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 _____________________________________________________________________
 CTHEORY          THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE          VOL 22, NO 3

 Event-scene 84   99/11/30       Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
 _____________________________________________________________________

 Spectres of America: The Graduation
 ===================================

 ~Ralph Melcher~

 The way I figure it...the only way we are going to make it into the
 next century with any grace at all will be in some kind of altered
 state...I mean, a state that is radically altered from what we have
 mostly come to assume is real. Like Lester Burnham in the film
 _American Beauty_ we've come to accept too many habitual patterns of
 fear and guilt and suffering as the defining notes of our existence.
 We demand from each other little more than that we happily (or not)
 re-enforce one another's laboriously crafted cages.

 In its themes the film _American Beauty_ can be seen as a
 revisitation of _The Graduate_, another movie that in its time
 served to identify an entire generational struggle with the angst and
 meaninglessness of the postwar world. When _The Graduate_ was made,
 in 1967, my generation was just beginning its arc toward
 self-definition. We were awakening to the fact that the definitions
 of reality accepted by our elders lacked what we thought we needed,
 essentially, to survive. Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffmann
 character, gave us a clear image of how we felt, adrift, caught
 between worlds, feeling alternately stifled and abused. We wanted
 only to escape the constricted and paranoid expectations of a
 generation that had survived a victory over fascism only to succumb
 to a vision of post-modern suburbia.

 At the end of _The Graduate_, the two lovers find themselves riding a
 city bus, detached and disoriented, having scaled the castle walls
 like Buddha, facing the inquisitive eyes of a suffering world
 outside. 30 years later, like Lester Burnham in _American Beauty_, we
 find ourselves curled in our SUVs, wondering where our lives have
 gone and how we became as lost and bewildered as our parents. We are
 puzzled and horrified, because our children seem to be as alienated
 as we were.

 Just where has the bus taken us? What kind of world have we created?

 Many in succeeding generations consider our generation's own apparent
 fall from grace to be a more unforgivable crime than whatever came
 before, because we came so close to imagining something better. We
 paused long enough to erect the images of revolution, but then we
 were caught in the almost irresistible historical current of a
 century steeped in war and the dream of a technological paradise.
 Although we perceived and resisted the trends of ongoing
 environmental and cultural abuse, the corporatization of everyday
 life, and the burying of our better impulses and higher knowledge
 under the detritus of denial, we were largely swept along by the
 tides of endless innovation and the pressure to "succeed."

 Still, something carried through, something wasn't forgotten. My
 parents' world was shaped by the bestial global insanity of World War
 II. The fearful social barriers they carefully constructed were a
 reaction to the demonic extremes of a world at war with itself. When
 my generation began to come of age, impatient with the routines of
 safety and supplication, we unloosed a seal long set on the grave of
 time and allowed the angels and demons to fly free. In our Dionysian
 hubris we opened ourselves to ecstasies not known in hundreds of
 years, and for our visions we paid the price of ecstasy's shadow,
 exposing ourselves to whole new breeds of addictive and obsessive
 behavior, the modern forms of demonic possession.

 As a culture we are at home in altered states. In fact, it can be
 said that we're a culture on a collective shamanic journey. We devote
 an immense amount of resources and attention generating and sharing
 our images and dreams. Storytellers and sorcerers are at the leading
 edge of cultural innovation. Technology, in fact, has become the
 primary vessel of our collective imagination as well as the purveyor
 of our visions of past and future.

 We are like infants in a new world. Having learned to see, we do not
 yet know how to walk. We are fascinated with the image to the degree
 that many of us spend a large part of our days in an altered trance
 state of television viewing, having all but lost the ability to
 distinguish between trance and reality. We are like Benjamin Braddock
 in _The Graduate_, escaping what we know is an insane world by
 floating face down in a swimming pool, endlessly caught in the
 patterns of light on water, unwilling to come up even for air.

 For storytellers, and those living at the edges of collective life,
 looking back toward the center and revealing what is seen, there is a
 clear imperative to make us more aware of body and soul and the link
 between them. To merely indulge in recreating the dissonant and
 deadly world of corporate greed disguised as entertainment is no
 longer conscionable.

 In the modern world we have all become so involved in a maze of
 sorcery and magic that what we decide to watch is what then becomes
 real. In a world so completely skewed toward the visual, things are
 not perceived as real unless they are seen. Yet, the visual can be so
 totally manipulated, and is, that it becomes harder and harder for us
 to believe what we see. The overall effect of being caught in this
 paradox is numbness, resignation and apathy. Although we sense the
 suffering and imbalance at the periphery of our vision, it's easier
 and more comforting to surrender to a theme park version of the world
 crafted by the people who think they are in control.

 In one of my favorite movies by David Cronenberg, the statement is
 made that "...the battle for the minds of North America will be
 fought in the video arena...the Videodrome." Of course we all have
 come to know this to be true. The battle is on between sorcerers and
 shamans in a land of vision. In the world of television, the forces
 of social management are firmly in control. Partly because of the
 commercial demographic priorities of the people in charge and partly
 because of the nature of the image itself, television rarely if ever
 transcends the droning banality of the entertainment trance.

 The televised image is small and sketchy and can only represent
 reality through a rather limited vocabulary of outlines and icons.
 Whatever is shown on television is immediately transmuted to the
 level of symbol, at least one step removed from any context of flesh
 and blood. This is why, invariably, when a person is exposed to
 television beyond a certain threshold, the ability to discriminate
 between the quality of images all but disappears. We find ourselves
 either endlessly flipping channels or simply lost in a trance in
 which commercials, news, sitcoms, talk and game shows, and anything
 else that happens to be on washes over us and we are neither able to
 effectively distinguish between them or to turn them off.

 The movies are a little more encouraging. Here, the storyteller has a
 much wider visual palette and has an audience that has made a more
 deliberate and conscious choice to come and see these particular
 images. Competition between cinema and television for the attention
 of the public encourages moviemakers toward more innovation and
 relevance while the distribution structure has led to a diversity of
 cinema venues not directed exclusively at some fictional average
 viewer. The proliferation of less expensive and more sophisticated
 technology has placed the tools of moviemaking in the hands of a
 wider cross section of the population, so that more and different
 stories can be told.

 Movies seem to be getting smarter while television keeps getting
 dumber. These trends are likely to continue for years to come. The
 most sophisticated images on television are in commercials, devoted
 toward reinforcing a carefully crafted marketing image. The purpose
 of commercial television is to sell merchandise, and television will
 continue in the predictable future to function as the primary tool
 for social engineering. Since news management achieved new heights
 during the war in Iraq and fell to new lows during the Clinton
 Impeachment hearings, television has managed to convince most people
 that it is absolutely the least reliable source for information. The
 total corporatization of the media (as documented in Michael Mann's
 film, _The Insider_) has put the final kibosh on anyone taking
 anything or anyone on television seriously.  The best thing about
 television is that it's sort of a corporate subsidized training
 ground for the directors and cinematographers who may one day make an
 impact in the movies.

 While television languishes in growing mediocrity the movies and
 other digital forms of communication (i.e. the computer) attract
 artists after alternative expressive forms that have power to make us
 actually see our lives differently. Thanks to television the movies
 have become a marginal form, and thanks to the competitive nature of
 capitalism marginal forms are driven to strive for original qualities
 in order to overcome their marginalization.

 Except for the occasional tape of the _X-Files_ or an occasional
 Public Television news segment, I personally stopped watching
 network television years ago and don't feel that anything is
 missing from my life as a result. I'm certainly not less informed or
 less entertained. On the contrary, every moment not spent in the
 trance world of the tube is a moment of creative rebellion against
 powers that would otherwise control the way I perceive my everyday
 life.

 (Movies on VCRs may transcend the television trance to the degree
 that we choose to honor the ritual of cinema...a delicate line
 between surrender to the spirit of the artist or the spirit of
 commerce...made more challenging by the degraded quality of the
 image. We come to the theater as we come to a church.)

 I encourage an effort to become more aware of the conscious intent
 behind the images to which we expose ourselves. It's the only way we
 can detach ourselves from the deadening apathy and parched conformity
 of the times. When living in a world created by sorcerers it behooves
 one to learn the intent behind their spells. Americans have given too
 much of their lives to those who would manage us as commodities. When
 reality is appropriated by those who want to sell us a lifestyle we
 feel lost and alone and painfully conscious of the fact that
 something important has gone missing. Fortunately, as Lester Burnham
 says in _American Beauty_, "...it's never too late to get it back!"

 _____________________________________________________________________
 Ralph Melcher is a freelance editor and essayist living in Santa Fe,
 New Mexico.
 _____________________________________________________________________

 * CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology
 *   and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews
 *   in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
 *   theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
 *
 * Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
 *
 * Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Austin),
 *   R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln),
 *   Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San Francisco),
 *   Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Geert Lovink (Amsterdam),
 *   Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston),
 *   Andrew Ross (New York), David Cook (Toronto),
 *   William Leiss (Kingston), Shannon Bell (Downsview/York),
 *   Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Sharon Grace (San Francisco),
 *   Marie-Luise Angerer (Vienna), Hans Mohr (Howe Island),
 *   Alberto Perez-Gomez (Montreal), Robert Adrian X (Vienna),
 *   Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein (Chicago),
 *   Patrice Riemens (Amsterdam), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
 *
 * In Memory: Kathy Acker
 *
 * Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
 *   Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Sweden).
 *
 * Editorial Assistant: Grayson Cooke
 * World Wide Web Editor: Carl Steadman

 ____________________________________________________________________
                To view CTHEORY online please visit:
                     http://www.ctheory.com/

             To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
                   http://ctheory.concordia.ca/
 ____________________________________________________________________

 * CTHEORY includes:
 *
 * 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
 *
 * 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
 *
 * 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
 *
 * 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
 *
 * CTHEORY is sponsored by New World Perspectives and Concordia
 *   University.
 *
 * No commercial use of CTHEORY articles without permission.
 *
 * Mailing address: CTHEORY, Concordia University, 1455
 *   de Maisonneuve, O., Montreal, Canada, H3G 1M8.
 *
 * Full text and microform versions are available from UMI,
 *   Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale
 *   Canada, Toronto.
 *
 * Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
 *   Documentation politique international; Sociological
 *   Abstract Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political
 *   Science and Government; Canadian Periodical Index;
 *   Film and Literature Index.
 _____________________________________________________________________


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