VLVL2 (9.5): "But We Watch a Lot of Tube"

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Uhk ee ahkhh uh akh uh Oomb,' said the kid
through a big mouthful of Takeshi's food.
   "'But we watch a lot of Tube,' DL translated. 
While waiting for the data necessary to pursue tehir
needs and aims among the still-living, Thanatoids
spent at least part of every waking hour with an eye
on the Tube." (VL, Ch. 9, p. 171)


p. 170 "But we watch a lot of Tube"    Thanatoids
watch lots of TV, trying to advance further into the
condition of death. This makes them Reaganite kids?
Couch potatoes? Embittered hippies? Everyone in
America? Anyway, advancing further into the condition
of death is only a restatement of the law of entropy,
which may mean that everyone in the universe is a
Thanatoid.

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter9.htm

Cf. ...

"Tubal abuse and other video-related disorders" (VL,
Ch. 3, p. 33)

"Tubefreeks" (ibid.)

"the Brady Buncher" (ibid.)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84681&sort=date

As Baudrillard suggested, the mass media have already
effected one more displacement from reality.
Newspapers, photos, television, or film (the "traces"
Prairie has to resort to in her search) have combined
in order to impose on us an extra barrier to ever
reach the real. The United States is infested by
television sets that are never switched off, a notion
Pynchon also used in The Crying of Lot 49, and that he
radicalizes with the creation of his Thanatoids. The
new Eliotean living-dead or "Straw Men" who share with
Zuniga a fatal drive towards the TV set: no wonder
"the Tube" is a term written in capital letters all
through the novel.

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/collado24.htm

That's why what's buried always returns: even if
hideously decayed, and even if only in bits and
pieces. The flesh is more than willing, though the
spirit is all too weak. The "afterlife" is a wholly
material phenomenon: it concerns the body, and not the
soul. Today we fear the subsistence of the flesh, more
than we do its annihilation. The great terror in
George Romero's "living dead" trilogy is not being
killed, but being unable to stay dead, being compelled
to return as one of them. Postmodern space swarms with
the Undead. Zombies throng our city danger zones, our
suburban backyards, our shopping malls.

http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch05.html

Shaviro, Steven.  Doom Patrols.
   London: Serpents Tail, 1997.

http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/index.html

Capitalism is a parasitic system, and Romero’s zombies
are the ultimate manifestations of this parasitism.
Shaviro writes:

They are the long-accumulated stock of energy and
desire upon which our ilitarized and technocratic
culture vampiristically feeds, which it compulsively
manipulates and exploits, but cannot forever hope to
control. (94)

The zombies are the silenced majority who bought into
the ideology of the ruling class. They are the
laborers who have been exploited and alienated from
their product, and they are the consumers who have
been led down the road of accumulation and
assimilation. While they seem to uphold their
individuality [...] they undermine and usurp these
negligable differences. The power is drained from
their individuality, and they are all after the same
goal: to satisfy their hunger (Shaviro 84). Romero has
commented that he was attracted to zombies because
they are the "underclass of the monster world" (Beard
30). Beard extrapolates this to view the zombies as
"the disenfranchised underclass of the material
world;" they are a "stand in for those workers and
consumers who ... have been thrown on the scrap heap"
(30).

If the zombies seem foreign to us, it is only because
we do not want to see ourselves. [...] Logan notes,
"They are us. They are the extensions of us." Indeed,
they exhibit consumer desire and they are drawn to
places we are drawn to, such as malls, homes, and
bastions of civilization. Their desire is insatiable.
Shaviro writes, "Want is a function of excess and
extravagence, not of deficiency: the more I consume,
the more I demand to consume" (92). Likewise, the
zombies become enraged when presented with a "fresh"
meal of live humans, and they are content to stumble
around for eternity, looking for another bite. Indeed,
the zombies are not a foreign invader, but the
ressurected dead of late consumer capitalism.

http://www.wdog.com/rider/writings/romero.htm

Citing ...

Shaviro, Steven.  The Cinematic Body.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/shaviro_cinematic.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm

http://www.cult-media.com/issue3/Aharper.htm

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