Notes on Tele-Opium

Published in Bond University's The Clocktower

I've become increasingly frightened of television just recently; I'm scared that, if I watch it, I'm going to get brainwashed. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mediated world alright, and I've gone and got myself a near-phobic fear of governmental propaganda. Irrational, sure, but then again, not. Disturbingly, The New York Times recently published a piece about the Bush administration's aggressive use of pre-packaged news reports that slot right on into the scheduled programming and go unattributed despite being, by their very nature, little more than biased, self-congratulatory press releases masquerading as researched journalistic fact (1); needless to say, it got me thinking. Who's to say—in fact, who really believes—that the television news, here in Australia as much as anywhere, isn't being filtered through a number of various political sieves before being broadcast out to us every night at six? It's not too hard to comprehend that the powers that be are, in fact, constructing certain sensitive news stories themselves, from scratch, with PR people playing make believe in the role of the objective journalist, force feeding the party line to us down through the tube, like an intravenous drip, the true opiate of the masses. If it sounds at all Orwellian, that's because it is. "Whenever our rulers want to endow a particular event with symbolic meaning," wrote Serge Daney, "television is involved." (2)

So, yes, I've become increasingly frightened by television, though not merely by the news. To be honest, I've become increasingly afraid of most television programs—of game shows, sitcoms, dramas, everything. I'm afraid because, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, my mind it going, and I can feel it. Opiate of the masses, indeed. I'm scared because I don't have to do anything; television really is an intravenous drip. It's a portal that, like something from The Matrix, downloads information—live!—directly into my—your—our—system. As Gerda Johanna Cammaer points out in the latest of edition of Synoptique: The Journal of Film and Film Studies,

increased access to remote places erodes the notion of distance. While the new expanded possibilities for rapid travel in the physical world may or may not affect our sense of location, in the two-dimensional universe of visual mass media, especially television and the internet, we receive this concept of growing proximity directly in our homes and minds. (3)

Here I am, then, sitting in my room, with 'National Nine News' playing in the background, transported by the magic of the image and the relative nowness of its reaching me—by the instantaneousness of satellites and all that jazz, which seems, as a result of its very existence, to drag the continents closer together with each passing day—halfway across the world; to wars, to the White House, to wherever news is 'breaking'; the television—little window—renders distance—and place—immaterial.

If the fear of tailored news wasn't enough to freak one out, surely the idea of the absolute irrelevance of 'here' and 'there' is, even a little? In front of the television set, where the hell am I, and where the hell are you? And, what's more, when the hell are we? Are we 'here and now,' 'there and then,' 'Here and then' or 'there and now?' And, as Cammaer argues in his piece, if television—or at least live television—is a medium obsessed with the immediate present, where and when and how do we remember ? Where does the past fit in a schema that privileges the now-ish now of the immediate now?

I'd like to be able to argue in favour of my beloved cinema, but I'm not sure that I can—not fully, anyway, and not for the people who need it most. Like the aforementioned game shows, sitcoms and television dramas, mainstream cinema—the vast majority of cinema—is, in effect, a big screen version of the grand distraction: "Hang your brain at the door!" What's scary, of course, is that the news is becoming a fiction; indeed, one might argue that, in some respects, the sports section of the news has always been about hanging your brain at the door. The cinema is lucky in that each film is—for the time being, at least—in effect, a memory: it's not live, it's not instantaneous; the cinema is a place for reflection on the past, present, and future all at once—none of this eternal present rubbish! The eternal problem is that the form of mainstream cinema—like the form of the game show, the sitcom, and the television drama— and now the news! —is a form designed to trap us, seduce us, placate us, and, eventually, kill us off. It is designed to make us shut down. To look at the world in one way, across the board, without question. I have nothing against entertainment or escapism (in moderate doses), but there needs to be more ways of seeing.

And therein lies the rub, for there are other ways of seeing; but the people who need to be aware of them, unless forced (and how do you force anyone to do anything nowadays?), hardly ever are. Don't expect to find the answers on television (though there are a few bastions of hope around the place); you want to be looking at experimental and avant-garde cinema, certain branches of international art cinema (I say 'certain branches' because, for every Tsai Ming-liang, there is something like Hero, which, although beautifully shot, is just about as safe as you can get on a formal level); cyber-cinema; music video; and, yes, admittedly even the occasional studio release that, somehow, manages to smuggle its way through the system and then breaks the rules for real.

The only problem is that formally daring work is rare—it's marginal—and, really, how can it not be? The problem is not just a conditioning of the audience towards the dominant forms (that's why they're dominant), but that the mainstream has a way of either ignoring marginal forms completely, leaving them for festival or 'specialist' audiences who're eternally hungry for 'new ways of seeing and hearing,' or absorbing them (the ones with the potential to become commercially successful, anyway) into its own body, turning them, in turn, into the dominant forms they were meant to oppose in the first place. This isn't a victory for the marginal filmmaker, but is instead another call to action. It doesn't matter if your innovations and sensibility have been adopted and are the ones in question; they're the ones you now have to attack. Don't give the audience the chance to develop cataracts or go deaf in their one good ear again. As John Cassavetes once wrote, "Blast them. Blast them then love them. Then blast them again." (4)

Having your eyes and ears prised open for you hurts, of course, but the artist only puts you through it because, in actual fact, he loves you so much. He wants you to be able take your brain to the cinema again; he wants you to kick your opium habit. He wants you to be in the here and now, but with both a memory and a future. He wants you to be alive again. But more than anything, what he really wants is for you to be able to point at the news and, with eyes and ears wide open, say, "I have a sneaking suspicion the government made that!"

Notes

1. Barstow, D. and Stein, R. 'Under Bush, a New Age of Pre-packaged TV News'. The New York Times, March 13, 2005. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

2. Daney, S. 'The Forbidden Zoom'. Libération, November 3, 1983. Available online at: http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esteevee/Daney_forbidden.html

3. Cammaer, G. J. 'Canadian Experimental Cinema since the 1990s: Retro-Vision and Trans-Vision'. Synoptique: The Journal of Film and Film Studies, Edition 8, March 2005. Available online at: http://www.synoptique.ca/core/en/articles/cammaer_canadian

4. John Cassavetes in a letter to Ray Carney. Available online at: http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/cassfilms/responses.shtml