Nothing is more aggravating than watching TV characters watch television. Virtually every TV show these days eventually shows us their characters watching television. Turn on Frasier and they are inevitably watching television. Seinfeld was notorious for flipping through channels and discussing television at length.

The Simpsons watch television perhaps more than any other TV characters from the beginning of time to date. My question is, what are these characters watching anyway? Better TV shows? I just don’t understand why I’m watching other people watch television on my television which is being watched by me. Or words to that effect.

I fail to appreciate this self-reflexive post-modern irony, or whatever it is. I take my entertainment straight. These days, it’s like everyone in fiction is both mimicking and mocking my boring TV- watching life. I don’t need this kind of thing in my fiction. Reality is boring enough in the first person.

Give me a car chase, a naked woman, terrorists on the make. I have no interest in seeing the dull monotony of reality translated through a cinematic prism.

Something else annoying is watching an actor play on a computer. Why do we have to see Sandra Bullock surf the internet when surfing the net bores most people to tears? And if they want realism, why didn’t Sandra inadvertently run into a dozen of those ubiquitous porn sites while surfing? How is that T‚a Leoni in “Deep Impact” can discover an impending apocalypse by playing on her computer for five minutes when I can barely open my mail? Keanu even does it in “The Matrix.” But what I want to know is where did they find those kung fu experts? I always wanted to know kung fu. I actually met Kung once. Really.

Does any of this make these characters more real or intriguing or anything? Real characters are not always better characters. Shakespeare didn’t write realistically, but then who reads him anymore? And to digress, did anyone else see the article that compared Crichton to a Renaissance man? Does “renaissance” now have a meaning I’m not aware of? Is this supposed to be irony or flippancy or what? Are we now in line for a really bad renaissance?

And incidentally, why are the previews for new movies now as long as the movie? Sometimes I just watch the previews and leave the theater feeling satisfied. And the popcorn in movies – does anyone really request extra butter on their popcorn? I like to ask for a separate cup of butter, actually.

It gives me something to drink when the movie starts to get really bad. And the sound levels in theaters these days is enough to make me clutch my chest and lurch for the nearest paramedic. Just turn it down already. And everyone who now owns a car stereo which is larger than your car, please turn that down too. And why can’t they make the whole airplane out of the stuff they make the little black box out of? Really, what are those engineers spending all their time on?

What is the obsession with realism in movies lately anyway? Why do I have to watch Ralph Fiennes in “Schindler’s List” take a leak on screen? John Malkovich does the same in “Being John Malkovich.” It’s like everyone in the theater has to go and just can’t hold it until the end of the movie. Including me. Given the size of the drinks lately, it’s understandable in a way. But it even happens on television.

How many Seinfeld episodes revolved around bathroom motifs? What’s the deal with that? If art reflects culture, does this mean our culture is obsessed with toilets? This is not to say that I want to watch Tom Cruise ride explosions in his ballerina slippers or bear witness to a Crichtonized universe, but whatever happened to pretend people on the big screen? I don’t recall ever seeing John Wayne using the facilities on screen. He was a great plastic monolith we could all just admire.

I’m relieved beyond words that Bogart never relieved himself in situ. Of course, this might all just be the end result of an unscratchable cultural taboo with no basis in logic, but nonetheless.

And it’s not that I object entirely to the advent of realism in a modern film aesthetic; it’s more that I don’t know what any of that stuff means.

But the end result of this realism is going to be an end to heroes and villains, an end to story and plot until finally we’re all just watching “The Truman Show” together.

What can I say? I like my fake people fake. So to the pretend people of Hollywood, please get out of the can and into the plot or, in short, bring on the phonies. Whether I’m on the couch or in the theater, I need less reality, not more of it.

Dan Johnson is a graduate student in English from Davenport.