Garfieldminusgarfield. And in this pitiful (and common) reverie, Jon Arbuckle let his life slip away, forever hoping that the camera would follow him, dramatize him, transform his pedestrian struggles into mass-consumed myth.
Seriously, though: I think Paul Simon was (as usual) decades ahead when, in the lyrics to “The Boy in the Bubble,” he associates with technology’s miraculous ascendancy over the physical world (and its simultaneous failure to resolve the violence of human nature) the ubiquity of spectacle: “The way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all…”
The latter half is the key: the universal pose of the watched is a reflection of what our recent obsession with visual narratives (film, television, the web) has done to our minds. We think of the way we look to us all. We’ve interiorized the perspective of the camera, of the audience; in our most private moments our minds record how we’d look to the confessional camera of a reality-TV show.
A corrosion of authenticity is inevitable in a culture of videographic mirrors, as surely as vanity would ensue if one were always surrounded by one’s reflection.
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