Entertainment that denies death — the loss of eschatology
echoes
From: Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
- Early text: "try to recall the last time you saw the “hero” die
within his drama’s narrative frame"; heroes made "immortal" so that "We the
audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of
eschatology, thus of teleology," and "if we forget how to die, we’re going to
forget how to live." We are the only animals "who would submit so cheerfully
to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth" — death.
[the eschatology passage] [e-text]
- IJ echo: IJ's death/entertainment nexus — an Entertainment so pleasurable
it is lethal, a culture whose managed pleasures deny death (the
Marathe/Steeply debate on a nation dying of its own pleasure-freedom; the
entertainment-casualties). The 1988 essay names the mechanism — entertainment
that edits out death and so hollows out life — eight years before the novel
literalizes it in a film that kills by pleasure.
- Weight: prefiguration