VLVL2 (12): The Tube and Death

[Tim Strzechowski]

218.13:  "[. . .] an enhancing factor in Takeshi's opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic [i.e. Death] with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself.  If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?"


What are the real implications of Pynchon's passage here?  Up to this point the Tube has functioned as a window into pop culture sensibility or has been equated with the desensitizing drugs of ex-hippies.  Yet Takeshi associates television's desensitizing quality with a certain peacefulness that is achieved, albeit through trivialization.  Television programming inundates viewers with images of "the Big D," yet by "picking away" at the topic it is paralleled, through its inclusion in this paragraph with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with a text meant in part to assist us in coping with the fear of/and inevitability of death.

Does the Tube function as religion in a *positive* way?  Can "trivializing" death through TV programming actually make death less threatening, less frightful?  Consequently, does the Tube possess the potential for spiritual enlightenment in terms of our perceptions of death?




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