RH: How does it feel to go on a media tour
talking about the remoteness of media?
DS: The author tour is really a sort of weird
epilogue to Remote. I think the main thing that's
interesting for me is that I feel a lot of the book is
trying to do is to jam the wires in some way, fuck up the
whole operation. So for me, it's not a contradiction to be
doing a media tour because I'm just trying to throw a monkey
wrench into the whole process. I was doing a TV interview,
for example, and I put my hand over the camera lens. I'm
having that kind of fun with trying to break our reverential
view towards media culture. We can enjoy it for its weird
playground, but it's not to be taken too seriously, or it
can be enslaving.
RH: Some of the celebrities you choose to write
about (Bob Balaban, "Stuttering John" Melendez)
exemplify that sense of being in the middle of
things, but alienated from them at the same
time.
DS: Those two sections are essential to the book. I
view them in a way as bookends, alter egos to my own
identity that I identify with them -- or at least I pretend
to identify with them -- enormously as crucial scapegoats
within media culture. It's important how flawed they are:
Melendez through his stutter and generally ungainly manner;
Balaban through his whiny tone, passive-aggressiveness. The
viewer identifies with the hero who's handsome and mythic in
part by NOT identifying with somebody like Balaban, trying
to cast off the human qualities that he displays. We excise
out our human fallibility to imagine ourselves as being one
with Michael Douglas or whoever. And if those actors are
willing to play those kind of roles, it's a very difficult
bargain that they've made in the triangle between hero,
audience, and reviled character.
RH: It's an odd sort of self-identification, as
well.
DS: A lot of the book is about the masochism of the
viewing experience. Much of it is about voyeurism and
vicariousness and the ecstacy of the vicarious experience.
Part of that experience is quite passive, humiliating, and
in that way rather masochistic. I think there's a kind of
masochism in Melendez's performing relationship to Howard
Stern, but there's a similar masochism in the way that I'm
presenting myself in this book and on this tour as a weird
stalker of the celebrity gods. I'm using myself as a
representative of American obsession with beauty, celebrity,
and image. I think that at his best, Melendez does a
brilliant job of emptying out the starmaking machinery,
undermining the whole process of stardom. Balaban, I think,
is less consciously subversive, but there's still something
brave about his willingness to always play that type of
character. Part of it is that he's simply making a living
and has been typecast.
RH: One of the interesting scenarios of
revulsion and attraction in our relationship to
celebrities is when the hero and the reviled
character get collapsed into the same person. Like
Oprah.
DS: Oprah's interesting. I don't know how conscious
her strategy is, but she is admired for raising herself up
by her bootstraps to become an articulate host who tries to
address, for the most part, serious questions on domestic
issues. At the same time, she deconstructs that celebrity
and makes herself a star who can't be touched, but also a
human being who's extremely vulnerable, particularly in an
area that is of concern to many of the women who watch her:
her weight. You think of other talk show hosts, and they
don't have that combination to the degree that she has, and
it's something that has developed over years as well,
through her own revelations and endless discussion in the
tabloids.
RH: And every crisis that comes up around her --
the weight, the childhood abuse, the drug use in
the 1970s -- ultimately becomes an issue of self-
esteem, which mirrors our own self-loathing in
watching famous people on TV. So we're back to our
own reflections in the media...but what makes your
book different from other critiques of mass
culture?
DS: I was reading this column in the paper yesterday
where this guy was writing a diatribe about JFK, Jr. and his
latest fight with his girlfriend. How we shouldn't keep
pursuing him in the tabloids, what our fascination with
celebrities says about us, and so on. And I was trying to
figure out what made my book more than just a two-hundred
page version of that column. What was finally unsatisfying
about that column is that the author took on a tone in which
he tried to pretend that he was outside of the emotional
maelstrom of the story. If I were to do that story, I'd talk
about what watching JFK, Jr. meant to me: how I might wish
that I was as handsome as he is, or as rich, or that I know
people who were at Brown when he was. But it's not adequate
for media people to sit outside of the circus and judge it.
I hope that the appeal of my book is that I actually am
inside the tent, rooting through the elephant shit, as
seduced and beguiled and depressed as everybody else
watching.
RH: There are a lot of passages where you put
yourself through the wringer, especially in
revisiting your teenage and college angst, where
you hold up that self-loathing as well.
DS: I'm interested in art that has a strongly self-
reflexive quality. Writer/performers like Spalding Gray,
Dennis Leary, or Sandra Bernhard. Documentary filmmakers
like Ross McElwee and Errol Morris. People who know that
they are participating in the media process, and don't shy
away from that. I like work that has an autobiographical
element, a memoir element in which you're telling some kind
of confesional story, but is married to huge cultural
history, like McElwee in Sherman's March, or Gray in
Swimming to Cambodia. Quite personal, but weirdly
large and national at the same time.
I don't know if you're familiar with my previous novel,
Dead Languages, about a kid growing up with a
stutter. I grew up with a stuttering problem myself, and so
a recent interviewer was asking me how the issues raised
there tie into this book. I'm not sure I can encapsulate
it...but growing up, that woundedness, that vulnerability
and imperfection, made me want to exist in the perfect world
of media culture. The depth of that stutter made the fluid,
glib world of mass culture seductive and alluring. It
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, getting back to your
point about self-loathing; somehow there's a human lack,
from which we turn to mass culture as a refuge, but even as
it offers us refuge, it punishes us with deeper realms of
self-loathing, as we realize that we aren't like the
stars.
RH: That's why authors and directors appeal to
me so much, because they exist at a weird halfway
point. Their names are famous, but unlike film and
sports stars, they can walk down the street
unnoticed. We imprint on their work, not on their
face or body.
DS: If you can eat dinner at a good restaurant in
Cleveland without being recognized, you're probably not
famous. A lot of people who think of themselves as 'famous'
just aren't, not on that scale. People can be well-known
within their field, but being famous involved being known
outside that. If I'm at a writer's conference, I can be
famous sometimes within that tiny world, but I don't deal
with that all the time. In my tiny glimpses of what fame can
be like, though, I see how there's a private self that can
be very different from what the public is imprinting on your
face, your image.
At the end of this century, we as Americans seem to be
channeling many of our desires through celebrity and mass
culture. This book is a series of sketches based on that
idea. I don't have any sort of thesis as to why that is, but
I have some tentative thoughts, based on my own experiences.
Without being too self-helpish about it, I think that Remote
can be seen as a toolkit, where the reader can fashion his
or her own weird scrapbook of their relationship to popular
culture.
