More than a year ago I first read film critic David Thomson’s large new book Television: A Biography. Since then I've returned to its pages often, reveling in Thomson's essential insights and savoring his unconventional approach to his subject. Far from being a dry historical account, a cerebral work of
cultural theory or sociological documentation, or a fluffy entertainment
chronicle, Thomson’s tome is a remarkably free-spirited (and freewheeling)
series of reflective essays on the cultural, existential, and psychic impact of
that problematic household fixture: the small screen.
Chronology,
thankfully, is out the window here. Instead of a banal blow-by-blow of
television’s development from the 1930s onward, Thomson lets the theme of his
thoughts be the guide. He riffs, and his riffs cover just about everything
interesting, disturbing, and outright surreal relating to this
taken-for-granted medium: the TV as precursor of the ubiquitous and entrancing
handheld screen; the fallacious nature of TV ratings systems; the subliminal
polarities of 1) The Fugitive, which
extolled chameleon-like freedom and the excitement of being on the run, and 2) The Donna Reed Show, which extolled
domesticity while hinting at the eroticism underlying suburban decency; the behind-the-scenes marital
dysfunction of Lucy and Desi; our Pavlovian consent to the eternal “on-ness” of
the tube; the mesmerism of the laugh-track; the lethal constancy of commercials
and the failure of Mad Men, as an
ad-supported show on an ad-dependent network, to live up to its own potential;
the sweet depressive allure of “channel-surfing”; the “Gong Show” as a
postmodern theater; and on and on. He’s a fantastically intelligent and
appealingly “fizzy” writer, and many of his observations here hearken to Neil
Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death
or Marshall McLuhan in The Medium Is the Massage.
“The medium had
another role,” Thomson writes, “all the more powerful because it was never intended
or organized: It promoted the principle that it was sufficient for the world to
be witnessed, or to have it pass by. It did not require the effort of
understanding or criticism. Its ‘on-ness’ was paramount, just as our
participation began to be offset. This was a new solitude, not just that of
living alone: You could be in a crowd, but you might not matter.”
A little
further on, he writes: “You know this is true: Television is not for attention;
the ads trained us in not watching. … The mainstream of the medium clung to the
idea that everyone can understand everything — but that can slip into the
delusion that no one needs to understand anything.”
And Thomson
ties together the generational overrating of screen media -- first in our passive fixation
upon the original living room screen, and now in today’s obsessive fixation on
handheld screens: “Television wasn’t just an elephant in the room. It became
the room, the house, and the world. … The deepest nature of television is to be
reassuring. That may be the most frightening thing about it… our making our way
by watching screens, or by having them on, hardly aware of how the television
screen has trained us for the computer screen, the iPad, the iPhone, or the iI
(coming so soon I wish I had invested), and the assumption that because
information is carried in those ways so knowledge must exist there.”
