The Breakfast Table

A Future Full of Perfect Sound Bites

Wesley,

It’s all very White Noise, yeah. But it’s also Underworld, with the Kentucky kids starring in their own Farelly brothers version of that book’s “Texas highway killer” subplot.

Andy, I think the stunt they were copying was actually one that Johnny Knoxville performed in a home video put out by the skateboard magazine Big Brother. Knoxville used to write for the magazine and appeared in a few of these videos. I recommend the installment titled “Poop”–chances are you’ll never see the footage of their “Depends Party” (don’t ask) on basic cable.

You also bring up the idea of kids doing stupid stuff in order to get a few minutes of fame on their local news. Why not take it one step further–seeing as how the news tends to be more saturated with violence than, say, your average hour of MTV programming, what happens when kids start imitating stuff they see on the news? (I know: They’d have to start watching the news first.)

Or maybe they do watch the news–note that the kid who decried “sensationaliz[ing] for media attention” did it in a perfectly sound-bite-sized statement. In the future, everyone will give really good quotes.

Re the cultural oversaturation defense: After our conversation hit the Web on Monday, a friend harangued me over e-mail for not being sufficiently bothered by MTV’s appropriation of the visual language of AIDS-activist art and advertising for self-promotional purposes. “[H]iv/aids PSAs,” she wrote, “use a specific type of language to convey a specific message–and one that’s hard to get the public to listen to. [T]rivializing that message–by co-opting the language–to sell a network just lessens the impact of the PSAs.”

She had a point, and my only defense was that I hadn’t thought about it from a moral standpoint at all, just a cultural one. I thought it was interesting–that’s interesting as opposed to praiseworthy or cool–that anti-AIDS PSAs and Barbara Kruger’s screaming-headline style had become part of our common visual vocabulary, to the point that MTV could yank their approach out of context and use it to promote a product.

But I was being an ironist about it. You know how sometimes you get hypnotized watching your socks whirl around in the dryer? It’s easy to get that way about culture–to start seeing things as an continuous disco megamix of signs and signifiers, where everything points to everything else but actual people and actual pain don’t matter.

It should probably trouble us–it troubles me, anyway–that this mindset is the end result of giving culture a close reading. We end up thinking of AIDS advertising as mere visual language, and a kid getting his leg broken on TV reminds me of Don DeLillo reminding me of Rodney King. Somebody has to shoot the pictures. I fought alongside Che Guevara, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

Meanwhile, from life imitating Jackass to the New York Observer imitating the Onion’s recent “Nation’s Breasts Prepare for Warm Weather” headline. Irono-licious.

AP