A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Page B

prove to you that the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious
     irony. Irony is, of course, a turf fictionists have long worked with zeal. And irony is important for understanding TV because
     “TV,” now that it’s gotten powerful enough to move from acronym to way of life, revolves off just the sorts of absurd contradictions
     irony’s all about exposing. It is ironic that television is a syncretic, homogenizing force that derives much of its power
     from diversity and various affirmations thereof. It is ironic that an extremely canny and unattractive self-consciousness
     is necessary to create TV performers’ illusion of unconscious appeal. That products presented as helping you express individuality
     can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to enormous numbers of people. And so on.
    Television regards irony sort of the way educated lonely people regard television. Television both fears irony’s capacity
     to expose, and needs it. It needs irony because television was practically
made
for irony. For TV is a bisensuous medium. Its displacement of radio wasn’t picture displacing sound; it was picture added.
     Since the tension between what’s said and what’s seen is irony’s whole sales territory, classic televisual irony works via
     the conflicting juxtaposition of pictures and sounds. What’s seen undercuts what’s said. A scholarly article on network news
     describes a famous interview with a corporate guy from United Fruit on a CBS special about Guatemala: “I sure don’t know of
     anybody being so-called ‘oppressed,’ “ this guy, in a ’70s leisure suit and bad comb-over, tells Ed Rabel. “I think this is
     just something that some reporters have thought up.” 7 The whole interview is intercut with commentless footage of big-bellied kids in Guatemalan slums and union organizers lying
     in the mud with cut throats.
    Television’s classic irony function came into its own in the summer of 1974, as remorseless lenses opened to view the fertile
     “credibility gap” between the image of official disclaimer and the reality of high-level shenanigans. A nation was changed,
     as Audience. If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real? Television, that summer,
     got to present itself as the earnest, worried eye on the reality behind all images. The irony that television is itself a
     river of image, however, was apparent even to a twelve-year-old, sitting there, rapt. After ’74 there seemed to be no way
     out. Images and ironies all over the place. It’s not a coincidence that
Saturday Night Live
, that Athens of irreverent cynicism, specializing in parodies of (1) politics and (2) television, premiered the next fall
     (on television).
    I’m worried when I say things like “television fears…” and “television presents itself…” because, even though it’s kind of
     a necessary abstraction, talking about television as if it were an entity can easily slip into the worst sort of anti-TV paranoia,
     treating of TV as some autonomous diabolical corrupter of personal agency and community gumption. I am concerned to avoid
     anti-TV paranoia here. Though I’m convinced that television today lies, with a potency somewhere between symptom and synecdoche,
     behind a genuine crisis for U.S. culture and literature, I do not agree with reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy
     visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with
     little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes. Critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that
     TV’s lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a “contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to
     the mass market and necessarily to mass taste” 8 can be refuted by observing that their Propter Hoc isn’t even Post Hoc: by 1830, de Tocqueville had