Who
invented expectation? We know the Lumiere brothers and a small
army of others assisted at the birth of motion pictures, Guglielmo
Marconi and another brigade at radio’s development, and
V.K. Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth in the diffusion of television,
but why have we not heard a name connected to the super-mass
medium of expectation?
One
plausible answer would be someone connected to the advertising
business, the industry that plays with public anticipation as
its raison d’etre; whatever the product or brand
name, advertising’s foremost commodity has always been
the prospect, the promise, the hope. Or maybe the pioneer was
some forgotten figure in cybernetics -- that field where what
is delivered is all but redundant to the capacity for being
so and where the most trivial of delays prompts computer rage.
Then there are the candidates lurking in our cultural vanity,
where pursuing happiness or anything else desirable is to be
viewed as merely a warm-up lap to obtaining it. Whoever it is,
I would like a name, a specific identification. That’s
one of 'my' expectations.
I
first acknowledged the super-medium of expectation a moment
after it was too late, when I was already captive to it. Like
somebody standing on an ATM line who is irritated that the person
ahead of him requires 45 rather than 40 seconds to complete
his transaction, it has been a post-contaminant epiphany. Understanding
alleviates nothing; if anything, clarity is offensive for not
having delivered the obvious previously.
For
good reason. Expectation has been around a long time. One of
its oldest manifestations, for example, came once upon a time
when a television announcer for a CBS affiliate marked a mid-evening
half-hour by bubbling: “Famous world statesman dead at
123! Details at 11!” Back when, this kind of non-information
was considered a tease for assuring more viewers for the news
at 11. But that was then. Human physiology has advanced rapidly
to a stage in which a remote control is attached to every set
of five fingers so that it has become instinctive upon such
an announcement to zap immediately to CNN, CNN2, or CNN46 for
the identity of this prematurely deceased knight of world affairs.
By the time the CBS affiliate’s 11 o’clock news
goes on the air, not only are most of us not in attendance,
but we have learned far more than we want to know about this
luminary’s meteoric rise from elementary school through
Yale’s secret societies to the Trilateral Commission.
(If there is any lingering interest in this primitive use of
expectation, it is that some TV stations still resort to it
despite mountains of evidence that most of their viewers long
ago exhausted their patience when the “Killer Animal on
the Loose!” turns out to be a polar bear roaming the outskirts
of Dawson).
But
if news show blurbs represent its most primitive exploitation
by television, there are other viewing areas in which the expectation
medium has continued to inform our anxieties without (yet) being
outflanked by the latest technologies. For example, every January,
commercial by commercial, television promotes the Super Bowl
as expectantly as it would the Second -- or CCXII -- Coming.
We are presumed to be only minimally irked by the fact that
the games themselves are regularly decided before the first
timeout for a spot for a riotous new sitcom about a pizza delivery
boy mistaken for a nuclear scientist; the countdown to bathos
is not just part of the event, it is often the only event. Then
there are infomercials, second to no mirror for displaying fitful
aims regarding (more) beachfront and (less) paunchfront acreage.
Who needs even a psychic hotline to grasp that these lobotomously
cheerful spiels are not pitching real estate and dieting ware
as much as they are showcasing our secret little anticipations
by selling us to ourselves?
But
television is not the only mass outlet for the expectation medium.
Long before cathode tubes were introduced into the home, the
neighborhood movie house was consolidating its reach. Who has
ever seen a full feature as entrancing as the coming attractions
that had promoted it? Contrary to any instant conclusions, this
is not only because the people patching together the trailers
distilled the highlights of a given movie. Granted there is
something exquisite about a picture that starts off by blowing
up the Tower of London, moves on to naked lovers frolicking
inside a guided missile about to land on Pluto, then shows an
adorable, articulate dolphin being menaced by goons in the North
Atlantic -- each sequence scored by Modest Mussorgsky at his
most spine-tingling. And granted that this kind of montage eliminates
all the chatter, plot and logic that probably wouldn’t
have been all that coherent at full-length viewing. But beyond
the exhilarations produced by the excerpted scenes as such,
trailers have always seduced viewers by luring them to share
in the excitement of the unabashedly elliptical, in not restricting
them to the feature paid for back at the box office, and in
letting them savor the freedom of imagining the suspenseful
tensions, dramatics, and hilarities not available then and there
(but soon enough -- for the price of another ticket!). To put
it another way, trailers offer a lifeline to more than the immediately
vicarious; they are a reminder that the spectator will always
have more coming, that he need not measure off the last minutes
of the film he has already paid to see as the end of his reverie.
But
that said, motion pictures are still no more synonymous with
the expectation medium than is television. Individually, they
are not big enough; together, they are as much effect as cause.
Although it is sometimes easy to forget, non-virtual reality,
You and I exist outside these mob instruments. If television,
movies and other screens have accelerated our expectations,
even redefined them for better and worse and worst, we have
still been the ones to give ourselves over to them. How we have,
I believe, offers the telltale clue for identifying the inventor
of the expectation medium.
In February we already know what to expect from television over
the weeks leading up to the following year’s Super Bowl.
On the popcorn line we already know we’re going to be
intrigued enough by a trailer or two to feel ever so slightly
disappointed that we have chosen to see what we have paid for,
that, great reviews and personal recommendations notwithstanding,
the picture for the evening lost some of its allure the moment
our ticket was transformed into a stub. As we swagger through
the turnstiles of a stadium or arena, we already discount the
likelihood that any game can be as thrilling as the ballyhoo
-- or even the statistical weight -- behind it would have us
believe. Having expectations is not the same thing as being
disarmed, has little in common with being an optimist. We are
skeptics, some of us even cynics. Nothing can be that good,
significant, or definitive. The coin with promising-more on
one side has always circulated with delivering-less on the reverse
side and we know it.
And
yet we continue to shape up, to form lines. As mass producers,
programmers and distributors learned to their financial benefit
a long time ago, the public may be fickle, the box office can
die, and the fan is liable to switch allegiances overnight,
but there is still everybody to go around for plenty. It is
upon this premise that our expectations outlast any individual
opportunity to indulge them that the minion media of television,
films and publishing feel free to worry primarily about keeping
their specific shops in business. More than a mere market, we
are the inventory. One programming executive after another aims
for a mythical common denominator that would be frighteningly
moronic even if divisible by one? Film producers have no qualms
about spending national budgets on computer-animated epics that
are little more than noisy postcards (“good thing you’re
not here”)? Best-sellers have all the intellectual dynamics
and ethical heft of an astrology guide for children? In the
last analysis, none of that is here or there. Our availability
precludes the urgency of quality, as it makes the sociology
of quantity academic. The ultimate enthrallment is elsewhere,
and that is in the romancing of our expectations for themselves.
The
more of our expectations represents an open-ended warranty;
it guarantees whatever we want guaranteed (adventurousness,
censoriousness, moroseness) without the practical limitations
of time and place. It endorses the mass industries of entertainment
and information as projections of desire, injections of plasma,
and objections to solipsism. Beyond that, it validates the prediction
of the obstetrician in (what else?) the delivery room who slapped
us on the ass and handed us to our mothers with the happy promise:
“Here, here’s . . . . . Further identification was
mere formality.
