Picture a thirteen-year-old sitting in the living room of his family home, doing his math assignment while wearing his headphones and watching MTV …. A pubescent child whose body throbs with or gasmic rhythms, whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbatory fantasy.
(Bloom, 74-75)
The vampire narrator of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat. As the novel opens, Lestat explains that he came back from the dead because he was awakened by the “cacophony in the air”-the radio and television waves that penetrated even his coffin underground. Upon resurfacing, one of the things that he finds most surprising about life at the end of the 20th Century is that
the old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore …In the art and entertainment worlds all prior centuries were being “recycled” … In grand fluorescent-lighted emporiums, you could buy tapes of medieval madrigals and play them on your car stereo as you drove ninety miles an hour down the freeway. In the bookstores Renaissance poetry sold side by side with the novels of Dickens or Ernest Hemingway. Sex manuals lay on the same table with the Egyptian Book ofthe Dead…. Countless television programs poured their ceaseless flow of images into every air-cooled hotel room. But it was no series of hallucinations. This century had inherited the earth in every sense.
Scene from Danc…
Scene from Dances With Wolves (1990).
After John Dunbar has taken part in a buffalo hunt and begun his initiation into the tribe, he contemplates the Sioux tribe moving across the horizon, silhouetted against a spectacular sunset, a picturesque vision of an unspoiled West. Dunbar says in a voice-over that he had never encountered a people so completely connected to their environment-“The only word that came to mind was harmony”-at which point we see not the Sioux, but Dunbar framed perfectly in the midst of a magnificent sunset, situated just as heroically and just as harmoniously within that landscape. 
I was getting tired of all those white walls and white people with white wine.
(Diego Cortez, curator/art dealer in “The Radiant Child”)
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