The Seduction of Television

What spell is cast that allows television the near-universal monopolization of attention of the population? David Foster Wallace compared television to a malignant addiction because "(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems" in the way that it presents life as more beautiful, action-packed, and infinitely amusing than are viewers' actual lives (which consist, in large part, of watching television) and that it reinforces the act of watching television by sending the message that the viewers' "only access to this world is TV." As Jean Boudrillard said, "Needs are curbed as much as possible.

But when it proves necessary, they are instigated as a means of repression." Our needs to revel in reality by doing something other than watching television are sublimated except as they are used to lure us into watching television. Another method that television deploys is the creation of a group therapy mentality and the "queering of everyday life" that Oprah Winfrey has mastered.

Both of these techniques-while not quite using irony as a tool (although the mechanism Wallace details is ironic)-are involved in "ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative." Winfrey, through the lens of open-mindedness, creates a very postmodern idea that everything can be, if not justified, explained into ordinariness (or queerness, though that is slightly off-point) and, in that way, "ridicule[s] old-fashioned conventions right off the map," creating a void of authority. So "the real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view," i.e., Oprah Winfrey, i.e., television.

Added to this is the populace's (suppressed) frustration with the limited nature of their needs and the ties between the existence of needs and the capitalist system. Boudrillard argued that consumption is not, fundamentally, "a process of craving and pleasure," but is rather a "controlled emancipation, a mobilization whose end is competitive exploitation," that "deliver[s] up a new kind of serf: the individual as consumption power." Todd Gitlin, a television theorist, noted the "interrelated ways in which television messages are integrated into the dominant system of discourse and the prevailing structures of labor, consumption, and politics." Boudrillard and Gitlin do not speak to the human toll that this mechanism exacts probably because the capitalist mechanism adjusts to it so easily and it incites no notable upsetting of the social order; speaking to agonizing human tolls may be more the purview of fiction than social criticism, being as they (the tolls) are silent, unspeakable, and consequential only in ways lacking redress.

But the rise of irony in television can be seen as an adjustment to countenance people's dissatisfaction with the homogeneity of their needs and the resistance-borne idea that people should desire more novel and fresh cultural experiences and programming. Television responds to these desires with a "PR-patina of 'freshness' and 'outrageousness'" and by cultivating in viewers a sense of ironic appreciation-"the mixture of devotion and sneer." In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Andy Samberg sings: "I go to my favorite hot dog stand, and the dude said, 'You come here all the time, here's one for free.' I said, 'Man, what I look like, a charity case?' I took it and threw it on the ground. I don't need your handouts. I'm an adult. You can't buy me, hot dog man. ... The moral of this story is you can't trust the system." The humor/irony comes from the fact that, of course, you can trust the system. The system is benevolent and those who get uppity are paranoid. A television commercial for the Slapchop, popular online, where it and its takeoffs have received upwards of 10 million views, features Vince, a sleazy salesman who croons, "This tuna looks boring. Stop having a boring tuna, stop having a boring life. ... Now you gonna have a nice tuna salad. You're gonna have an exciting life now." The viewers recognize that neither the Slapchop nor tuna will give them an exciting life, and they congratulate themselves on their perspicacity even as they continue to watch the advertisement and they, presumably, purchase the product.

Modern television and advertisements have gone beyond the sales of group belonging and reached into the bizarre sale of individuality. Television and advertising have been able to placate people's needs for individualism with a knowing (ironic) wink to the fact that television is the opposite of individualism. Wallace gives the example of a perfume ad showing a homogenous line of women applying a fragrance that reacts "specially with each woman's 'unique body chemistry' and creat[es] 'her own individual scent.'" In the newer ads, "the crowd is now, paradoxically, both (1) the 'herd' in contrast to which the viewer's distinctive identity is to be defined and (2) the witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity." Boudrillard further discusses this divorce from fashion and value. Fashion "can impose the most eccentric dysfunctional, ridiculous traits as eminently distinctive. This is where it triumphs-imposing and legitimizing the irrational according to a logic deeper than that of rationality." Irony becomes a method of disarming and robbing texts (and videos) of their power to speak truly about the world and about the reader/viewer. The success of television and advertising in creating a new method of watching television-the ironic method-not only increases the viewing and paying audience, but inures them (the members of the audience) to the truth-telling power of irony and teaches them that irony is not to be taken seriously. The ability to understand ironic statements, agree with them, and move on is flattering to its practitioners but does not spur them to action.

So which way forward? Does criticism of "a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule" necessarily fall on deaf ears? Wallace looked to literature, to "the new rebels ... willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.'" Perhaps, but theorists like Boudrillard, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkeimer might take a more gloomy look at the future and predict a consumer culture that is more likely to lead to the continued entrancing and encoding of men as "productive forces" than to an awakening or to rebellion.

Works Cited

[i] Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Little, Brown and Company: 1997.

[i] Clift, Rebecca. "Irony in Conversation." Language in Society, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 523-553. Cambridge University Press

[i] Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ideological Genesis of Needs." The Consumer Society Reader. Edited by Juliet Schor and Douglas Holt. W.W. Norton: 2000.

[i] Wilcox, Leonard. "Baudrillard, DeLillo's 'White Noise,' and the End of Heroic Narrative" Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 346-365. University of Wisconsin Press: 2000. [i] Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 346-365. University of Wisconsin Press: 2000.

[i] DeLillo, Don. "White Noise." Penguin Books: 1985.

[i] Semuels, Alana. "Americans now watch more TV than ever." Los Angeles Times. November 24, 2008.

[i] Illouz, Eva. "Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery."

[i] Gitlin, Todd. "Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment." Social Problems, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Feb., 1979), pp. 251-266. University of California Press.

[i] "On the Ground." Saturday Night Live. Accessed 12/13/2009: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/digital-short-on-the-ground/1163268/

[i] "Vince with Slapchop." YouTube. Accessed 12/13/2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= rUbWjIKxrrs