Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  Your folks wanted you, prescribed that you be on athletic teams …?

  No. I just meant … I mean, Amy played softball and I played tennis. And I think Mom and Dad’s nightmare was that—’cause you got to remember, this was when, this might be a crucial four-year difference. I think TV really started to become a pervasive part of the culture in like the mid- ’60s. And that’s when I was—that’s when I was growing up. My parents didn’t have any experience with it, you know?

  All the PBS/NPR parents even now try to restrict their kids. For all the good reasons.

  Yeah.

  If your parents had had some idea of what you should be doing, it would be like Avril and James. [The parents in the novel]

  No, truly, my parents are very unathletic. My father had wrestled in high school, early in college, but had stopped. And I discovered tennis on my own, taking public park lessons. I’d been a huge fan of football when I was a little kid; even at twelve, though I had lost a lot of size advantage on other kids, and was looking for another sport.

  No, it was more just that they could see—that my parents are intelligent, and they realized that it wasn’t, that they were projecting certain fears about TV onto their kids, and that we were giving the lie to them. I mean, my parents never leaned on us about grades or athletic teams, and both Amy and I were pretty functional as little kids.

  OK. So aside from the telethon … what’s the most you ever watched at a sitting? Even now I’ll go on these kind of benders when I decide to schedule them. I’ll go on a bender now where I’ll decide I’m going to start watching, I’ll start with The X-Files on Friday night, and then decide to go on until, I’ll realize …

  But it’s also sort of—I mean, it’ll be on for a while. Then you get restless and maybe you’ll make a phone call while it’s on or maybe you’ll—[I’m shaking my head] No?

  Not me.

  See … maybe we’re a little different.

  No. If I get into that phase and someone calls, I’ll get off as quickly as I possibly can …

  Now if I get that deeply immersed in something, what’ll happen to me now is that I’ll fall asleep. You know? Because I’ll get so relaxed. I think the most that I’ve ever sat and just stared at and watched would have been, you know, late in high school, and we’re probably talkin’ about eight hours.

  Ha. And you haven’t watched that much TV since?

  You mean all in a sitting? I can remember a couple of times having the flu, you know. And like being at my girlfriend’s house with the TV on, and just lyin’ there with the set on. And just kind of drifting in and out of consciousness, you know. But that’s—you seem to me to be meaning something different, by watching. Maybe in the posture of the Bose-through-that-speaker commercial. Where the guy’s just kind of sitting in the chair like this …? [Demonstrates: Hunkered in chair]

  (Laughs) You’ve never done that.

  I also, here’s the—like the thing that’s killed it recently for me, is the channel-surfing thing. Is because, I always have this terrible fear that there’s something even better on, somewhere else. And so I will spend all this time kind of skating up and down the channel system. And not be able to get all that immersed in any one thing.

  But the problem is, there always is something better. So you can always find something else to watch.

  Yeah, but there’s this terrible anxiety, this gnawing anxiety about it. That was the great thing about last night, I just decided, I’m gonna watch Sodom and Gomorrah. This is gonna be cool.

  No, but when you can trapeze to something else … swing on to the next bar … there’s always a next bar coming …

  That’s true.

  I mean I could go home now and watch ten hours of television.

  Fill me in on something … [Shuts off machine]

  [Break]

  … and read for a couple hours, and it’s much harder if there’s a girl there. Because they want to interact. No, I’ll tell ya, I mean, in a certain way, I’m a little bit—but I am with reading I think kind of like what you are with TV. I mean there’s lots of times where I’ve read for three, four days in a row, pausing only to eat and sleep.

  [Break]

  So when you said TV addict, you were just being colorful. Or you see a potential for it, even though you’ve never exercised it fully.

  I think, I think what you’re betraying here is you and I have a somewhat different understanding of “addict.” I think for you, the addict is the gibbering, life-that-completely-grinds-to-a-halt thing. And for me—and the thing that the book is about, is—it’s really about a continuum, involving a fundamental orientation. Lookin’ for easy pleasurable stuff outside me to make things all right. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. But I’m saying it’s a continuum, and that we slide.

  [Eventually, the first thing I got home, I pulled out the dictionary and looked up the word “continuum.” To see exactly what it and he meant.]

  And it’s much more—This is one reason I was afraid the book was just not going to make any sense, ’cause I wasn’t sure anybody else saw it this way. I mean, I began to see significant relationships between—a significant similarity between my relationship to television, and some of these people in the halfway house’s relation to, say, heroin.

  Or, you know, if you ever go to like—I went to this one thing called SLAA? Oh, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous? Where guys would, like, would go to prostitutes, you know? And get thousands of dollars in debt on their credit card. ’Cause they just couldn’t stop. That it seemed to me that the only differences, that the differences were relatively unimportant. That there’s more just this sort of desperate hunger, enormous hole to be filled. And a real inclination to look outside, for like consumer products mostly of varying kinds, to fill it. And that’s what seemed really like, movingly American about it to me.

  In the book, when you had Murat? …

  Marathe.

  … talking to Steeply. He said, Your country … if you make it available to, a sad thing about Americans is if you make it available, they’ll take the entertainment that leads to death. That’s why Infinite Jest is a good movie.

  Because any person you give that choice to would take that choice … other cultures are as fixated with television as ours … sometimes farther, they can’t see the distinction between what’s real and what’s not …

  [Yet his radical desire to give people something they can’t stop reading: his editor at Harper’s described his work as the literary equivalent of cocaine. So addiction is also a metaphor for how much you want readers to love a book. To be hooked. It’s an artist’s great ambition. Forget the other stuff in your life: family, work, outdoors … focus only on me. The level of approval and applause, that a writer looks for: I dropped everything for you.]

  Naipaul does this too …

  For me the thing … And again, now, this is just my opinion, and I couldn’t—I can’t win an argument with you. But I think there is kind of a difference, and it has something to do with what’s sad. And there’s this desperation to give ourselves away to something. To be—what do you call it? There’s a German word for it, it means a sort of Wagnerian falling into, that I think our culture really encourages. And I think other cultures—particularly more repressive cultures—could simply ban it. Find mechanisms to deny its supply. That sufficient demand would not automatically result in its availability. That a number of factors would make it—makes it more of a problem here. But in another way, I mean the movie’s not just a MacGuffin, it’s kind of a metaphorical device … it’s kind of showing you what the end of this continuum might be.

  [This is his chalk talk, his sales pitch for the book’s material. He’s good and effective.]

  … I remember writing in the margins, that all cultures would make that same choice about watching the movie.

  Steeply, Steeply has the same argument. And it’s a terrible argument because Marathe is basically a fascist. You’re talking about a culture that teaches
people how to make moral choices, that teeters very easily into a culture … into a totalitarian, authoritarian culture. But a culture that doesn’t, and that prides itself on not—the way sort of ours does, or has recently … I think we’re just beginning to see, that on either side of the continuum there are terrible prices to pay.

  You give no answer to this question then …

  I don’t think there’s an answer. You mean, are there laws that should be passed? Or is there public education we can do—my personal suspicion is that for the really deep important questions, there aren’t any answers because the answers are individual, you know? I mean, there’s no culture … I mean, the culture’s us, you know? The country’s us.

  So no answer: either that kind of freedom or that kind of guidance.

  I think it’s—I mean I think the whole thing is an enormous game of Little Red Riding Hood, and you’re trying to find what’s just right. And you, you know—what is it?—you can’t find the middle till you hit both walls? You know? The thing that really scares me about this country—and again, I’d want you to stress, I’m a private citizen, I am not a pundit. Is I think we’re really setting ourselves up for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do—or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by—is getting so bad, um, that I think it’s, there’s even a, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I mean, makes a similar argument economically. But I think, you know, in Pat Buchanan, in Rush Limbaugh, there are rumbles on the Western horizon, you know. And that it’s going to be, that the next few decades are going to be really scary. Particularly if things get economically shaky, and people for instance—people who’ve never been hungry before, might be hungry or might be cold.

  Cliff Robertson. Three Days of the Condor.

  [He laughs.]

  [Break]

  There’s always been that pull, but I assume … I mean you went to a good college, you knew about Louis Hartz and the liberal box. [I nod. I have no idea.] There’s always been some great … Louis Hartz is this political scientist who talks a lot about this difference between American politics, say, and Europeans. And that we don’t tend to get extremism with the kind of political influence here that there is in Europe. And that one reason is that there has been this peculiar kind of liberal centrism. That we’re very nervous about extremes.

  I don’t know about you, and I don’t know what your friends are like. But this seems to me to be a sadder, more hungry generation. And the thing that I get scared of is, when we’re in power, when we’re the forty-five-year-olds and fifty-year-olds. And there’s really nobody—no older—that no people older than us with memories of the Depression, or memories of war, that had significant sacrifices. And there’s gonna be no check on our, um, appetites. And also our hunger to give stuff away. And I’m aware—I’m again, I’m speaking as a private citizen, I do not know any other generation. I’m talking about kind of a feeling I have, that’s somehow way down in my stomach …

  You think this generation is more prone to—

  I think this generation has it worse or better than any other. Because I think we’re going to have to make it up. I think we’re going to have to make up a lot of our own morality, and a lot of our own values. I mean, the old ones—the ’60s and early ’70s did a marvelous job of just showing how ridiculous and hypocritical, you know, the old authoritarian Father’s-always-right, don’t-question-authority stuff was. But nobody’s ever really come along and given us anything to replace it with. Reagan gave us a kind—I mean, the Reagan spasm I think was very much a story about a desperate desire to get back to that. But Reagan sold the past. Reagan enabled a fantasy that the last forty years hadn’t taken place.

  And we’re the first generation—maybe people starting about my age, it started in ’62. We grew up sorta in the rubble of kind of the old system. And we know we don’t want to go back to that. But the sort of—this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we’re starting to see a generation die … on the toxicity of that idea.

  Dying in what ways? I mean, literally dying?

  I’m talking about the number of people that—I’m not just talking about drug addicts dying in the street. [Watch beeps again. I keep thinking it’s my watch in the bag.] I’m talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don’t believe in politics, and don’t believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Or who just … who don’t believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s just a whole lot else.

  And if you look for instance—some of the stuff’s in an essay about TV that was in that, I mean, and I’m kind of quoting it. But I really believe, that I think if there were one, like, archangel of this mentality, it’s Letterman. You know? Who’s the master of the deadpan, ironic echo of old truisms, that expose their vacuity. And his hip sophistication at seeing through them, and his hip invitation to us to join him in his superiority over them. And that it’s—Letterman for me is this fascinating trans … I mean, he is an archetype, it seems to me, of this era. I don’t see anybody or anything past him, except for extremists, you know? Rush Limbaugh, who uses a Letterman-like irony to ridicule liberal positions. But the device, the mind-set, is still there. I don’t know what’s going to come after it, but I think something’s gonna have to. I mean, something’s gonna have to.

  What do you think it will be?

  My guess is that what it will be is, it’s going to be the function of some people who are heroes. Who evince a real type of passion that’s going to look very banal and very retrograde and very … You know, for instance, people who will get on television, and earnestly say, “It’s extraordinarily important, that we, the most undertaxed nation on earth, be willing to pay higher taxes, so that we don’t allow the lower strata of our society to starve to death and freeze to death.” That it’s vitally important that we do that. Not for them, but for us.

  [But it’s funny, there’s a real detachment, almost aesthetic. Not that it’s good for the freezing, but for us. I don’t mention this.]

  You know? That our survival depends on an ability to look past ourselves and our own self-interest. And these people are going to look—in the climate, in the particular climate of our generation and MTV and Letterman, they’re going to look absurd. They’re going to look like, What do you call it? Pollyannas. Or, um, you know, suffragettes on soapboxes. They’re gonna come off bombastic and pretentious and self-righteous and smug and, um …

  But in a weird way, I think they’re … At some point, at some point I think, this generation’s gonna reach a level of pain, or a level of exhaustion with the standard, you know. … There’s the drug therapy, there’s the sex therapy, there’s the success therapy. You know, if I could just achieve X by age X, then something magical … Y’know? That we’re gonna find out, as all generations do, that it’s not like that.

  That at a certain point, we’re gonna look for something. And the question for me is, what?—is what comes after it? Some Ralph Reed, knuckle-draggin’, fundamentalist, you know? Easy atavistic bullshit that’s repressive and, that’s repressive and truly self-righteous and truly intolerant? Or is there going to be some kind of like, you know, something like what the founding fathers and the Federalists did. You know? Are we going to like look inside our hearts and decide that, things have been fucked up, and we’re going to make some rules that are good for everybody?

  … I want to argue two things with you that I’ve noticed about you since I’ve been with you since Tuesday. That when I mentioned my feelings for Pat Buchanan
, because of those same things?

  When you mentioned …?

  When I mentioned my affection for Pat Buchanan because he was at least talking about people who are in that, that you kind of smiled at me. Second thing is that, when I mentioned Pauline—that was why Pauline Kael was jazzed up by the end of Scrooged. When Bill Murray comes out and makes a speech that’s actually heartfelt, after having been a facetious prick for so long. She wrote a passionate thing about it. And yet you found that movie painfully bad. I think you may feel the conflict about wanting something that’s truthful, and then also being able to see through it. Those two poles are really really really powerfully in you in a way that you’re not aware of—

  [I’m doing his “really really really” thing too.]

  I’m aware of it to the extent that I make no pretense that I’m not firmly a member of my generation. And I do not claim I am exempt from any of the stuff that I seem to be indicting the generation about. What I’m talking about is, This is our job. This is our bed to lie in, you know? This is our—and I agree with you, there are reasons why I think—the end of Scrooged has been set up by so much elbow-nudging, broad, Bill Murray mugging for the camera, that I think the movie, in a cowardly way, undercuts any attempt to make a statement at the end.

  Because Pauline Kael found that brave and passionate in just the way that you’re asking for. For the same reasons. The essay she wrote on that movie was just what you’re talking about. … Because he had been the exemplar of that thing we were talking about on the airplane: that was the question from when he first showed up—was his thing “hip mock sincerity” or “mock hip sincerity”?