Hype over experience

There is a general theory, often invoked by school teachers, that the more you know about something, the more interested you will become. If so, I should by now be unable to contain my excitement about the eclipse, and be packing my suitcase for a once-in-a- lifetime dash to Cornwall.

I can't remember when I first heard about the eclipse, and haven't paid it particular attention, but with two days to go, I could not say I was feeling underprepared. Among any number of other facts, I know that 1.5m visitors are expected in Cornwall, and that train companies have set up special hotlines. An event is not an event until it has its own special hotline, and the National Farmers' Union has set one up too, for members anxious about marauding hippies.

The Samaritans will provide roadside assistance for motorists distressed by the traffic jams, and insurance companies are predicting a mini-crime wave, as pickpockets and burglars make the most of the distraction. Cornish banks are stocking up on extra bank notes, and supermarkets have put their staff on red alert, I read.

I have been told that the birds will go quiet, there will be a gust of wind, and I will definitely feel an eerie sense of dread. I can also recite all the reasons why I absolutely must go and see it. I will never get another chance, and I hear it will even change my life, in some unspecified but profound mystical fashion. "The experience will be nothing short of magical," I read. "It will be like nothing we have ever seen before."

Then again, I have memorised all the reasons for not going as well. It's apparently a load of new age rubbish, I'll burn my eyes out, and the traffic jams will be of biblical proportions.

I would very much like to want to go. And yet I don't - but not for any of the burnt retina and what-about-the-traffic banalities being put about every day. The horrible truth is that I am bored by the eclipse, as are most of the people I know, and we have been bored for almost as long as we have known about it.

To be bored by something authentically rare and wonderful does not feel like an innocuous misfortune, like a preference for giving Tuscany a miss this summer. Rather, it is an example of something best described as the denial of experience. Take the arrival this summer of the Star Wars "sensation", The Phantom Menace.

Anyone who had read the odd newspaper in the preceding month felt as if they had seen the film before it had even been released; we'd heard so much about the "legendary" queues, it was as though we'd stood in them ourselves.

Every novelty costume had been worn, every comment had already been made. Reports of American fans returning to cinemas to watch it over and over again were particularly puzzling, as you could clearly have the sensation of seeing it a dozen times without buying a single ticket.

Likewise, Eyes Wide Shut is still not out in this country, but what dreg of response remains to be claimed? The experience of watching these films has been stolen before any of us has had the chance to have it.

It is impossible to have a purchase on an experience which is exhaustively scripted and administered by something so much bigger than you that your only available role becomes that of an obedient chorus girl. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to experience any major event, because there is no longer enough time to claim it for your own before it is taken out of your hands.

Something is clearly responsible for shrinking the space between individual discovery and mass boredom, and a plausible candidate is capitalism's demand that everything must be instantly extraordinary. An event is only truly great if vast hyperbolic superlatives - The biggest ever! The jammed hotlines! The longest queues! - can be applied, and measured out in cash terms.

An event like Glastonbury is now considered momentous (100,000 sell-out, ticket touts, etc), but its charm derives from the fact that it began as a humble free-for-all, and those involved had a sense that it belonged to them; the beauty came in the surprise of what they made it become. Nobody would come up with the idea of a tiny free music festival now, and instead we have Creamfields and V99, vast commercial operations which map out the whole experience in the brochure before you even get there. This is the trance tent, you are told, and there you will dance to this particular DJ during these hours, and drink the sponsor's specified beverage.

If an idea is only valid if it makes instant money, then nothing can be left to chance. A film has to break box office records in its first weekend, and you don't launch a magazine unless you can persuade advertisers that it will sell in excess of 100,000 copies with its very first issue. Magazines like the Face or Private Eye crept out of nowhere, and their readers felt as though they'd formed private relationships with them.

But it is very hard to have a private relationship with Emap, and no one will come across Tina Brown's new Talk magazine by accident and enjoy the intimate pleasure of surprise.

There is an idea that mass capitalism is marvellously democratic, and that only a mean-minded elitist would object to an arrangement where everyone gets to hear about everything. This is one of capitalism's many myths, for a mass market experience is not one we all get to share in, but one that none of us do, for there is no meaningful experience left to be had.

What matters is not how many people participate, but how they participate. Alex Garland's novel, The Beach, ended up being read by hundreds of thousands, but every reader felt it was their private prize. Hollywood's film of The Beach, on the other hand, isn't even finished yet, and is already a stale, exhausted commodity.

Yet the Hollywood machine is considered successful, and the novel's surprise success is regarded as an accident. Publishers make sure they won't make the same "mistake" again, and so tell us exactly how we will feel about Garland's next book before we've had a chance to read it.

What we frequently end up with is a strange situation where even the hype doesn't live up to the hype, and so cinemas run 24-hour screenings of The Phantom Menace to empty auditoriums, and Cornish guest houses report chronic underbooking. But then the event becomes a "fiasco" and a failure, not on its own actual merits but because the prescribed experience failed to materialise.

Even in the act of opting out, you therefore become part of an administered phenomenon. You are as much of a cliché staying home this Wednesday as you are staring up at the Padstow sky in an eclipse T-shirt.

"What has been lost is the glory of the event," Jean Baudrillard wrote. "The prodigious event, the event which is measured neither by its causes nor its consequences but creates its own stage and its own dramatic effect, no longer exists."

Ten years ago I was fantastically excited about the prospect of the millennium, and couldn't believe our good luck to be alive at such a time. What bad luck for us all, now, to have come so near, and to be robbed of the experience at the last.