Digesting the Dinosaur

When Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was first published in 2003, I had never seen anything like it. It was a book of essays that reveled in the fact that it analyzed low culture (see: pop culture) in a way that didn’t involve a thorough knowledge of media and communication theory to appreciate. The essays were written in an amusing, wry way, by an amusing, wry author. They were easily accessible and infinitely entertaining, which is what made the book so great. It was pop culture writing, written for an audience that consumes pop culture. However, it wasn’t a transcript of an episode of Two and a Half Men; it had value in that Klosterman used these essays about pop culture minutiae to illustrate points about our society. For instance, Klosterman argues our obsession with the Real World can be seen as the advent of people developing one dimensional personalities and our voyeuristic perversity as a culture. Eating the Dinosaur takes what Chuck Klosterman started four years ago and adds to it in a more mature—though still amusing and wry—way.

Through a series of what, at first glance, seem to be wild non-sequiturs, Eating the Dinosaur manages to tie together essays that compare Kurt Cobain to David Koresh (think Waco) in a somewhat offensive yet somehow convincing way, an analysis of time travel that is way more in-depth and thought out than it needs to be, a critical take on the laugh tracks employed by sitcoms, and progressive football plays into the larger, more important idea that through our love of culture and idolization of cultural figures, we create a fake reality that is far more comfortable than actual reality. This fake reality is so pure a fantasy that when we encounter someone entirely truthful (Rivers Cuomo or Ralph Nader, to name a couple of Klosterman’s examples) we are hostile and disappointed.

One of the most interesting instances of this fake reality comes in the final essay, named FAIL. Everyone prides themselves on being tough to influence, infinitely skeptical of how much they are affected by the treacherous “media,” but by quoting from Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Klosterman provides us with a revealing example of how much media we actually internalize and how that internalization of images makes it difficult for us to differentiate from the real and unreal. In order to illustrate this inability, Mander asks people to imagine, “life in an Eskimo village,” the Old South,” and “a preoperation conversation among doctors,” and “playing basketball.” A simple enough task, to be sure. You probably already have the images in your head. Though you have experienced maybe one or two of these scenarios, you can picture them all with clarity, right? Mander says that the images conjured up are “either out of your own imagination or else they [are] from the media. Can you identify which was which?”

Yes, some of the essays are hit and miss—particularly the ones on basketball, football and ABBA. Yes, it’s written in Klosterman’s signature style, which some could argue is getting stale, but it is far and away Klosterman’s most thought-provoking and mature work to date. Besides, (arguably) stale Klosterman is still (arguably) great Klosterman.