Synthetic Emotions

While reviewing the novel "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West, one of my favorite professors gave a lecture on authenticity and the birth of television. Nathanael West would be more known if he had not died in his early thirty's in a car crash. He death was around the advent of sitcoms. He predicted that emotions would mirror the sentimentality of television shows.

Sitcoms have to 'speed up' emotions to fit the frame of a half an hour time slot. To interest the large American (and world) audience, you have to agree upon emotional responses (nothing risky or too edgy) and unify emotional response. T.V is not meant to instruct it's audience. It's aim is to pacify a work worn viewer; to zone out, stare, and enjoy.

The moral code for these emotional responses is always clique. Take a hallmark advertisement for example. The Christian happiness of a child receiving a puppy for Christmas. Heart warming, feel good emotional responses that make a person at ease in the world we live in day to day.

Unified emotions, sped up to fit their half hour time slot, watched continuously, might infect the viewer enough to 'borrow' socially agreed upon emotions as our own. You break up with your boyfriend, as a crass example. Borrow the emotional response from a popular show. In our society, everyone is so frantic to fit in and be considered normal (plus we are lazy) it is safer to borrow emotional responses from television then to create your own. And by this point you probably are so brainwashed with these contrived, synthetic responses that you don't know what to feel anymore.

Remember in Camus "The Stranger" how the protagonist was unsure if it was okay to drink coffee at his mother's funeral? This was before t.v. infected our lives. But still there was a moral stalling: wondering if it was socially acceptable to drink coffee at a funeral. We are so uptight about what is right and wrong that it seems only normal to live complacently through the television screen.

I am merely pointing out that t.v. shows do speed up emotions, unify them, and present them to us for our amusement. It's detrimental when we chose not to go with our natural emotions and instead borrow from what's in vogue. It's more detrimental when our subconscious does the borrowing, without us knowing. The next time you are forced to feel, make sure you feel from deep in your gut- and it's fine to be slobbering, hysterical, and beside yourself. We are living for an all too brief time on this planet. Our emotions are all we have to make us human. Not the automatons zoning out to the boob tube after a long day of robotic labor.