“Exposure”

Kurt Wenzel

Review by Ed Hannibal

Elevator Pitch:
Kurt Wenzel’s “Exposure” is Kurt Andersen’s “Turn of the Century” (Lite) meets “Entourage” meets “Day of the Locust” meets “24,” except with Jack Bauer hero played by a drunk screenwriter. Be seen reading this in Nick & Toni’s this summer, establish hip Lit Life street cred at least until next Film Festival.

Full Monty:
If you’ve ridden the black, Jitney-sized Nokia cellphone to the city lately and been hung up on the overhead approach to the Midtown Tunnel for even a few moments, you’ve already seen some of the media monstrosities Kurt Wenzel attacks in his latest I.E.D., “Exposure”: the enormous digital advertising broadsides he calls Moving Image Billboards, or MIBs.

Popping up high over factory roofs here, there, and everywhere, MIBs transmit commercial messages nonstop — brighter than daylight, dangerously mesmerizing at night. An indecent invasion, to Mr. Wenzel’s Richard Condon-like mind, not just of the air we breathe, or our privacy, but of our very sanity as individuals and as a race. You think the Nike swooshes are scary . . . how far will those big, evil advertisers go?

Hi-Def monster outdoor plasma screens are the first signs, literally, of the coming invasion. The (voracious) Media Empire’s first giant Lucas-like foot soldiers, marching steadily, relentlessly, irrevocably, and irresistibly across Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and points west, all but chanting in unison, Give us some ads/ that are stout-hearted ads/ and we’ll soon give you/ ten thousand more! Today, America; tomorrow, the world.

By 2010 or soon after, the time of “Exposure,” the MIBs have gone national. The new Times Square video overkill has metastasized across America like digital kudzu. The entire Los Angeles basin, kind of nervous to begin with, is wall to wall with back-to-back MIBs of all sizes, always on, never off. All of Tinseltown has been turned into one illuminated sprawl of mirrors out of anyone’s worst acid trip (or a Bliss O.D., Bliss being the super-boosted grandchild of Ecstasy and drug of choice among the media doers and shakers habituating the Sunset Strip).

Worse horrors, the Hi-Def signs themselves are only the tip of the malignancy. It’s not the signs driving every Los Angelino stark, raving crazy. It’s what’s on them. (But think, ever since PC pop-ups made the 30, 60, and 90-second TV commercials extinct, around 2008, where else did they have to go?)

*?*?*

Having left the New York media world in tittering tatters with his first two funnyish/grim forays, “Lit Life” and “Gotham Tragic,” Mr. Wenzel turns his sort of satiric guns westward, and peoples his plot with showbiz types we’ve come to love or loathe on cue, depending on what side of the cameras they live on: actors, writers, directors, etc. (talent), yay! Studio moguls, producers, agents, network execs, lawyers (anti-talent), boo!

The jaundiced author adds to these a mysterious zealot, “Mr. Black,” anonymous author of a best-selling anti-media manifesto, “The Black Book,” and followed (slavishly, as charismatics always are) by disciples calling themselves Blackheads, an unavoidable nomenclature too amusing to sustain serious terror — until they start acting out.

Playing the part of Mr. Wenzel’s usual alcoholic has-been novelist protagonist is alcoholic blocked screenwriter Marshall Reid (Nicolas Cage, “Adaptation”). To underwrite his indulgent, Bliss & Scotch-fueled Hollywoodland lifestyle, Marshall clings like a latter-day Pat Hobby to UberGlobalSuperIcon Colt Reston, an actor good-looking enough for stardom on his own but transformed to the nearly divine by how the digital lens happens to read him. (Viewers of all nations and faiths go like, Oh, my God!?)

Plus, he’s a pretty nice guy in real life, faithful to his friends, generous to a fault, cares about the poor and ecology too. The plot has sex and love, mystery, ambition, chicanery, murder, and other subplots galore set in snazzy venues, Malibu, Big Sur, and all that L.A.-movie style jazz. But Mr. Wenzel himself presents his story in such an un-arced, Lego-set, cubistic manner that it’s better read than synopsized here.

Instead, put these two-real life puzzle pieces in your pipe and smoke them:

1. Remember TV spots a while back seeming to have brought James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart back to young and gorgeous life again to peddle some diet soda? How did they do that? And what if one of the digitized stars suddenly threw the bottle at the camera, spat, “I’m outta here!!” and walked off screen?

2. From the Monday, Aug. 6, New York Times. Business Day headline: It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World.

And I quote the Public spokesman:

“The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then . . . the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone, or — eventually — a television.”

“More simply put, the goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer.”

Aaaargh! Where are the Blackheads when you need them?

“Exposure”
Kurt Wenzel
Little, Brown, $23.99

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Kurt Wenzel lives in East Hampton.

Ed Hannibal is a novelist and ex-advertising creative (talent) who lives in Springs. His latest novel is “The Collar,” currently being read by powerful media types living the Lit Life in New York and L.A.