Remote
by David Shields
Knopf
Reviewed by Ron Hogan
Remote
by David Shields
Knopf
Reviewed by Ron Hogan
e live our lives surrounded by the artifacts of mass culture: films, TV shows, baseball cards, even bumper stickers. Without realizing it in most cases, we take those artifacts, latch on to them and invest them with emotional significance, using them to shape and define our own existence. In his latest book, Remote, David Shields examines that process, using his own life (or a stylized version of it) as a prominent example.
Remote is an unusual book -- it is neither fiction nor non-fiction in the strictest sense of either term. Think of it as a "theoretical fiction," perhaps. Each of the 52 chapters presents a meditation on some form of popular culture; in the first section, for example, Shields describes the experience of sitting in the studio audience during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Before the book is over, he'll have attended a taping of "America's Funniest Home Videos," interviewed cast members of "Northern Exposure," stood in line to get a baseball card signed, and suffered a chance encounter with O. J. Simpson in an ice cream shop. Every situation allows Shields to wonder aloud, as it were, about his relationship to the stars and the world that they represent. What is it about them that I/we find so appealing? What does that say about our own self-esteem?
Two significant chapters of the book are his extended analyses of Howard Stern's sidekick Stuttering John and the character actor Bob Balaban. Both men, he argues, take on roles that emphasize qualities that viewers find unappealing, all too human. Balaban plays neurotic, whiny film characters who serve as counterpoints to the perfect heroes, while Stuttering John strips away the glamor and mystery of celebrities by asking questions which bring them down to their most human levels.
Shields-as-narrator self-consciously combines elements of both men. He realizes that our participation in the media culture is inevitable.
We're going to be viewers whether we like it or not, but that doesn't mean that we have to be complacent viewers. Remote (and Shields) takes part in mass culture, while actively questioning it and his own role in it, never accepting what is seen or heard at face value. By making himself so relentlessly ordinary, Shields ultimately suggests that this self-interrogation is possible for all of us.
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
