Austin Meakim’s Reviews > A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments > Status Update

The commercials for Alf’s Boston debut in a syndicated package feature the fat, cynical gloriously decadent puppet (…) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV.” His pitch is an ironic permission-slip to do what I do best whenever I feel confused and guilty: assume, inside, a sort of feta position, a pose of passive reception to comfort, escape, reassurance. The cycle is self-nourishing.

An activity is addictive if one’s relationship to it lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and really needing it. Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign. But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.

And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience.

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.

But they are also, weirdly, being asked and answered by television itself. This is another reason why most TV criticism seems so empty. Televisions managed to become its own most profitable analyst.

The fact is that it’s only in the US arts, particularly in certain strands of contemporary American fiction, that the really interesting questions about fin-de-siècle TV — What exactly is it about televisual culture that we hate so much? Why are we so immersed in it if we hate it so? What implications are there in our sustained, voluntary immersion in something we hate? — are being addressed.

We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

It’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind of fiction-consumption. Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window I. An attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt.