Infinite Jest: Satire 3 key examples

One of the starkest examples is the concept of Subsidized Time. Corporate sponsorships have become so ubiquitous that years themselves are now named after products. The way this works at first seems silly and nonsensical. Companies like Dove, Depend, or Tucks make brand deals with the government to have years labeled with whatever product they are trying to sell. Once the company buys the year, they get an unimaginable boost in advertising in perpetuity because for the rest of time, everyone utters the name of the product whenever they want to talk about that year. As the novel goes on, the reader gets more and more used to this absurd system. It becomes less confusing when someone refers to "The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar." While time is theoretically a common resource that no one can buy, the novel suggests, the way humans choose to measure and label time is a cultural phenomenon that can change with only a little buy-in from everyone. The novel's satire lies in the way it normalizes absurd customs like this until the reader realizes that the world is already well on its way to this reality. It is not a far jump from branding a youth tennis competition to transforming the Statue of Liberty into a billboard.

The Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960 have often been credited with winning John F. Kennedy the presidency. These were the first presidential debates that aired on television and featured the actual presidential candidates, instead of surrogate representatives. Kennedy, known for his charisma and good looks, won people over by appearing on their television screens. By contrast, Nixon lost the confidence of many voters. He refused to wear makeup and sweated through his suit under the bright (hot) lights, giving the appearance of a man who was unwell and possibly unfit to govern. Wallace includes a joke statistic that "71% of senior-citizen respondents" to a survey about videophone technology not only found their own faces untrustworthy on the screen but specifically compared themselves to Nixon in this disastrous debate. The joke emphasizes that nothing could have been worse for people's self-esteem than seeing their own faces on video.

At the same time, the joke also suggests that people may have been too hard on Nixon for his appearance. This is not to say that Wallace is defending Nixon as a politician. Rather, it seems to be an indictment on the way voters ignored policy concerns and instead focused on how handsome their presidential candidates were. If everyone looks that bad on camera, maybe looking good on camera is not a reasonable metric for whether someone is trustworthy.

In Infinite Jest, politics have become a laughable disaster in part because the President of the United States is a good-looking celebrity with no real skill or ability to govern. There is a way to read Johnny Gentle as an exaggerated sequel to Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who was president for part of the time when Wallace was writing this novel. Kennedy was elected partly on looks and had a well-developed policy agenda. Reagan was an actor who used his celebrity to launch a career as a politician. Many people still believe that Reagan's greatest strength (for better or worse) was making dirty politics look good. Wallace seems to imagine Gentle as the next logical step: he is a pretty figurehead who completely distracts from politics. By electing him to office, the American people agree to fix their attention on a pretty celebrity while their world is dismantled around them.

This footnote and other moments like it are a humorous treat for readers who are familiar with driving in Boston. Storrow Drive is of course not officially exempt from traffic enforcement. There is technically a speed limit, and the ramps aren't quite as close together as the footnote claims. However, frequent ramps, difficult signage, and hurried drivers can make this road feel especially lawless, hectic, and "forehead-drenching," as if entering it amounts to entering the Indy 500 racetrack. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest during the Big Dig, a decades-long project that moved a large interstate highway underground to create more common green space. While ambitious and ultimately successful in reducing traffic congestion, many people felt the entire project was emblematic of bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. The idea that the police would have it in their contract that they don't have to patrol one of the most heavily-used roads into the city, especially during the Big Dig, is a joke about both the institutional corruption and the unchecked speeding and road rage Boston is known for. It is especially funny given that the police in Infinite Jest stand at the ready to tow cars at exactly the moment when parking bans switch from one side of the street to the other. The rules only seem to apply when it matters the least.

Unlike Storrow Drive, the Enfield Tennis Academy is fictional. In an even more exaggerated way, it skewers the elite private schools that are ubiquitous in Boston and the surrounding area. The tennis academy is supposedly a high-ranking private school that gives mostly-rich children an advantage going into college or the professional sporting world. However, its actual educational standards are laughable. Students learn antiquated and oddly specific lessons about grammar, Latin, and Montréal politics while drilling their tennis skills so hard that many of them sustain permanent injuries. The academy sends its students far afield from Boston, exploiting city resources and refusing to participate much in public life.

Wallace highlights the nonsensical power of institutions like E.T.A. and their leaders by placing Ennet House and its associated Marine VA institutions in the academy's literal shadow. E.T.A. is still paying damages for the time when it sent an avalanche down the hill during the construction of its tennis courts. This relationship between E.T.A. and a public institution like the V.A. demonstrates how wealthy private institutions have essentially bought Boston as their personal playground. On the other hand, the avalanche primarily affected a building that already stood in vacant disrepair (Ennet House residents use it when they relapse). The VA's brazen use of the avalanche to wheedle money out of E.T.A. is a further joke about the way scrappy public institutions in Boston play along with the corruption and take advantage right back.