The Faces tell you what you want to hear

David Foster Wallace and the shift from TV to social media

David Foster Wallace was an addict. As in, he struggled with addiction to various illicit substances throughout his life, which resulted in attending AA and various of its offshoots as treatment for his struggle, which resulted in the depictions of AA and its adherents in Infinite Jest—arguably the novel’s strongest sections. But Wallace also possessed what we might call an addictive personality, whereby he found himself inclined to become addicted, as it were, to substances that were perfectly legal, if not exactly salutary. Sex, in some cases; exercise, in others; but above all, and most consequently to his art, to television.

Wallace was addicted to television, at certain points in his life, especially his youth. Part of the reason why he didn’t have a television in his home when he wrote Infinite Jest is that he feared its hold over him, as a drug addict would a needle. He consumed vast quantities of television, from sitcoms to primetime dramas, to daytime soaps and talk shows, to the schlocky infomercials that once aired at 3 in the morning and now appear in our newsfeed smack in the middle of the workday. He feared it would ruin his mind, which he valued immensely. But he also, like so many other writers who’ve struggled with addiction, from Frederick Exley to Denis Johnson, discovered that it makes for ideal literary subject matter.

Not just that, either. Television offered an unusual promise to Wallace and other writers of his generation, what one could loosely call Gen X of the American variety. An addictive substance that would enable the fiction writer to create the work he yearned for. Form and content both.

In his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”¹ he outlined the strange allure television held for writers like himself. The work that it promised, seemingly, to accomplish on their behalf.

If we want to know what American normality is — i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal — we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror that reflects the blue sky and mudpuddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is simply invaluable in terms of writing fiction. And writers can have faith in television. There is a lot of money at stake, after all; and television owns the best demographers applied social science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans in the 1990s are, want, see — what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

Writers can have faith in television. The medium is all about satisfying desire, which fiction should aim for as well. Wallace may have written this in the early 1990s, but he sounds an awful lot like fiction writers surveying the Golden Age of Streaming in the 2000s and early 2010s, when shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City were treating issues of work and love and morality with the level of detail once thought to be the purview of fiction. I can’t tell you how many times critics called The Wire “a visual novel.” Yet Wallace said something like this back in the era of Home Improvement and MacGyver. One of many ways in which he was remarkably, uncomfortably prescient.²

But the point I really want to focus on is Wallace's observation that television promises, though perhaps not deliverably so, to perform the fiction writer’s work for her.

The second great-seeming thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can't see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people.

Fiction-writers are supposed to observe human nature, the better to render it believably in their work. Yet one can only observe so much of humanity during the course of one’s daily life. You go to work, you go to the store, you come home to interact with your family, possibly. But turn on the TV and you can observe, not everyday people, but actors convincingly portraying everyday people, from doctors to cops to lawyers, to mothers and husbands and children. More convincing than their real-life counterparts, oftentimes. Who among us hasn’t been disappointed when our family physician fails to live up to the ideal of George Clooney on ER?

Television, for writers of Wallace’s generation, held the promise of doing this observational work for them. And even if one rebelled against that promise, which Wallace did, to say nothing of bonkers satirists like Mark Leyner, one still operated within the artistic space created by that televisual promise. It was a kind of public knowledge that readers could be expected to recognize, whether you leaned into it or against it.

But that was more than thirty years ago. Where do fiction-writers, along with everyone else, get their ideas as to what is, and is not, normal?

The answer, I think, is obvious: social media. And that answer creates a different set of expectations for writers to navigate.

++

The Faces: you know the ones I’m talking about. The Front-Facing Faces, the ones staring directly into your own face through the portal of the screen, in marked contrast to the faces on TV, which looked at each other and never directly at the camera, and managed to make that look normal instead of incredibly, existentially complex.

What do The Faces tell us? What do we tell them?

Wallace said that TV, in the 80s and into the early 90s, had raised a generation that knew every trick in the book, every hackneyed plot device and cliche, and TV responded in kind, creating shows that knew the tricks as well as them. Seinfeld got saddled with the ridiculous-yet-still-kinda-right sobriquet of being “a postmodern sitcom,” for the way it winked and nudged at the audience for the way it undercut the standard rules of TV. When George’s fiance Susan died, and the gang shrugged it off then went to the coffeeshop, the show acknowledged the viewers familiarity with, and contempt of, the standard sitcom of the group hug.

Not to sound like an elder millennial bemoaning the zoomers nowadays³, but part of what I fear The Faces have trained us to do is to banish that kind of irony from our own responses as viewers and consumers. We believe everything The Faces tell us. We are heartbroken when we learn that not everything The Faces tell us is real. We get defensive when we learn that tradwife influencers got their start via generational wealth, rather than gumption and spirit. We believe The Faces because we want, desperately, to believe in something, and worthy objects of belief are few and far between.

And look, I get that we love to look at The Faces. They’re pretty. They’re soothing. They say nice things. But can we bring back some sense, however meager, of Gen X jadedness? Do we have to take everything The Faces say as holy writ? Did Max Headroom labor in vain?

What made Wallace’s writing on television so effective, and affecting, was that he saw the TV screen as both mirror and window, displaying the viewer’s one grimy desires along with the TV’s tireless efforts to satisfy them. Yet so many of us today regard The Faces with fatal credulity, believing that’s all they are, no more: Faces, talking to us, telling us exactly what we want to hear, while ignoring the vast apparatuses that place us in such a position that we could even believe such a thing. Failing to recognize the habits they inculcate within us.

So look beyond The Faces, to the strings pulling them, creating each and every gesture. Then look in the mirror and see your own face repeat the same gestures, trained by some program whose name you were never told.

1. The essay first appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, and was reprinted in Wallace’s nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, in 1997. It is perhaps famous for its explication of the “MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA” passage from Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

2. The most out-of-left-field example of Wallace’s prescience comes in Infinite Jest, during a furtive description of the titular film. Infinite Jest, created by experimental filmmaker James O. Incandenza shortly before he took his won life by affixing his head securely in a microwave, is a film that is so entertaining, so engrossing, that anyone who watches it is compelled to keep watching it, forever, never moving, never even eating, to the point where one dies of starvation while remaining entertained. But what makes IJ so fatally entertaining? We get some kind of answer through a character named Joelle Van Dyne, a young woman of striking beauty, employed by Incandenza during his filmmaking. Joelle recounts that, for one of the shoots, she dressed up in a black lace mantilla and looked into an unusual camera (specially created by Incandenza) and cooed baby talk incessantly. This is the film: a work that, via technology, recreates the experience of being an infant basking in mother’s love eternally, to the point where one loses all other desire.

The film is thus, from the perspective of today, a proto-ASMR video. Endlessly looping like the selfsame YouTube videos comforting the digitally lonely.

3. (but yes of course that’s what I am obviously)