3.1.3 The blending of the real and the simulated

The pervading reconceptualization of the real according to televisual stereotypes leads to a kind of "deja-vu-perception" of reality which registers only the most familiar elements of it. The reader of White Noise is made aware of an aestheticisation of experience which "is composed of easily assimilable, bite-sized units, where each item in view triggers a memory of a previously-encountered equivalent, usually drawn from television [...]."(70) Almost all of Jack's perceptions and imaginations are incited and structured by television's visual repertoire. A prostitute has for him "the opaque look of a hair-curlered woman on the evening news whose house has been buried in mud." (p. 152) He pictures a woman in a yellow slicker, "in a soup commercial taking off her oilskin hat as she entered the cheerful kitchen where her husband stood over a pot of smoky lobster bisque." (p. 22) Buildings in Iron City remind Jack of a "classic photography." (p. 89)

These all seem like more or less ordinary perceptions, common to anyone living in a media culture. However, the perceptions of Jack during the evacuation seem to go one step further:

Out in the open, keeping their children near, carrying what they [evacuees traversing an overpass, V. H.] could, they seemed to be part of some ancient destiny, connected in doom and ruin to a whole history of people trekking across wasted landscapes. There was an epic quality about them that made me wonder for the first time at the scope of our predicament." (p. 122)

As witnessed through Jack's eyes, the whole evacuation seems to be a staged drama. The sight of a car wreck strikes him with its "eloquence of a formal composition." (p. 122) An evacuated gas station is conceptualized as a museum-arrangement, "the tools and pottery of some pueblo civilization, bread in the oven, table set for three." (p. 127) Faced with the toxic cloud itself, the blending of the real event and its reconceptualization in media terms becomes even more obvious:

A few minutes later, back on the road, we saw a remarkable and startling sight. [...] It was the black billowing cloud, the airborne toxic event, lighted by the clear beams of seven army helicopters. [...] In every car, heads shifted, drivers blew their horns to alert others, faces appeared in side windows, expressions set in tones of outlandish wonderment. The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armed creatures with spiral wings. [...] It was a terrible thing to see. [...] But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass. (p. 127)

The evacuees perceive the airborne toxic event as real because it offers so many epic, i.e. simulated, sights; and because it is an event which should ultimately be televised. This becomes obvious by the outraged man who laments the absence of cameras after the evacuation:

"There's nothing on network," he said to us. "Not a word, not a picture. [...] No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? [...] Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? (p. 161/162)

For the lamenting man the apparatus of simulation is an indispensable part of a real event. A disaster like the chemical cloud is for him a complete, already known sequence which unfailingly ends in "streets crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters." (p. 162) If this main ingredient, i.e. TV documentation, is missing, then the whole event is disparaged and becomes unreal: "The whole definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. [...] At the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced."(72)

The understanding of something as real because of its simulated qualities is most striking during instances where one expects the emotions and feelings to be untouchable by the media. For example, when Jack watches his sleeping children, a moment commonly associated with unmediated paternal feelings, he feels as if he "wandered into a TV moment." (p. 244) The sex life of Jack and Babette seems to be completely modeled on previous representations. They choose from a cornucopia of historical sex-acts, and thus their desire seems to be completely dependent on mediation (cf. p. 29). Even death, the last resort of naturalness to which Jack tries to turn,(73) has entered the realm of simulation. Jack's fantasy about Attila the Hun, a man whom he finds difficult to imagine "feeling sad about death," is completely cinematic:

I want to believe he lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financed movie epic, and said cruel things to his aides and retainers. No weakening of the spirit. No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know [...] that we must die. (p. 99)

The blending of the real and simulation is perfected by SIMUVAC, an organization which throughout the novel SIMUlates eVACuations to prepare themselves for a real emergency. When the real disaster finally occurs, it is for them nothing but a model for further improvement:

[Jack:] "But this evacuation isn't simulated. It's real."
[SIMUVAC official:] "We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model."
"A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"
"We took it right into the streets." (p. 139)