prop up a table than as something to try to digest. But what does that say for the future of fiction? Will it be plagued by revamps (get it? “revamp” ) of old conservative ideas seeking to undo the progress being made toward a more liberal, more accepting media landscape?