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Dinty Cowardly in the Age of Virtual Reality |
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“Listen to me, Truman. There’s no more
truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. Same lies. The
same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear.” —Christof,
The Truman Show (Paramount Pictures, 1998) So, aside from killing
twenty-two swarthy hoodlums the other day, killing some of them, in fact,
explosively, and rather enjoying the unbridled admiration from afar of three
shapely young cartoon women, I managed to ride a vintage Harley across a
simulated desert, and to wing low over Not bad for a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Had I enough time, I might have veered left and bombed portions of Hackensack, but a cheerless string of awkward young men was hanging just over my shoulder, snickering a bit at my neophyte skills, waiting to use my helmet. Averaging around sixteen-years-old, these bug-eyed boys had already drunk their fill of what real life has to offer, and needed their daily jolt of virtual reality to keep them adrenalized and invigorated. The black helmet and binocular eyepieces, when strapped on tightly, were enough to trick them out of their drab existence, take them where they wanted to go. “Real life is boring,” one told me. “So hey, we come here.” Fair enough. Real life can be boring at times, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in the prosperous, modern world. I doubt life is boring for many—for those facing the real threat of disease, starvation, drought, machetes, and landmines—but for us fortunates, survival is a near given, and tedium a social trend. In Let us take a minute here and woefully shake our heads at the pathetic, disconnected, worthless lives led by the sorts of human beings who prefer virtual, digital, manufactured reality to what we all agree is the solid, sticky, unprogrammed reality that we inhabit. And now let us look at ourselves. * “Human Kind/cannot bear very much reality” —Thomas Stearns Eliot Start with television, of course. Book after unread book have discussed the malevolence of the tube de boob, forewarned us of the inevitable downward spiral of intelligence and the obliteration of community that television would surely bring. It is common to the point of cliché these days to bemoan how little substance the televised world has to offer compared to the porch-sitting, flesh-pressing, fence-leaning, town square 4th of July picnic world enjoyed by our grandparents, but the ubiquitous picture box seems to thrive nonetheless. We woke up a decade or so ago as a nation, announced that we absolutely didn’t like where network television was taking us, then promptly agreed to let fifty more channels into our homes. Who are we kidding? Maybe you don’t watch tv, and in order to attain your respect, I will pretend that I don’t, or perhaps that I only watch C-Span and National Geographic nature specials, but look around you. The planet is addicted. Think of someone you know who watches a good amount of television—your elderly parent, your teenaged child, your spouse, you. Calculate how many hours they spend during an average week closely following the lives of their favorite character—the sitcom comedians, the cop show cops, the emergency room doctors, the Chicago Bulls. Now ask them how much time they spend closely following your life—watching, considering, wondering, with anywhere near the same intensity of purpose. Do you come out on top? Of course not, your life is boring. Mine is too. MTV knows this, and created “The Real World,” a show where young adults are given free rent in a showcase apartment in the midst of a splashy urban paradise. The roommates are always wonderfully diverse—male, female, black, brown, pink, pierced, gay, straight, sensitive, brutish, liberal, fascist—just to keep apartment life humming. The real roommates do actually live together, followed night and day by MTV camera crews chronicling every herpes blister, every date gone wrong, every infected piercing. “The Real World,” they call it. As if those of us without cameras following our every move aren’t real. And in a way, we aren’t. Not real enough. Simply put, the presence of the
camera makes people like Pedro, Flora, or Puck on “The Real World,” or
Princess Diana, or the To put it another way, what began as a way to escape, as a simple distraction, has begun to serve a more basic and pivotal function. We are no longer just entertained by television—we to an increasing extent live in that world, handing over our thoughts and our consciousness. We have given to television that portion of our brain designed to recognize a reality outside of our own selves. But tv is an easy and obvious target, and if it all ended there, this would be an essay on tv, and, thus, superfluous. Haven’t we already decided that tv is bad and we want it anyway? It doesn’t end there, though, and switching off the tube, burying your nose in the synthetic world of a good novel, isn’t going to stop the quickening encroachment of artifice. The irreality of television has oozed its way out of the programmed box and into the very fabric of our lives [insert National Cotton Council theme here]. It all starts with small things. Once, we took pen in hand and wrote to our loved ones of what we were feeling. Perhaps we actually struggled over what to say. Now we buy Hallmark Cards. “You are very special to me, Mom,” we announce, though in truth she is only as special as the millions of other mothers who get this same manufactured sentiment. Virtual intimacy. We used to raise our children, carefully teach them what we knew. Now we ship them off to infant care, day care, school care, soccer camp, violin lessons, after-school learning enrichment, and finally ethics and morality focus groups for teens. Now all teaching is done by others. Virtual parenting. Virtuality is everywhere. You can buy shares in an organic garden. Someone else moves the dirt, you get the crop. The food tastes so much better knowing that you almost raised it yourself. You can take Prozac, feel the relief and release of cognitive therapy without actually undergoing the rigors. Liposuction is virtual exercise. The meat we eat is soy, the fat is olestra. Thanks to the Internet, I can sit inside my windowless office, punch up www.weather.com, and instantly experience what is happening just twelve steps out my office door. I sometimes do. Nothing is real, not even
experience. The travel industry booms with programmed adventures, rustic
hikes into the mountains of You can visit Disney is way ahead of us, as
usual. Sensing the trend beyond the trend, understanding that we have already
begun to sour a little on counterfeit glitz and cartoon mice, the latest
Disney venture is a 540-acre Animal Kingdom with over 200 species of real
animals represented, as well as real grass, and a real tree or two. It is an
artificial In Animal Kingdom, a visitor tours what appears to be a flourishing African savanna, but what they are actually viewing is a cleverly managed illusion. What is fake is fake, of course, though it is reportedly impossible to tell the real trees from the synthetic. What is real, however, is hardly real. Even the live animals are actors, forced to wander the park in a realistic search for food by a carefully choreographed schedule of geographically-distributed feedings (accomplished through hidden feeding stations, so that we don’t see the puppeteers at work). This is not a zoo—zoos are boring, the animals sleep. It is not a wildlife preserve—the animals here exist solely for our viewing pleasure, we aren’t saving them. It is, in the words of Eisner, “an open book, with a dramatic and humorous plot that features adventures, conflicts and the unpredictable antics of live animals in their own environments. The entire Park is an incredible stage set with Disney artists creating forests, streams and waterfalls, dense tropical jungles and savannas filled with natural beauty, where the animals will live.” * “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful
about what we pretend to be.” —Kurt Vonnegut We have far more in common with Eisner’s unpredictable yet expertly manipulated animals than we are probably willing to acknowledge. The affluent consumer society in which most of us now live is a painstakingly managed stage set, a virtual theme park where we too travel from feeding station to feeding station, mainly to shop. In a real world, in a solid, physical world, we would become what we do, and be that from which we are made. In other words, we would be hair, flesh, bone, and the ability to forge metal, carve wood, grow wheat. There is a very primal link between action, reaction, and survival. In the manufactured world that
exists at the end of the second millennium, however—let’s call it To create a virtual reality is to make something seem real when it is not, to construct the illusion that certain circumstances exist when they, in fact, are not really there. This is what we do in our “real world” now, whether it is spreading the buzz on a new product, putting spin on the latest scandal, fluffing our corporate feathers, or simply dressing for success. All the world’s indeed a stage, where now more than ever we seek a “bubble reputation,” and I fear that sooner, rather than later, we may find ourselves “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Truman Burbank of “The Truman Show,” the poor schlemiel who unknowingly starred in his own television program, is the modern everyman; we are each of us starring in our own miniature drama. At first glance, we would seem to have far more creative control than Truman ever did—we choose the soundtrack (at the CD store), dress the set (at Pier 1), handle costumes (The Gap), and improvise most of the dialogue. The lucky among us even get to choose our own attractive co-stars. Yet as we manipulate, we are manipulated. The incessant barrage of advertising—and by that I don’t just mean the ads and commercials, but much of what comes in between: all the endless suggestions from all of the media about how to live, who to admire, what is in and what is out—present a Disney-like fairy tale plot synopsis that we are compelled to follow. Here is the good life, we are told. Pursue it. And cowards that we are, we do. If we eat the right foods, wear the right clothes, drive the right car, and see this weekend’s blockbuster movie, our happiness, we believe, is virtually guaranteed. Credit card firmly in hand, we glance in the mirror one last time before we rush out the door on cue, wondering, “How do I look to others? Is the illusion intact? Is anybody watching?” * “When the Many are reduced to One, to what is the
One reduced?” —Zen Koan Having a life, living a life, and projecting a lifestyle, seem all boggled up to me. When I left the VR parlor, after I had murdered my villains and dropped my bombs, when I stumbled back out onto the bright streets of my college campus theme park hometown, dressed for the role of casual professor, I nearly tripped over a vending box for USA Today. Wanting to know the script for the upcoming week, I bought one. On an inside page, a story told of how a Washington think tank, something called The National Commission on Civic Renewal, had just released a study of the state of citizenship in American life. Their conclusion: Americans are becoming “a nation of spectators.” Well, I already knew that. I’ve been watching. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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