MEDIA

            In the second half of Money, John Self begins to continually bring up Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s upcoming wedding. His obsession with the royal family’s affairs is linked to another of John’s addictions: the media. He can’t get enough of it. When he watches the news, he is over flooded with information, much of which he doesn’t process and analyze, but rather repeats what has been said by the reporter to the reader; ‘TV’s Val has been rushed to the hospital with a mystery illness. On page five blonde Ulla sports big tits and cool pants. Sissy Skolimowsky turns out to be a diesel, and an ex-chick of hers is suing Siss for galimony’ (Amis 225). Overconsumption is a recurring theme in John’s interaction with all aspects of life. All of these news snippets have only one thing in common; they are random and have to do to with TV personalities’ gossip. Amis depicts modern entertainment as a brainwasher; something that offers so much random and useless information to the masses that ‘cretinizes’ people like John Self (31). Thus his inclusion of 1984 by George Orwell, a critic of the modern television and mass media as a means of mind control, as John’s present/reading assignment from Martina. On the day of the wedding, he is with Selina Street, his gold-digging lover, at his ‘sock’. Feeling the romantic mood arising from the royal wedding, John elaborates his intention to marry and then go on a honeymoon to exotic places such as Barbados, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Bali. Given her past record of essentially demanding John to marry her, it is surprising that Selina doesn’t react positively. Instead she yells at John ‘look, get off. Anyway I want to watch the royal wedding on television’ (225). The reality that exists on the television, the luxurious reality of royalty, overpowers Selina’s sense of reality. In the television, she finds an escape to the world she wishes she was part of, a world where money is not merely an essential part of life, but a mainstay and normality. In his essay on Money’s satirical critic of Thatcherite England, Miracky comments on the use of the media as a means of consolidating two of John’s favorite topics: money and sex. Being a TV commercial director, John made his fortune by mixing his addictions of money and pornography in order to convince millions of viewers to purchase his product. However, this hasn’t harbored him from the negative effects of television. He still idolizes members of that unreal world, the world of television where everyone is young, virile, beautiful, and most importantly, rich.