Screen time

I spent this past weekend in Boston with my girlfriend, visiting her family. In the spirit of this quasi-vacation, I took along some light reading: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, a copy of which I picked up on the cheap at a liquidating Border's.

The book's reputation had me expecting a shocking, polarizing experience. This was not the case. The sex and violence were graphic, but I've watched enough Saw movies and episodes of Dexter (the protagonist of which is reputedly based on American Psycho's Patrick Bateman) that cartoonish depictions of serial killer mayhem don't really faze me. The book's critique of consumerism also isn't anything new. Most people my age had recognized, internalized, and eventually rejected Fight Club's message by the time they were sixteen. All of that being said, the book was often hilarious and a lot of fun to read. Bateman is certainly an unforgettable character, in spite of his self-diagnosed vacancy.

A certain tangential passage from the book's second half caught my eye. Sandwiched between his posh hang-out regime and a line about deoderant:

"There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views of the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workings retrieving body parts."


This idea is creepily prescient for a book that was published in 1991. While cable news was firmly entrenched at that point and America was watching its first TV war, the 24-hour news cycle and camera obsession of the internet age were still almost a decade off. It would be ten years before the 9/11 attacks--the ur-moment of cable news disaster porn--occurred in the same Financial District that so much of American Psycho takes place in.

The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast just experienced a disaster that virtually everyone was supposed to feel but most people simply watched on the Weather Channel. It's getting to the point where the constant screen time makes these events feel less real, rather than more.