wallace-l: Will's Students -- Johnson

[Gershom K. Bazerman]

I don't think that LEA is about the evils of television, so much as it is
about the pretentiousness of Jeopardy. Jeopardy has always been billed as
the most intellectual of the US's game shows. Their traditional
contestants are teachers and executives rather than mechanics etc.
Wheel of Fortune bills itself as "America's game show" or something to
that effect, while Jeopardy has always been "America's game show for
really smart people" I mean, while it's impressive to guess phrases on
wheel of fortune, you only show your true mental prowess when you can
answer ahead of the contestants on Jeopardy. In any case, what I think
Wallace was pointing out was that while american tv is hollow in general
(and I don't see this as a particularly bad thing), only Jeopardy tries to
bill itself as high culture, our crass american equivilant of the BBC's
Mastermind(or was it Genius) where excrutiatingly difficult questions are
lobbed at a man sitting is a sparse stage with poor lighting. Back to the
point, Wallace shows Jeopardy to not only be pretentious, but that the
glamour of the intelligesia(sp?)(word
choice?)(appropriatness?)(pretentiousness?) as precived by the TV viewing
world is really quite sad. I felt deep sympathy for all of the characters,
all in weird and somehow terrifying situations for the entertanment of the
rest of us, with our worship of their celebrity. I really don't know where
I'm going here, but to condemn TV in and of itself as any more trash than
any other pop culture item of the times (books most certainly not
exculded), really doesn't make too much sense. To compare to Wallace's
other works, how about the parrot (Vlad?) in The_Broom_of_the_System? Once
again we see the subversion of it's intellect for mass entertainment, and
really don't know whether it's good or bad, just that we are amused. I
haven't really more than cracked _IJ_ but maybe the section on the
videophones, and their fall into disuse could shed some light. Also, the
whole concept of TV as addiction (altho that looses relevance in the
context of his presentation of AA philosophy of *anything* as addiction).
Just spewing some thoughts here...

> ********************
> 
> In his short story, "Little Expressionless Animals", David Foster Wallace
> humorously jabs at our television saturated society.  Alex Trebek, the sort of
> dweeb of the game show industry, takes considerable abuse from Wallace, and with
> this the story addresses the idea that there's something ridiculous and phony
> about t.v., that it's the junk food of entertainment.  Of all the inane things
> on television he chooses Jeopardy as his focus, and as a protagonist, a girl who
> has memorized the encyclopedia.  Both of these things represent pointless
> flaunting of facts and memorization abilities that the normal ones of us
> couldn't even conceive of.  But because they're that way, just that far beyond
> us, the knowledge of these facts is also admirable.  Memorizing the encyclopedia
> is an impressive feat, but Julie and her brain and her enigma are all cheapened
> by the fact that we know about it because of Jeopardy, because of t.v., because
> of Alex Trebek.  There is something so immense and important about knowledge
> that I wince at the idea of constraining it to questions and answers.  So is
> that the analogy?  Jeopardy does to knowledge what t.v. does to our lives. 
> Sitcoms with their thirty minute conflicts and resolutions serve what purpose
> for us?  Entertainment?  So when Arthur from across the street sits down with
> his wife after dinner to get his fill of "must see t.v.," he knows he's
> devaluing life, he simply finds the entertainment worthy of such an
> accomplishment.  I don't think so.  He just doesn't realize what is being
> accomplished, aside from his being entertained.  So where does the problem lie? 
> Is it just stupid people, uninformed people who watch their t.v.'s like a
> teenaged girl might watch a mirror while contemplating not eating dinner?  Or is
> it t.v. that makes them that way?  Certainly in Mark Leyner's "Oh, Brother" we
> hear of a story is which t.v. takes kids beyond stupid to deranged.  So the
> excessive violence that results, the elaborate patricide, is due to, according
> to their lawyer (ironically, law being a profession specializes in
> oversimplifying) the television they mistook for a mirror.  If it's really that
> evil then how can we just plunk down multiple t.v. sets in every American
> household?  Oh, right Ñ for entertainment's sake.
> 
> -- Emily Johnson
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

--Gershom K. Bazerman <bazerman at cs.ucsb.edu>