O Verily was, understandably, a madhouse. The time from initial pitch to live broadcast was 31 hours. The Suffering Channel would enter stage three at 8:00 PM CDT on 4 July, ten weeks ahead of schedule, with three tableaux vivant. There were five different line producers, and all of them were very busy indeed.
It was not Sweeps Week; but as the saying goes in cable, every week is Sweeps Week.
A 52 year old grandmother from Round Lake Beach IL had a growth in her pancreas. The needle biopsy w/ CAT assist at Rush Presbyterian would be captured live by a remote crew; so would the activities of the radiology MD and pathologist whose job was to stain the sample and determine whether the growth was malignant. The segment entailed two separate freelance crews, all of whom were IA union and on holiday double time. The second part of the feed would be split screen. In something of a permissions coup, they’d have the woman’s face for the whole ten minutes it took for the stain to set and the pathologist to scope it. She and her husband would be looking at a monitor on which the pathology crew’s real time feed would be displayed—viewers would get to see the verdict and her reaction to it at the same time.
Finding just the right host for the segments’ intros and voiceovers was an immense headache, given that nearly every plausible candidate’s agent was off for the Fourth, and that whomever The Suffering Channel cast they were then all but bound to stick with for at least one stage three cycle. Finalists were still being auditioned as late as 3:00 PM—and Style magazine’s Skip Atwater, in a move whose judgment was later questioned all up and down the editorial line, ended up devoting a good part of his time, attention, and shorthand notes to these auditions, as well as to a lengthy and somewhat meandering Q&A with an assistant to the Reudenthal and Voss associate tasked to the day’s multiform permissions and releases.
In 1996, an unemployed arc welder was convicted of abducting and torturing to death a Penn State coed named Carole Ann Deutsch. Over four hours of high quality audiotape had been recovered from the suspect’s apartment and entered into evidence at trial. Voiceprint analysis confirmed that the screams and pleadings on the tapes—which were played for the jury, though not in open court—belonged to the victim. This tableau’s venue was a hastily converted OVP conference room. For the first time, Carole Ann Deutsch’s widowed father, of Glassport PA, would listen to selections from those tapes. There with him for support are the associate pastor from Mr. Deutsch’s church and an APA certified trauma counselor whose sunburn, only hours old, presents some ticklish problems for the segment’s makeup coordinator.
Longtime People’s Court moderator Doug Llewellyn hosts. After lengthy and sometimes heated negotiations—during which at one point Mrs. Anger herself had to be contacted at home and enjoined to speak directly by cell to R. Vaughn Corliss, which Ellen Bactrian later said made her just about want to curl up and die—representatives of both the ACLU and the League of Decency are on hand for brief interviews by Skip Atwater of Style.
It is a clear Lucite commode unit atop a ten foot platform of tempered glass beneath which a video crew will record the real time emergence of either an iconically billowing and ecstatic Monroe or a five to seven inch Winged Victory of Samothrace, depending on dramatic last minute instructions. Suspended from the studio’s lighting grid to a position directly before the commode unit, a special monitor taking feed from below will give the artist visual access to his own production for the first time ever in his career. He believes what he sees will be public.
In point of fact, the piece’s physical emergence will not really be broadcast. The combined arguments of Style’s Ellen Bactrian and the Development heads of O Verily Productions finally persuaded Mr. Corliss it would be beyond the pale. Instead, the artist’s wife has been interviewed on tape respecting Brint Moltke’s abusive childhood and the terrific shame, ambivalence, and sheer human suffering involved in his unchosen art. Edited portions of this interview will compose the voiceover as TSC viewers watch the artist’s face in the act of creation, its every wince and grimace captured by the special camera hidden within the chassis of the commode’s monitor.
A consciência é o pesadelo da natureza.
It is, of course, malignant. Subsequently, though, Carole Ann Deutsch’s father discomfits everyone by seeming less interested in the tapes than in justifying his appearance on the broadcast itself. His purpose for being here is to inform the public of what victims’ loved ones go through, to humanize the process and raise awareness. He repeats this several times, but at no point does he share how he feels or what he feels he’s gone through just now, listening. In the context of what he and the viewers have just heard, Mr. Deutsch’s reaction comes off as almost obscenely abstract and disengaged. On the other hand, Doug Llewellyn’s own evident humanity and ad lib skill in getting everyone through the segment testify to the soundness of his casting.
A slow chain pulls the commode assembly up an angled plane until the unit locks into place atop its Lucite pipe. Mrs. Moltke’s been allowed in the control room. Virgil ‘Skip’ Atwater and the Reudenthal and Voss paralegal are back against one wall, out of the arc lights’ wash, the journalist’s whole face flushed with ibuprofen and hands folded monkishly over his abdomen. At the base of the plane, Style’s freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn’s wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss. The Malina blanket for the artist’s lap and thighs, however, is the last minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an apprentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare—the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, the story collections Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair, the book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and, most recently, Everything and More. His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize and John Train Prize for Humor, and the O. Henry Award. He evidently lives in California.
* Team Δy’s term for their Focus Groups’ moles was Unintroduced Assistant Facilitators, whose identities were theoretically unknown to the facilitators in pure double-blinds, though in practice they were usually child’s play to spot.(back to text)
* = Market Research Oversight and Planning(back to text)
* = Manual Adjusting Mechanism(back to text)
* also, somewhat confusingly, = MAM(back to text)
* = Presentations to Client Agency(back to text)
† = Overall Campaign Concept(back to text)
* = Wrongful Termination(back to text)
* = Intervals of Multiple Product Consumption(back to text)
† The emetic prosthesis consisted of a small polyurethane bag taped under one arm and a tube of ordinary clear plastic running up the rear of the left shoulder blade to emerge from the turtleneck through a small hole just under my chin. The contents of the bag were six of the little cakes mixed with mineral water and real bile harvested by means of OTC emetic first thing this AM. The bag’s power cell and vacuum were engineered for one high-volume emission and two or three smaller spurts and dribbles afterward; they were to be activated by a button on my watch. The material wouldn’t actually be coming out of my mouth, but it was a safe bet that nobody would be looking closely at the point of exit; people’s automatic reaction is to avert their eyes. The C.P.D.’s transmitter’s clear earpiece was attached to
my glasses. The scope’s Mission Time said 24:31 and change, but the presentation already seemed much longer. We were all of us anxious to get down to business already.(back to text)
* (who in fact, unbeknownst to Awad, was an old friend and Limited Partnership crony of Alan Britton from way back in the previous decade’s Passive-Income Tax Shelter heyday)(back to text)
* (venues 1-4 historically comprising TV, Radio, Print, and Outdoor [= mainly billboards])(back to text)
† = ANalysis Of VAriance model, a hypergeometric multiple regression technique used by Team Δy to establish the statistical relations between dependent and independent variables in market tests.(back to text)
* Britton knew all about Laleman trying to jew him out to A.C. Romney-Jaswat; who did the smug puppy think he was dealing with; Alan S. Britton had been contending and surviving when this kid was still playing with his little pink toes.(back to text)
* One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate—which we do, it’s the only way you can—95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.—how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END.(back to text)
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories
(Series: # )
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