Norman Mailer And You, Unplugged

[It was only three days, but it was a great three days. I took my 16-year-old son and his two buddies for three nights/three days of skiing/snowboarding fun at Sunday River, the massive resort in Maine. I return to this desk sore, wicked sore. But it was a perfect little getaway, staying as we did in a slopeside hotel. Plus, it's so picking easy to get there: 190 miles with just two traffic lights (well, there's another one, but it's a non-stop right hand turn) between here and there. Zoom, zoom indeed. And because of the spring conditions, my three charges followed me down several double-black diamond trails (the tough ones), which are accessible when the snow is soft. Not that any of you are interested ...]

While lounging after dinner in my hotel suite this weekend, I happened upon a discussion with America's man of letters, Norman Mailer, televised on C-Span. Now, I know nothing about Mr. Mailer. If I've read one sentence penned by him then I must have done so in a hurry, for I recall nothing. But there was something he said that interested me, not because it was original or brilliant, but because it is something I've been saying for 20 years (I'll take any tuppence I can find that makes me feel like I am a 'player').

Mailer, while discussing the place of the novel in American life (it is agreed that the novel is not nearly as central to the American mind as it once was), divined that one of the worst things for the human soul is the television commercial. Mailer argued that the ability for humans to concentrate, to pay attention to something without interruption, has been befouled by the TV advertisement (hence, corrupting interest in long-term reading projects). For Mailer, it is impossible to enter into a character or his plight; or to enter into a heroine's story and be fully involved in her world, if every 8 to 12 minutes a viewer is interrupted; if consciousness is disturbed by the machinery of marketing. Mailer, in fact, believes (I think) that there is even perhaps a correlation between attention disorders and such interruptions.

I don't know about the clinical research behind Mailer's claims, or even if there is any. But I will agree with much of what he said. But Mailer is missing something, I think, that is more important: it's not the commercials that interrupt attention, it's the medium itself.

I love to go to theatrical plays. Not that I go often. In fact, I now go rather rarely. But I get far more out of reading rather than watching a play, for I am too interested, or too distracted, by everything around me. I can't listen to nuanced dialogue and also absorb the subtleties of the set-pieces, of the lighting and backdrop and blocked out props; or of the supporting actors' gestures. In short, there is often too much going on for me to attend to the play.

Oddly, the same goes for movies. My favorite film of all time, the under-rated "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", which is a loose translation of Homer's Odyssey, is loaded with good humor and brilliant witticism, but much of it was invisible to me during my first viewing. Nonetheless, I still immensely enjoyed the film. And while I recognize that "O Brother, ..." is clearly a love-it-or-hate-it film, it takes a considerable amount of concentration to determine whether one indeed loves it or hates it. It is not a simple film; it's not really what it looks like. It's like M. Night Shylaman's "Signs", another film I loved (though I loathed it after the first viewing): it is not about what one thinks it is (aliens), but about a Christian regaining his faith (after losing it in tragedy). "Signs" is emphatically NOT about alien invasions; it's about the transcendent, the prophetic, and the power of faith in the midst of meaninglessness. But my point is that even when we concentrate on films, it's hard to get the full scale of a film's import, theme, or message.

And what makes film (and TV) hard is not the projector breakdowns or the commercials that may interrupt a person's concentration; it's the medium itself. You see, each image, stuck firmly in the realm of the two-dimensional, requires a certain frame of mind, a certain gestalt or perspective, even one that produces a certain emotional reaction, to make sense of what is seen. In film and TV, images move faster than they do in real life: we can go from a funeral to a wedding to a desert to an alpine village to a morgue to a baseball field, all in just a few brief seconds. Each image, even each camera angle, requires a reaction that differs from another: one is not to feel the same during "Crash" from one vignette to the next, nor can one feel the same from scene-to-scene. There is a barrage of images and stories, a tumult of camera turns and emotions, that get broken and interrupted by a film's pacing and editing. Constant concentration is near impossible; the nerves can, and do, get frazzled.

One look at the evening news or even a newspaper drives this point home. In 2 minutes one might hear or read about a wondrous birth of a child in a jetliner, the mutilation of a young girl, a donation to a hospital, a fire that consumed an elderly couple; a recession in the housing market and a bullish technology market; a monsoon in Pakistan and a cloudless day in Alabama. Each of these requires a different intellectual and emotional response. Can the heart and mind keep up with this barrage, with the rapid shiftings of tone and topic? I wonder.

And then there is music. Radios, CDs, iPods, MP3 players: each of these (along with other electronic media), not only provide bombardment of our ears in our shopping malls, cars and bedrooms, with each song quickly eliciting a variety of emotions from us as we listen, these technologies permit the constant re-eliciting of these same emotional responses. Unlike our ancestors, who rarely attended theater or symphony and had no access to recorded materials, a fact which forced them to pay attention, we can blithely and superficially absorb our visits to places, theaters, and concerts knowing that we can always return to video and audio recordings. And we DO return, over and over again, visiting old emotions associated with events long past, perhaps even reliving feelings -- or perpetuating feelings -- that we should have been healed of or outgrown. In fact, there are countless songs that I accidently land on while touring the radio dial that bring me back (often unconsciously) to old, old feelings I really need never to relive. Should I really be singing along (again!) with Eric Carmen -- All by myself!! -- or Elton John -- Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road! -- while driving home to my family? Should I really be piping "I can't liiiiiive, with or without you?", thinking about an old girlfriend when I am driving in my wife's car?

Similarly, is it really good to see old TV shows, over and over; is it good to submit daily to a constant barrage of changing scenery and sounds and themes and feelings and tragedies and joys that are nothing but someone else's? I mean, imagine taking a child who has done nothing but jumped through every digital scene and song that lasts no longer than a few minutes and then ask him (now that he is of working age), to show up on the first day of summer break to paint a house, where he may stay on one side, looking at the same scene, doing the same thing, for 40 hours?

Alas, it is interesting to think of these things, especially in light of some recent evidence suggesting that people vulnerable to Alzheimer's may have led lives often spent in reverie, often lost in the romance of Memory Lane. In short, Alzheimer's might be the disease of living in memory too often or too much, which is exactly what a lot of TV, replayed cinema, and recorded music asks you to do everyday.

So my departure from Norman Mailer is two-fold. I think the various electronic media we adore these days (and have for a couple of generations), require too much emotional response from us in too short a time (think of the news or 12 different broadcast rock songs in 40 minutes), thus dulling us emotionally to what is properly required of our emotional and intellectual attention. And I think that recorded materials constantly drag us back into the past, often to things that we should forget or get beyond. Again, why dredge up old feelings of regret, lost love, sin, or even distant triumph every second of our commutes to and from work? For surely these constantly jolt us from what we should remain focused on.

This ultimately points to something even bigger, namely, that in a sense all of our technologies that speak to the mind and emotions (many of them) serve to actually hypnotize us: we are in a trance and we do not know it. For we get addicted to these things: they pull us to emotions many of which are not only bad for us, distancing us from our own lives, but they are not even our emotions or even our stories: they are someone else's.

I am not recommending a sudden and complete rejection of all things technological. I am only encouraging myself, really, to be mindful of my media addictions and the real harm such addictions cause. Reading a novel surely can be an escape from concentrating on important OTHER things, even though reading does permit more control over the speed of the emotions and images presented therein: I decide how fast a novel moves. But what I must do is protect myself from too much information, or else I run the risk of becoming addicted to the emotional and chronological breaks between data, interrupting my ability to fully concentrate; or I run the risk of living in a media induced reverie, forcing me to miss out on my own present moment. I need to mindfully control the input, for there is much I need to protect: myself, which is all that I've really got to give to you, my family, and my God.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.