Last night I saw the most extraordinary program on American Experience. The title was The Boy in the Bubble, a documentary of a boy, born without an immune system, who grew to the age of twelve confined to the interior of a plastic bubble that served as a substitute for the missing immune system. The work was a recording of "real" events, and yet I can't get over the sense of its being an absurdist film; the participants had so obviously been cast. The Bubble Boy's Mother is too good to be real, as are the Three Mad Scientists --- two men and a woman --- who conceive, construct, and finally desert the boy and the bubble.

A record of "real events" or not, for me the viewer/reader, the work was symbolic theater. The bubble is a substitute, a metaphor in relation to the immune system. Each of us is a bubble boy; the immune system is a substitute, a metaphor in relation to the bubble. The boy was conscious, and as he got older, painfully so, that he existed inside a bubble, separated by this thin transparent film, from the world outside the film. The people outside the bubble were all profoundly unconscious of their own bubbles.

Bubbles and immune systems are designed to prevent the disorganization of the organism, the collapse of the ego/super-ego. The organism is continuously under attack by germs whose penetration of the boundary, of that thin layer of skin, between inside and outside, dissolves the distinction. Insofar as I am real, I am the distinction.