Alone with images on a screen

“Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it.”

“I don´t know about you: My life and my self doesn’t feel like anything like a unified developed character in a linear narrative to me. I think a lot of people feel —not overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them.” 

“If the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

“I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really afraid. That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff.”

“I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies —although they’re great at certain things— cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art.”

“A candy is real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s somethin’ really vital about food that candy’s missing, although to make up for what it’s missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up. There seems to me to be some analogy to what— I’m talking about very seductive commercial entertainment. There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister about it is the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is kind of… addictive, self-consuming pleasure. And what saves us is that most entertainment isn’t very good. 

“I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And they’re there for me, and I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there’s also, there’s something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, at certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.”