I'm just going to admit right off the bat that I'm a media lush. I've been watching movies like you wouldn't believe. I've been sneaking into the living room late at night to stare at my television, breaking into theaters, furtively glancing at the TVs that dangle from barroom ceilings.
What's more, I'm not sorry. I'd do it all again. And what are you going to do about it? How are you going to stop me?
In no particular order:
Lone Star
Spirited Away
Bad Santa
Casablanca
The Maltese Falcon
The Thin Blue Line
Decalogue (Murder & Adultery)
The Triplets of Bellville
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
The Big Lebowski
Spellbound
Capturing the Friedmans
Bus 174
Thirteen
An episode of The Apprentice
Eraserhead
Happenstance
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
So, in conclusion . . . fuck it. Media Dieting is for squares. I'm not going to compromise my identity for some abstract concept nobody has ever heard of anyway. I'm not shoot myself in the pop cultural foot. I've had it with being unable to contribute at the water cooler. Throughout this exercise I've been nothing but a prisoner to my own pride and vanity, trying in vain to postpone what I knew all along would be an inevitable surrender to the forces of mass consumption, rapping ceaselessly at the front door, saying "land shark," promising flowers and pizza, throwing pebbles off my windowpane, asking me to come out and play, filling my mailbox with impossiblities, filling my head with airbrushed imagination. No, I shall not resist. I am pulling my head out of the sand, and placing it into the great Crock Pot of American Culture. I am media, hear me roast.
