Society...Should We Accept or Reject It

Currently in American Studies class, we are reading a book called White Noise written by Don DeLillo.  It paints a vivid satire of the complicated and distinctively funny, yet depressing, world in which we so blithely live.  I couldn't help but connect topics brought up in White Noise to some of our earlier-in-the-year content, particularly the book Into the Wild.  The meticulously detailed, Jon Krakauer-authored biography on the societal renegade, Chris McCandless can be summarized in cliffhanging fashion by a poignant, yet undeniably essential inquisition posed in a review from Publishers Weekly:  "So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska?"


McCandless' death was almost as mysterious as it was tragic in that nobody will probably ever truly know exactly why he did what he did.  Krakauer's book does as close a job to perfect as possible in uncovering the mystery by providing ample detail from primary documents written in McCandless' hand.  Notably, the young man wrote about himself, "No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild" (163).

In DeLillo's White Noise, he chastises through satire society's incessant desire to be inundated with material possessions as he does here when the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is at the shopping mall:

The more money I spent, the less important it seemed.  I was bigger than these sums.  These sums poured off my skin like so much rain...We ate another meal.  A band played live Muzak.  Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promendades, a roar that echoed and wired thorugh the vast gallery, mixing with noise from the tiers, with shufflineg feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction (84).       

You may be able to sense the irony of the first sentence due to how the more money you spend either the bigger the debt and/or the bigger the material smothering.  DeLillo feels, as McCandless did in a way, that society can give us essentials, but it can also more importantly give us non-essentials: frivolous things that drone out (not coincidentally like white noise on a TV set) the true meaning that hides beneath the surface of things.  The passage above describes white noise that we hear every day, white noise that drowns our senses, he feels (live Muzak?  That can't happen.)

DeLillo's satire and McCandless' disapproval can be expressed, ironically, in the popular, alternative-rock/pop song "Sprawl II" by Arcade Fire.  The song goes, "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl.  Living in the sprawl, dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains, and there's no end in sight.  I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights."

If you watch the music video for the first time, you'll probably be confused and maybe even discomforted, as I was.  But if you look past the inherent weirdness of the video into the message that's being sent, there are interesting parallels to be found.  The girl in the video says at the beginning that others tell her to "quit these pretentious things [singing] and just punch the clock."  She also says "I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights."  In White Noise Jack says, "Brightness settled around me" (83-84) as he entered a shopping mall, a mall that, as Arcade Fire would say is "dead" and "rise[s] like mountains beyond mountains" with "no end in sight."

Perhaps Jack is drowned by the brightness and noise of modern life, a life the girl in the video wants to escape by "cutting the lights" and by singing to avoid "punching the clock".  Also, in the video there are these strange people with no faces.  Maybe they have no more human qualities and are just products of the modern society.  I don't really know, but do you?  What issues exist with our material and technology-based society?  Or do you think that there aren't any issues?  How would Don DeLillo and Chris McCandless react to this music video?


If you're interested in this topic, there's a song by Eddie Vedder called "Society" and it plays on the "Into the Wild" movie soundtrack.  I have it posted below.