We are inundated by entertainment. Ingulfed, immersed, overwhelmed.
Even when we think we’ve had enough we demand and expect more. The line between truth and reality is blurred. This means that we are confused when real life intrudes: a terorist act, an act of God, a man-made disaster, an argument with a friend, a personal achievement. When any of these happens, a common comment is to say ‘It was just like a movie’.
What used to be the basis for speculative fiction are now daily occurences. There is no need for Science Fiction anymore. A TV presenter becomes President of the USA. A clean-cut dictator threatens to launch a nuclear attack. TV channels boast of being first at the scene of the latest horrific event.
A routine editorial remit is ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. Now that entertainment is so precisely tailored to personal tastes and individual fetishes, consumption becomes an end it itself. So preferable is this to ‘real life’ that it becomes no just an escape but an alternative reality. Welcome to the modern world.
In these lockdown days, the escalation of video calls on WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom etc and online team meetings, means that David Foster Wallace’s inspired piece on video telephony in ‘Infinite Jest’ has become highly topical. The whole section is hilarious and here is just a taste of what he had to say:
Infinite Jest was written over two decades ago but is still remarkably topical in an age where the line between entertainment and ‘real life’ is increasingly blurred.
So far this year I have read two prize-winning ‘novels’ – The Sell Out by Paul Beatty (
I read this passage today and, although it is from a book published in 1996, I was immediately struck by how topical it is. What do you think?:
