on consumption and Larry David (redux)

Curb Your Enthusiasm's striking reality

One of the very first topics I wrote about in this newsletter was consumption, and what we’re looking for when we consume media: television shows, social media, TikToks, etc.

Using Curb Your Enthusiasm as my central example, I argued that we look for a certain form of escapism when consuming, a Sisyphean form: one in which we look to accept the absurdity of the world and situations around us. This argument, admittedly, is best fitted towards comedic media, as it is the genre best fit for us to, for lack of a better word, laugh at the world around us– there’s no other genre that provides a more enjoyable critique than comedy.

However, as I’ve taken note of my own habits, along with reading about current trends in the media industry, I’ve noticed that regardless of what we look for in our “escapism” – absurdity, terror, raw emotion – there’s a limit to what people are willing to consume. There comes a point where the escaping, or the scenario which we are presented, is no longer a beneficial alternative when compared with the real world. 

As Dylan Scott wrote in a new piece for Vox, media projects*

“are under no directive to be humane, just to entertain,”

making their consumption a tightrope between amusement and exploitation. For just as they’re under no directive to be humane, we’re under no directive to actually consume what they put out–but we still do.

And thus in continuing to consume these borderline offensive projects, such as the controversial Bachelorette finale that Scott discusses, we’ve created the paradox of modern media, one which serves both as a mirror and a shaper for our collective psyche. As we seek ever more intense, or simply different, forms of escapism, we unknowingly participate in a feedback loop that pushes creators to find new ways to shock, awe, or scare their viewers. And while momentarily satisfying our consumeristic desire for something new, something exciting, the escalation risks eroding the very empathy and human connection that art, at its core, aims to foster. There’s simply no longer a line between catharsis and desensitization…

…which brings me back to my Sisyphean form presented before: are we really accepting the absurdity of the world or simply increasing our tolerance for it? As we continue to engage with content that prioritizes entertainment over ethics, we risk not just accepting the absurdity of the world, but actively cultivating it within ourselves.

And it is in this manner that we become hostage not to the world’s absurdity itself, but to our tolerance and appetite for it, unwittingly shaping a reality more vain than the one we sought to escape in the first place.

*Scott’s quote is in reference to reality television in particular, yet his argument, in my opinion, can be expanded to all of the media as whole. There are very few creative productions under any directive to be humane, which is why we’ve seen such controversial projects in the past– think Lolita or A Serbian Film – and why we’ll continue to see such in the future.