Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (33 page)

How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping.

What about warmth? Well, you could illustrate warmth with hugging or tender smiles. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just not as easy to show on television as coldness is. The behavior of the Bionic Man, for example—coldness, determination, efficiency, domination—is easy to see because it can be demonstrated with nearly no facial expression at all. Therefore, this sort of behavior communicates more efficiently on TV.

Even if a given subtle emotion can be conveyed from time to time, you could never build an entire program on it as you could on violent emotions. In signal-to-noise terms the entire program would become indistinct in comparison with the background of more aggressive, expressive and efficient action shows.

What I am discussing here are tendencies of the medium. These are biases, not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there
are
occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s
Scenes From A Marriage
was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently.
Scenes
qualifies as the exception that proves the rule.

Many Americans saw this production in movie houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage.

Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning.

In demonstrating the best that is possible on television if you honor the medium’s limits absolutely, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further.

Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work
against
the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings.

Roots
was
not
an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible elements of
conflict
in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production didn’t have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted slaves, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind.

So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium.

Problems of subtlety don’t present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, easy to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favor such productions.

The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the world. Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image.

Edward Epstein, in his very important
News From Nowhere,
interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes:

“The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, black versus white students, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’

“. . . since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not from the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, that television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of the ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events.”

The Bias away from the Sensory

Television cannot transmit information that comes in the form of smell, touch or taste.

Furthermore, as we have discussed, the information it can transmit through the visual and auditory senses is extremely narrow. The ranges of color, brightness, depth are confined by the technology. The aural range is confined within narrow amplitudes, pitches and tones, dictated by low-cost speaker systems. The sounds we hear are flattened by the speakers. Smaller or distant sounds are blotted out by the whistle of the electron fields.

Unfortunately, given the human tendency to accept the information of our senses as total and reliable, we are not aware of the aspects of the visual and aural information that are dropped out of this new information package. We assume that when we see and hear something, we are seeing and hearing everything that is being transmitted, as though we were actually observing the event directly. Or else we assume that what is lost is too minor to matter. We are inclined to believe the information as though it had not been processed, reduced and reshaped before we experienced it.

In addition to the elimination of three sensory systems and the narrowing of two others, there is another sensory oddity in the television experience. Television disconnects the two operative sense modes—visual and aural.

You are sitting in a room watching an image from miles away. You see the place, but the image you see and the sounds which reportedly connect to the image are
not
really connected. The sounds are “nearer” to you than the images are.

Let’s say you are watching two people walking on a faraway hillside. In real life, you could not make out what the characters are saying, but on television you can. The voices are amplified or dubbed in, so you can hear a conversation that would otherwise be inaudible. The natural informational balance between aural and visual has been shattered. Now, information that you take in with the visual sense cannot be used to modify or help process the information from the aural sense because they have each been isolated from each other and reconstructed.

Furthermore, while you are watching and listening with your disconnected aural and visual senses, you are smelling some chicken roasting in the kitchen and you are drinking a beer.

So television has attached two of your sensory modes to a distant spot, altered their natural arrangement to each other, but left other aspects of your sensory apparatus at home in present time. This is a very peculiar arrangement and in a way it’s sort of funny, like playing a perceptual game in a technology museum. It takes on importance when we understand that the average person submits to this condition for four hours every day, and while in this state is receiving important information about life. All of the information is narrowed to fit the sensory transmission limits of the medium and distorted by the sensory disconnections in the human.

One can imagine the emergence of a new psychological syndrome: “sensory schizophrenia.” The cure will involve exercises to resynchronize wildly confused senses with each other, with the mind, and with the world.

Because of all the preceding it ought to go without saying that any messages that are dependent upon sensory understanding and interaction are not going to work on television.

This is very unfortunate for the ecology movement.

It always surprises me whenever any attempts are made to show wilderness or wildlife on television. The fuzzy image previously described is the first problem: forests become blurs, ocean depths are impossibly foggy, the details of plants are impossible to see. So the viewer depends on the voice-over to know what’s going on. Because of the blur naturalist programs focus on such objective behavior as playing, fighting, mating, eating, just as they do with human sitcoms and soap operas. There are more animal programs than plant programs because animals come through better on the fuzzy medium, and the larger and more rambunctious the animal the better.

But even if TV images were not as coarse as I have described them, there would still be no way to understand a forest or swamp or desert without all the senses fully operative, receiving information in all ranges, and freely interacting with each other.

An interesting recent illustration of the problem was a news feature concerned with a decision that a town council had to make. A land developer sought a permit to convert a large marsh area into a new community of homes. Should the permit be okayed?

It was quite a thoroughgoing, earnest report. Considering the subject, not ordinarily conceived as “good television” by producers, it was also an extraordinarily lengthy report, about eight minutes of an evening newscast.

The report presented interviews with the council members, interviews with the developer, and interviews with a local conservation group that opposed the project. It presented several minutes of images of the plants in the marshland, flocks of birds, nesting grounds, all with the appropriate wild-sounding calls.

Having worked as a publicist for many years, in fact, as a publicist for environmental groups, I knew how much work the environmentalists had put into this program and how important they felt it to be. In the end, though, I knew they had failed no matter how this particular vote came out, because if there is anything which cannot be conveyed on television it is a feeling for a marsh. I suspected that the result of the program would be to decrease concern for marshes.

The great majority of viewers watching that program had never visited this marsh or any marsh. These images and words about marshes were probably more than they had ever seen or heard before. Since the news report told them interesting things they did not know—how many varieties of creatures lived there, for example—they may have considered it quite a complete story. In terms of popular media, indeed it was. However, while the viewers knew more than before, they were not likely to be aware of what they did not know and were not getting. As the images of the marsh went hurtling into their brains, accompanied by a news reporter’s description of an egret nesting ground, they probably assumed that most of the relevant data were in hand, that they had learned enough to make a judgment.

Images and words about a marsh do not convey what a marsh is. You must actually sense and feel what a strange, rich, unique and unhuman environment it is. The ground is very odd, soft, sticky, wet and smelly. It is not attractive to most humans. The odor emanates from an interaction between the sometimes-stagnant pools and the plants that live in the mud in varying stages of growth and decay. If the wind is hot and strong, there can be a nearly maddening mixture of sweet and rotting odors.

To grasp the logic and meaning of marsh life, the richest biological system on Earth, one needs to put one’s hand into the mud, overturn it, discover the tiny life forms that abound. One needs to sit for long hours in it, feeling the ebbs and flows of the waters, the creatures and the winds.

Television cannot capture very much of this. The attempt to push the information through television goes flat. It doesn’t work. The viewer is left to evaluate aspects of the experience that television
can
capture, and these reduce to objective facts like the arguments among opposing viewpoints as to the best
use
of this area. People need homes. The developer has a right to profit. The tax base of the community is affected. Meanwhile, the ecologists speak of flyways and breeding grounds, endangered plants and nearly extinct creatures.