Not
having been in the States for almost 24 years and not owning a television, I
cannot always determine the status of that which is presented to me taped and
sometimes experience feelings of unreality as a result. Actually, I am not at
all sure that I would be any less confused about the reality of what I might be
viewing if I was back in
In
the case of "The Fruitcake Lady" it was entirely clear to me that it
is a show, even before knowing that the links were from a Jay Leno site. OK. No
questions there.
Sometimes
matters are not that straightforward, though. Not having been in the states and
witnessing the development of the "entertainment" industry, and
finding that Western society blows my mind and seems unreal all too often
(especially when it transpires that it is all too real); I get confused about
whether something implausible that has been videotaped is real or a put-on if I
am not prompted beforehand as to what exactly what I'm going to be viewing.
The
oxymorons in the entertainment industry confound me.
They are myriad, so I find myself feeling confounded more often than I should
expect to. E.g., what the hell is a "reality show"? Since when
do stiff upper lipped British MPs, who
were formerly renowned for their dignified reserve, get down on all fours and
act like cats and cavort in red leotards with someone, one breast exposed,
whose gender is indeterminate? (Since when is gender entirely
independent of sex? But I digress.) Now that I think about it, why have
so many ex-actors made the transition to being politicians so easily? I thought
that then actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was acting in the film "The
Terminator". Now, as Governor of
the State of
Do
you remember the film Mondo Cane? The 1962 movie was
considered "shock cinema". Today, images far more shocking, perverse
and utterly revolting are not supposed to shock people at all, but rather serve
as light-headed and light-hearted entertainment, and one is considered peculiar
if they do feel that those images assault his or her sensibilities. TV is
filled with images that make Mondo Cane look tame. If
one protests that they are sickened by those images and suggestions, the person
is considered overly sensitive, overly religious, or just plain over the hill.
Sites
like scopes.com and the search that someone on an e-list conducted in order to
determine the status of the film clip bespeak the fact that I am hardly alone
in this confusion. It's not at all clear
even to people who have been steeped in Western culture all their lives if what
they are viewing or reading on the net is real, some weird chimera of reality
and staging, urban legend, a put-on...Note how often the scopes.com site will
label a given story partially true, or something to that effect. Those are the
buggers. Give me the truth or a damn lie anytime, but when they create
pernicious, predatory species of mental picture-inducing and emotion-stirring
images and suggestions by splicing and concatenating the plausible and the
implausible ostensibly willy-nilly (but I'll bet dollars to donuts it's
painstakingly crafted to be conflating and emotionally overexciting, thus
numbing) into some indeterminate filmed production, evolution has not provided
me with a mechanism for defending myself against that. There are no such images
in nature and I am at a loss. I feel like the child who, emerging from a wax
museum, asks: "Am I real?", only there's a far more sinister air to
it all.
There
is a description on the psychiatry books for that state: borderline experience. When a person has been assaulted by the
unthinkable and by that which the brain is not equipped to process more times
than the brain can recover from, i.e., has had more borderline experiences than
the psyche can heal from, a syndrome results - Borderline Personality
Syndrome. The prognosis for BPS is far
more pessimistic than for Schizophrenia. The mass media are inducing Borderline
Personality Disorder in the masses and I don't believe for a moment that it is
unintentional or not serving someone's purpose.
Doreen
Ellen Bell-Dotan,