White Noise, TV, Etc.

I started off reading White Noise by marking an asterisk on the top corner of each page that held a passage that might be a good starting point for my weekly blog post, but then it turned out that by page 80 or so, every page of my book had an asterisk scribbled on it, so I just stopped marking them. It’s hard to narrow down what to discuss first, or what might be a helpful contribution to what I’m sure is going to be a fairly fun class discussion. Here goes.

At some point while pre-discussing this book, I remembered Prof. Sample suggesting that we keep our eye out for how DeLillo makes use of common objects (his example was the various meditations and connotations placed on the helicopter). Maybe the most reflexive image re-introduced in different contexts throughout is the television (55 mentions in 40 chapters). It seems that with each chapter, its purpose is re-allocated and re-characterized in some way that I hope we can discuss in class. Early Gladney confesses its role in his daily "formal custom" (16). Later, in that tremendously desperate conversation in which a number of characters boldly define the contents of their lives in relation to scatological things they did during pop-culture deaths, it plays as more of a lifeline anchor (Stompanado: "For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. . ." [66]). Later still, it acts as a mirror to Gladney and his relationship to Babette and his semi-kids (103-105), and scenes throughout are punctuated by TV commentary ("The TV says:") as if it is an actual character amongst the revealing and absurd dialogue spars throughout the book.  

The most interesting TV-related scene for me was Babette’s reading of the tabloid for the huddled masses at the camp (pgs. 142-147). It goes without saying that this whole section of the book is a mass commentary on technology and people’s flimsy relationship to what they perceive as authoritative information, with groups huddled around anyone (or anything) with a story to tell (machines, children). This particular grouping was a technology-barren re-enactment of the act of watching episodic or documentarian TV. Both the audience and Babette (who seemingly plays the role of the actor, projecting voices to the subjects profiled in the tabloid articles) seem to acknowledge that they aren’t gaining situationally-related news or instructional information, but are simply engaged with the hopeful theatricality of the dynamic. Gladney’s narrative characterization of the what is maybe the most primitive situation of civility and simulation at the camp highlights both our reliance on techo-media and our blind optimism for what it tells us: "They were content to exchange in brief and unrelated remarks, as during a break for a commercial on TV. . . Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope." (146-147)

I kept returning, throughout so many passages of this book, to that bizarre incident of the JetBlue crash landing of Flight 292 that happened recently, and the role television had in people’s perceived expectations of airplane disasters (seeing as every passenger had now a schema for not one, but two massive national disasters). I’ve been researching this event for a project I’m writing that is unrelated to this course, and I’m continually struck by how the in-flight broadcast of the situation (which, like any cable news event, flip-flopped between reportage and "expert" punditry) either magnified or diminished the passenger’s relationship to the immediacy of the situation. In many ways, the nature of the cable broadcast encapsulated the camp scene in White Noise, with expert pundits dispensing hopefully useful information, newscasters reporting often-speculative news as fact, and actual commercials broadcast in between (I know, this can also apply to many aspects of the crash landing in the first third of the book, but it applies differently there). In the days that followed the incident, armies of media were uncovered or made available, and its all really quite exhaustive, but unstoppably interesting at the same time. Here are some links to some media regarding the incident, if you’re not aware of the situation or are as morbidly interested in it as I am: 

• The actual story of the crash landing [MSNBC]
• Video of it, sadly, from Fox News, which is not my first choice (.wvm) [The Poltical Teen]
• A link to a Podcast of the pilot’s recordings during the landing (.mp3) [Fly With Me]
• A strange follow-up peice about C-List celebrity Taryn Manning’s experience as a passenger [MSNBC, imdb]
• Anderson Cooper’s interview with a pregnant passenger (.wvm) [mccanta]
• A This American Life episode with insightful interviews with passengers (Note: this is a HUGE .ram file, so be careful downloading it) [This American Life]