Critical Issues
(Image from Spike Jonze's Photo Album for the movie Being John Malkovich)
1. Representations vs Reality
"Forty years ago you could count the
parasite forms on your fingers: Reader's Digest, TV Guide, the
fanzines devoted to assorted Hollywood stars and doo-wop heartthrobs.
Everything else dealt with stories about folks somewhere outside the
fun house of mass media, even as that old, unmediated realm became increasingly
remote, until the thought of stories about lives untouched by the mass
media became for all practical purposes unthinkable, the way stories
that involved only knights and princes became unthinkable in the eighteenth
century. The technological changes that ushered in mercantile capitalism
did away with the old, aristocratic morality plays and introduced a
new, rougher form - the realist novel, with its orphans and scoundrels
and wayward heroines. In the same way, the electric technologies of
the twentieth century have done away with the old storytelling forms,
or at least scaled them down to assembly-line repetition, while simultaneously
unleashing a flock of new organisms into the larger cultural ecology
[...] It's worth stressing here that the shift from story-telling to
commentary - from host organism to parasite - is more than just standard-issue
postmodernism. The television shows that have gravitated toward metacommentary
in the past few years [...] have attached themselves to the mass-media
body because the mass-media is now a fundamental, irreversible component
of their everyday life [...] The infosphere is now a part of our "real
life" - which makes commenting on it as natural as commenting on
the weather [...] The growth of the parasite form reflects the increasingly
naturalized role of the media in contemporary life. We are fixated with
the image not because we have lost faith in reality, but because images
now have an enormous impact on reality, to the extent that the older
image-reality opposition doesn't really work anymore."
Steven Johnson Interface Culture p26-30
2. Entertainment and Identity
"I've never written an autobiographical
novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written
a single scene that I can say took place. I've never written a line
of dialogue that I've heard someone say or that I have said."
Bret Easton Ellis "American
Psycho?" (Joshua Klein)
"Media has informed all of us, no matter
what artform we pursue, whether painters or musicians. TV has unconsciously,
whether we want to admit it or not, shaped all of our visions to an
inordinate degree. How? I don't know. I couldn't give you specifics.
Is it good or bad? I don't know. I think it just is [...] Where does
it come from? I would say from seeing a shitload of movies, reading
a ton of books, watching enormous hours of television, and having it
all soak in. If for some reason you want to be a writer, that's where
the ear comes from. I don't know what other reference points there were
when I was growing up. It was books, movies, TV and rock and roll [...]
It's interesting, this idea of being so overwhelmingly influenced by
pop culture, and yet, in your writing, not that influenced by events
in your life. That's a new idea very common to artists of this generation.
You're making up stuff, but at the same time it's autobiographical because
it stems from how you're feeling."
Bret Easton Ellis "Interview
with Bret Easton Ellis" (Mark Amerika and Alexander Laurence)
