Today's New York Times featured a piece by Virginia Heffernan that I found fascinating. It was concerned some new DVDs produced by Sesame Street for children under two years old. Oddly enough, some people don't like the idea of 3-month-old babies watching TV. The article is great, but even more interesting to me was the beginning of the article and some philosophizing on the stigma attached to television viewing. Observe:Self-doubt stymies the television watcher. Go to the symphony, the opera, the theater or the ballet and you're rewarded with a feeling of cultural accomplishment; if you like the production, you feel improved, and if you dislike it, you feel superior. Either way, you've won.
But television is not for winners. Television is for low, exhausted potato people who slouch, and for their children, who are plopped in front of it. Slouchers and ploppers, that's us — and we tend to incur the wrath of more upright types. But, in spite of that generalized scorn and the self-doubt it induces, the loser in all of us plainly can't stop watching television, partly because it affords an opportunity, in our hard-driving world, to waste time and energy flagrantly, to live profligately, to forgo winning. Moreover, great television shows capitalize on this defenseless state, allowing us to grieve, pass imaginatively into unusual mental states, laugh off anxieties, lose ourselves. Television, in fact — to give the experience a paradoxical kind of dignity — encourages us to practice the great art of losing.
I think there's something so on-point about this theory. I praise TV all the live-long day, and yet I'm not just praising it, but justifying my behavior. As Rekha knows, I always say that "reading is my job. I need to watch TV to know I'm not working." But this is a rationalization, isn't it? Do I need to do that? I certainly don't justify my time at the theater, reading books, or browsing art galleries. Not that I actually do those things. I might miss Lost. But if I did do those things, I don't think I'd feel compelled to explain their merits to the world.
This sounds a bit like therapy. But don't worry about me, I'll be fine.
2 comments:
Well, here are my thoughts: I never watch TV. I don't own a TV actually. Sitcoms with their laugh tracks and punch lines make me feel like I'm dying. But I'm not saying some shows are not amazing, - the writing, acting, etc - right up there with movies and, sure, theater. But the essential difference is that THERE ARE COMMERCIALS! TV to me feels cheap in that the shows, although clever, are only on through the endoresment of the advertisers. Thus maybe why it does not feel so much like a high art. On the flip side, some commercials, wow, talk about art. The creativity and thought that goes into a 30 second commercial is much more extensive, and, the ultimate product, to me, impressive, than 30 minutes of friends. But I'm also a snob. If a TV is on I'll watch it. I guess, I just feel like a consumer rather than a connoisseur.
Matt, I completely understand what you mean about the commercials. It's true, the presence of commercials makes it plainly obvious that we wouldn't be seeing the programming unless Tide, Pampers, or Hot Pockets forked over the cash. It's blatant, it's ugly, it's commerce.
Where your argument loses me is that film and theater aren't subject to the same evil financing schemes. Perhaps the film isn't paused every 22 minutes to Buy the World a Coke, but that doesn't mean that the evil wheels of commodification and industry hoo-ha aren't spinning just behind the silver screen. If all the hubub surrounding "independent film" and the declining box office receipts has taught us anything, its that the heart of filmmaking pumps green paper.
So my point...I know I had it when I came in here...Oh! My point: maybe TV is actually MORE honest somehow. After all, TV divulges its deepest secrets (and financial assets) at least three times every half hour.
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