In the slides, I brought up Justice Antonin Scalia’s use of “Harrison Bergeron” in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion. Vonnegut is among the most quotable of 20th-century authors in English, dispensing quips, aphorisms, and confusing proverbs about the modern human condition. His genius is for simple, compressed phrasing that exposes depths of contradiction, joy, pain, or confusion:
Here’s an example: “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
How is this quotation relevant either to “Harrison Bergeron” or “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”? How do these stories see television and its social impact?
Or, if you prefer, how does the quotation shed light on an actual and widely televised death that “entertained us” in recent years? Perhaps some of the truth(s) in Vonnegut’s comment are proven by how often we see people dying on our screens.
I’ll go with the second question as it pretty nicely reopens a can of worms I’ve been wrestling with since the summer. Obviously, we all witnessed the George Floyd tragedy this summer and the nationwide response it provoked. In those first couple weeks–when the reactions were at their hottest–I often cynically skepticized about how long it would take folks to lose interest and move on. Now, in defense of that cynicism, if history–even the events of my own lifetime–proved anything, it was that these reactions are temporary; eventually, people lose steam, regardless of whether any manifest change had been made. That all being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the “white reaction” George Floyd’s death led to; it seemed the privileged majority was starting to care in a way it hadn’t prior. I found this puzzling, as in my eyes, the larger atrocity of the murder wasn’t simply that it happened–it was that it happened again. It happens all the time. Why was this last one the straw that broke the camel’s back–especially when an eerily similar tragedy occurred six years ago? The answer I landed on bears parallels to the Vonnegut quote. People reacted so passionately due to the video itself. The footage was crystal clear–high-definition; it was unsettlingly close to the scene; and it captured the entire death. Not only that, George Floyd was murdered in one of the slowest, most visually brutal ways possible; his life was literally choked out of him, and the video caught all of it. I agree with Chase’s opinion that “entertaining” is definitely not the appropriate adjective to describe these televised deaths. However, I do think Vonnegut is using that word to scrape at a larger complex. Though we aren’t “entertained” by watching such graphic videos, we are inarguably gripped. We’ve become desensitized to simply reading about the murders–desensitized to watching shaky body-cam footage of overheard gunfire and then a silhouette stumbling to the ground; the Floyd tape, on the other hand, shows a horrible death up close and personal.
In “Harrison Bergeron” the characters that have advantages are handicapped so everyone is equal in all aspects. This makes them want to just mindlessly watch TV to escape their handicaps like George or in the case of Hazel they are too unintelligent to want anything more than a television. This quote speaks to the way people watch TV. When people die on a screen we are emotionally disconnected from it so instead of being sad we see it as entertainment. This is exaggerated in “Harrison Bergeron” when Hazel sees her son die on the TV and cries but does not translate it into emotion.
“Harrison Bergeron” in the same vein sees television’s social impact as to desensitize people’s emotions and remove them from reality. When we watch television we may see things such as war where we would react with fear normally but since it is through a screen we sit emotionless. By watching TV we are shutting our brains off in a way and just absorbing information and images that the creators want us to see. In this dystopian world and in some parts of our world, the creators are the government. Since Vonnegut is an author and not a TV writer he is attacking the idea of visual media. Reading allows the people to think by projecting their own image of the text they are reading rather than being spoon fed everything.
Death has been normalized for us on screens. We have dissociated the on-screen death with the physical act of it happening to ourselves. They make us feel something, nonetheless. Happiness, sadness, revengeful or shell shocked that our favorite show would kill off our favorite characters (In a way like Fahrenheit 451). However, in the past year, we witnessed in so many murders on tv such as George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. Which the feelings I felt I cannot even put into words, but it led to a global civil rights movement. That’s why I might disagree with this quote that these horrible deaths did not entertain us, but more so enraged us. TV has gained so much importance in today’s society along with social media such as YouTube, its allowing these stories that were once silenced now being broad casted for the world to see. Thankfully the government has not created a device like that of HB which disrupts the higher thought process (but then again in other ways they have…).
I agree though to on Vonnegut’s comment and the overall sense of seeing death as entertainment on television. Why is it human nature to be fascinated death? It’s this weird twisted joke the universe is playing on us, but It’s the one thing that humans live for. We have created cultures, religions, beliefs all centered around this one entity. We are drawn to it. Lucky for us, we created the television that allow us to watch captured moments in time, and replay them over again infinitely. You could only guess what we do with this new technology? We record and watch death to be replayed several times. It’s the closest that some may get physically before it happens to us. It allows us to imagine what it could be like. No one imagines a horrible death for themselves, so witnessing one on tv, I would say is the ultimate hit of dopamine for us as humans.
This quote is relevant to “Harrison Bergeron” in that the entire story is exploring a society where they are just sitting and aimlessly watching tv. It is hard to discern reality from fiction, as Elise said, because everyone on TV has the same capabilities as you–everything is ultimately the same. Even after Harrison (and the “Empress”) die, Hazel has “tears in her eyes” and knows something sad happened on tv; she doesn’t understand enough to Geroge what happened. The nuances of a television program like we saw in “Harrison Bergeon” or the tv show watched in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” television is nothing more than something mindless to bring you in and forget your other problems.
In the second question, violence is something that draws people in. As Will says, it appeals to something primordial in us to search after viewing shootings, wars, violence, etc. In my Politics of Humanitarian, we talked about this in the context of aid organizations providing coverage of war and famine and using images of starving children to draw you in to donate. Also, the use of death in drawing in viewers for fictional shows, as Will mentioned, helps create more viewers and a feeling of a sense of connection. Watching Derek Shepard die on television after knowing him from 10+ seasons of Grey’s Anatomy sparks something in you, and you feel a deep sense of connection to a fictional character. Yet, as Elise said perfectly, that isn’t a sense of “deep connection”; it’s just our animalistic part of us who are looking for another hit of dopamine.
Isn’t it a bit ironic that the television death of the titular character in Harrison Bergeron is a moment that appears void of entertainment in its setting? Like Elise has said in her post, Hazel and George are unmoved and without reaction at witnessing the death of their son, such that it does just become a mindless spectacle. Vanity in the world of HB comes not in dying, but in the attempt to distinguish oneself as above another. It is a fruitless and fatal attempt by Harrison and his empress, one that is quelled without thought and perceived without feeling.
I am personally more drawn to the second part of this question and the nature of how we view death on television, both fictional and real. Spectators are drawn to violence. When there is news coverage of live shootings, murders, etc, it appeals to something primordial in the viewer. We view death with both fascination and fear, and keep coming back to carnage and its coverage even decades after the incident itself (9/11 remembrance, D-Day remembrance, footage of the Challenger are some immediate examples that come to mind. Even for fictional programming, episodes that have the strongest legacies are often remembered as “death episodes” (I think specifically of Grey’s Anatomy, Glee, and Orange is the New Black for having famously killed off significant characters). Violence and death in contemporary entertainment clearly awakens some instinct in its viewers to continue to employ it as a plot device, or even as the basis for a show in some cases.
The entertainment that Vonnegut speaks of isn’t thought-provoking, intellectual entertainment. Instead, it’s completely superficial and feeds that animalistic part of us that’s just looking for its next hit of dopamine. In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” the Schwartz patriarch has been watching the same TV show for 112 years. It’s quite literally impossible for a show that has been going on that long to have a cohesive storyline that’s insightful or provides commentary or literally anything of substance. It’s a shallow sitcom that gives Gramps juuust enough gratification that he still wants to live, but it also distracts him from thinking about the meaninglessness of living an eternal life (this story reminded me, ironically enough, of the TV show “The Good Place,” in which the inhabitants of heaven grow listless from eternal paradise).
In “Harrison Bergeron,” it’s a bit confusing what the purpose of TV programming even is. We often watch TV or movies that portray either intentionally unrealistic worlds or worlds that seem realistic, but are exaggerated for some purpose (e.g. comedy, like sitcoms). In HB, everyone on TV is supposed to have the exact same capabilities as you. You could literally do whatever the people on screen are doing, and thus, nothing is surprising or awesome or entertaining. When something that could provoke individualistic or intellectual thought comes up on the screen, Harrison’s uprising, Hazel is literally incapable of comprehending the greater meaning of this event (except for it’s “real sad”), and George is forced to keep his thoughts scattered. Thus, Harrison’s and his “empress'” murders become another mindless, albeit somewhat emotional, TV program.