Law Students

Hype

Only a certain very rare species of person, for Emerson, is "fit to stand the gaze of millions." It is not your normal, hard-working, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent freak who, for Emerson, "carries the holiday in his eye." The Emersonian holiday television actors? eyes carry is the potent illusion of a vacation from self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, a counterfeit impression - for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlling to appear unwatched before lenses. The self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the grand illusion behind TV?s mirror-hall of illusions; and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.

-David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

Full post as published by Expressio Unius on October 23, 2008 (boomark / email).