VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

ADINA BAYA 97
[…] I’ve been afraid for more than half my life. […] I wake up sweating. I
break out in killer sweats.” 17 This anxiety ends up dominating their life to
such an extent, that they both wind up doing desperate acts in an attempt at
its annihilation. Babette enters an experimental program for Dylar, a drug
that is supposedly meant to alleviate her necrophobic fears, taking the risk of
developing a daunting set of side effects. When the program is deemed
unsuccessful and suspended, she resorts to a promiscuous strategy to
continue receiving the drug. In his own search for obliterating his fear of
dying, Jack also gets caught up in an expectedly brutal context, ending up
with an attempt to kill Willie Mink, Babette’s supplier of Dylar.
The cultivation of an “irrational dread of dying” and its ensuing
“diminished vitality and self-direction in life” are regarded by George
Gerbner 18 as a result of the symbolic function of death in prime time media.
Starting from the fact that news represents a selection of events from an
otherwise endless stream of daily occurrences, Gerbner observes that “a
narrative is invented to convey some meaning about the selected facts as
interpreted in a previously learned framework of knowledge.” This strategy
works because television is the “universal story-teller of modern society,”
generally used by audiences for this purpose and without too much
questioning or disbelief. It is in this narrative frame of daily news that death
and the contexts that lead to it are used as a means of typing and confirming
the stereotypes previously put forward by the media. Death here is always
framed as a “sign of fatal flaw or ineptitude, a punishment for sins or mark of
a tragedy,” and its customary use has the aim to remind viewers “the risks of
life” and to cultivate “anxiety and dependence for those who are depicted as
most at risk.” According to Gerbner, death in the news cultivates “insecurity,
anxiety, fear of the ‘mean world’ out there, and dependence on some strong
protector,” thus resembling the “bread and circuses” strategy used by the
Roman Empire to keep populations quiet and under control. He concludes
that “the symbolic function of death in the world of television is […]
embedded in its structure of violence, which is essentially a show of force,
the ritualistic demonstration of power.” 19
The fact that in White Noise Babette seems to be more affected by
exposure to a media environment permeated by death, developing a
paralyzing fright in connection with her finitude, is also explainable through
the research conducted by Gerbner. His analysis of the designated victims
and aggressors presented typically in prime time shows that women and
minorities involved in violence are prevalently presented as most
vulnerable 20 . The researcher sees death on television as “a violent
17
DeLillo, 1986, p. 89.
18
George Gerbner, “Death in Prime Time: Notes on the Symbolic Functions of Dying
in the Mass Media” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, vol. 447, Jan. 1980
19
Gerbner, 1980, p. 66.
20
Gerbner, 1980, p. 67.