ain’t really your life,
ain’t really ain’t nothing but a movie.
Repeat.
Ad infinitum.

Was reminded today, after reading a superb review of Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated, of how much my life resembles a B movie.  A really, really unoriginal B movie.  Thoroughly mediated.  Thoroughly cliche.

Can you think of any moment in your life where you didn’t compare your experience, you didn’t size it all up to something else, some representation of how you were supposed to feel about that specific moment.  Your mind drifts from it, going over your options.  How would [your favorite cinematic hero] react?  How should I be feeling, according to [your favorite vapid self-help author]?  How would this feel with [your favorite indie tune]?  I always thought it would feel like this.  Or that.  But right now, it feels like nothing.

Our lives overflow with simulated experience, representations of the way things are supposed to be, according to some perverted, misguided nostalgia — and the full-toothed (with whitening!) shit-eating grins of happy glad-hands.  Everyone is content with telling you how or what or when to feel.  But no one is content with just letting you be. Everywhere you are (re)presented with possible versions of yourself, all created by someone else seemingly for you, optional selections on the shelves of the identity supermarket.  And as you queue in the aisle waiting to get your hands on that version of yourself, the one that will make you feel oh-so-whole again, that other version at the end starts looking mighty good.  Steeped in overchoice and ceaseless flattery, in the end, all you become is “a perpetual motion machine of self-reflexivity and inauthenticity,” to hijack the trenchant observation of Maura R. O’Conner, the most eloquent author of said review.

Say hello to the Blob.  Thomas de Zengotita’s metaphor for the postmodern condition afflicting us all.  My mind gives it form by imagining a head covered with a thin plastic bag.  The sheer, deceivingly elastic and transparent material adheres to the mouth as it gasps for air while covering the face with a milky, opaque surface that distorts its true shape and form.  I feel the Blob to be equally nebulous and suffocating, inasmuch as it stands between me and the “truth” — the raw, the unmediated.  If there exists such a thing.

“It proceeds so variously. It works on a case-by-case basis. It comes from all directions and no direction. Nothing is too great for its textured ministrations. Its elasticity is without limit, its osmotic processes calibrated to enfold the tiniest, most private gestures of your secret life and contain your sense of the universe and the meaning of love and death as well.”

Everything and everyone, thoroughly buffered from reality.  Even in death we must suffocate on the representation of our own expiration, played back to us as reruns of motion pictures or daytime dramas.  Not even the throes of death can interrupt the Blob.  Nor collective tragedies.

“Watch as the media antibodies swarm to the scene of those nascent interruptions. These are the junctures that require the most coverage—and the latent meaning, the ironic dialectic implicit in that word, emerges. What must be covered is any event or person or deed that might challenge the Blob with something like a limit, something the Blob cannot absorb. . . .” To these challenges the Blob will “devote some extra time . . . but in the end it prevails. And how is the moment of its victory marked? By your indifference. That’s the signal to move on, the signal for the Next Thing to appear. That’s when the original of the real thing has been fully mediated. It becomes representational, and that means optional.”

So we are left skimming the surface, occasionally dipping in when the water is warm.  But as a friend once reminded me

all’s shallow in a world of surfaces.