Decoder Ring: Selling Out (Encore)
Slow Burn
Slate Audio
4.6 • 25.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whatever happened to selling out? The defining concern of Generation X has become a relic from another era. How that happened is best illustrated by one of the idea’s last gasps, when in 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited author Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel The Corrections. A month later, she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm.
The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other, and one of them—the one that was on its way out already—crashed and burned in public, seldom to be seen again.
Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include screenwriter Helen Childress; writer and musician Franz Nicolay; New York Times critic Wesley Morris, Oprah producer Alice McGee; Boris Kachka, author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Bethany Klein, author of Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music; and Laura Miller, Slate’s book critic.
This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Benjamin Frisch. It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth. Cleo Levin was our research assistant.
Decoder Ring is produced by Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd, and Max Freedman, with help from Sofie Kodner. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Willa. I knew I wanted to do an episode about the idea of selling out for a couple of years before we actually went ahead and made one. |
| 0:08.5 | Selling out is this concept that had once loomed very large as a thing you did not want to do. |
| 0:15.2 | And I was interested in exploring how and why that had changed, because it really felt like it had. For a long time, though, |
| 0:23.4 | I could not figure out a story that illustrated those changes. It was an idea in search of a |
| 0:28.9 | narrative, basically. And then a colleague suggested I take a closer look at Jonathan Franzen and |
| 0:34.0 | Oprah Winfrey and their book club brouhaha. And there it was, our narrative. |
| 0:40.4 | This episode aired three years ago, but the question of what selling out was and what happened |
| 0:45.1 | to it, and if we're missing it or something like it, it just remained extremely current. |
| 0:50.8 | We're still thinking about selling out and what it meant, even we're also less worried |
| 0:54.9 | about doing it. And I think this episode is really illuminating about why. So we're airing it again |
| 1:00.1 | today. We hope you enjoy. |
| 1:07.9 | In 1992, Helen Childress, a screenwriter, was watching one of the presidential debates on TV. |
| 1:14.3 | Everyone was talking about sound bites. |
| 1:16.5 | They were like, this is a campaign reduced to sound bites. |
| 1:19.6 | We can't vote for anyone based off sound bites. |
| 1:21.9 | Helen was just 22 years old. |
| 1:24.3 | But she'd been hired to write a screenplay about her generation, Generation X, |
| 1:29.3 | the famously ironic, skeptical, media-savvy cohort that had come up in the shadow of the baby boomers. |
| 1:36.3 | In her script, the main character, Lelena, is working on a documentary, constantly filming |
| 1:41.6 | all her friends with a video camera. And so off of that, I had Lelina call her documentary Reality Bites, as if these are little |
| 1:50.7 | kind of bites of reality. |
| 1:53.2 | Reality Bites would become the name of the movie Helen was writing. |
... |
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