Thoughts & News
Reality Hunger
03/18/2009
The police in Milpitas, CA, are going to make arrests in a case because someone video-phoned the fight and then uploaded it on YouTube. At the 2:42 mark, the video moves inside the Vietnamese restaurant. You can see how quickly things get out of control.
What’s remarkable about the video is that you get to see how people really fight. In real life, as opposed to movies, it’s never fair. The guy has no chance. They’re breaking chairs and tables over his head, sucker-punching him—and then that last kick to the face. The guy who kicks him is either really mad about something or just evil. It’s the most awful thing to do: kick someone like that when he has no chance. You really feel this restaurant fight. Scorsese can’t come close to matching this realism.
Another thing you’re getting with these phone-videos is spontaneous commentary. The person with the phone, who’s shooting the images, is usually talking while the event is going on, or friends are talking as the phone films. You have a narrator of sorts with the phone, as in this fight scene: the girl who’s filming sounds a little ditzy, but you can feel her emotions (“Oh my god!”), spontaneous because she’s watching the fight and commenting live (no editing). She’s feeling the emotions in person, while we feel them through the computer screen.
We suffer from reality hunger. We crave this stuff. It’s what we’re after: feeling the emotions of others, their pain, as we’re shut up safe in our houses—cut off from our own emotions. We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else’s joy or woe. The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger dose in order to experience the thrill. “Reality”—the idea that something really happened—is providing us with that thrill right now. We’re riveted by the rawness of something that appears to be direct from the source, or at the very least less worked over than a polished mass-media production. Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,” semblances of the real. We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication—autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments which, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter. A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored.
What was it like witnessing this free-for-all? Was someone dialing 911? Did you think you were going to die? Did you think guns were going to go off? Did you think Columbine? Virginia Tech? Nick Berg? Hǒa Lò? Will you sleep okay? Do you need therapy? We’ll get you on Dr. Phil next week.
The Thing About Life in paperback
03/01/2009
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead was reissued in paperback by Vintage in February 2009.
The book appeared on New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the best books of the year by Amazon, Salon, ArtForum, TimeOut Chicago, and the Seattle Times.
On Amazon, Jon Foro said, “David Shields’s litany of decay and decrepitude might have overwhelmed the age-sensitive reader (like this one), but The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead manages to transcend the maudlin by melding personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an ‘autobiography about my body’ that seeks meaning in death and, moreover, life. Shields filters his frank—and usually foreboding—data through his own experience as a 51-year-old father with burgeoning back pain, contrasting his own gloomy tendencies with the defiant perspective of his own 97-year-old father, a man who has waged a lifelong, urgent battle against the infirmities of time. Shields’s book is a surprisingly moving and life-affirming embrace of the human condition, where inevitable failures and frailties become ‘thrilling’ and ‘liberating,’ rather than dour portents of The End.”
David Shields on Facebook