If there is one
thing the finger or two who know me well out of the handful of people who know
me at all know about me, it is that I take a rather dim view of the most
ballyhooed technological innovations of our time. This is not to say (and indeed the just-mentioned
finger or two would not say) that I am by any stretch of the imagination a
Luddite even in the bastardized, hyper-stultified sense in which that word is
now understood—viz., a person who categorically refuses intercourse with all
electronically dependent phenomena of less than, say, ten years’
antiquity. No: I simply maintain that
scarcely any electronically dependent phenomenon of less than, say, sixty
years’ antiquity has changed our lives to an extent that merits a
fraction of the paper, printer-toner, electricity, breath, or (let us not mince
words) semen and vaginal ejaculate expended in celebration or lamentation of
it. There have been, I would argue,
several great falls (although there is only one Great Falls) since the dawn of
the so-called industrial age: the first was probably precipitated by the
development of the railroad networks and steamships, when it first became
impossible for a would-be civilized person to get away with living out the full
duration of his natural without undertaking some pointless trip to some faraway
place; and the most recent by the proliferation of television, when it first
became impossible for the would-be civilized person to get away with
segregating himself from the importunities of visible and corporeally
non-present humans, when ghosts became a species of vermin as quotidian and
ineradicable as rats and cockroaches.
(The movies were bad enough, but one could escape from them at home; and
the radio, while domestically inescapable, was mercifully apictorial [one has
only to do the arithmetic: if a picture says a thousand words and a motion-picture
moves at 24 frames per second, then a moving image of a person imploring you to
buy Colgate toothpaste is about 16,000 times as eloquent as the naked voice of
a person delivering the same message]).
Compared with the televisual plunge, the descent collectively catalyzed
by the WISYWIG operating-systemed personal computer, the internet, and the
mobile telephone has, according to my lights, been a mere physiologically
untraumatic down-jump, like the one one has to perform in alighting from a bus
or train. My gorge rises with especial
rapidity in response to any sort of tirade decrying the impersonality and
brusqueness of email, texting, and tweeting, as against the hyperpersonal
warmth and languorous, mint julep-sippin’ attitude to time of the old-fashioned
handwritten letter. I am heartily
offended by such polemics because I remember quite vividly what a sorrily
moribund horse the practice of letter-writing was in the later pre-email days. To be sure, I myself then corresponded
regularly and not-unlengthily with several friends (indeed, almost a full
handful of them!), but the habit had a rather pungent whiff of campy
anachronism about it, as if my correspondents and I were collaboratively
penning an epistolary novel: we wrote letters to each other for the pleasure of
writing letters, and of following in the footsteps of the great letter-writing
friends of old. The idea of exchanging letters
with people to whom I was bound by ties that I did not aestheticize–for
example, my parents or my younger brother—never crossed my mind. If I needed or wanted to say anything to
them, I gave them a phone call. And as
near as I could tell, it was solely by telephone that the vast majority of my
peers and elders transacted the entirety of their non face-to-face business
with all other people, from total strangers to those supposedly nearest and
dearest to them. “But surely it was
highly impractical to be on the telephone 24/7, 7/52 in those
station-to-station, pre flat rate long-distance, landline-only days.” Indeed it was, and people dealt with that
impracticality by generally not being on the phone, which was easy to
do, given that they generally had little interest in and often a positive
aversion to the people whom they knew to be immediately accessible via that
engine. Perhaps even in the most
intellectually fertile and socially integrated ages, the default attitude of
one human being to another—whether friend, stranger, or foe—is mild to severe
hostility. When other people are
present, the most efficient medium of expression of this hostility is verbal
abuse; when they are absent it is silence.
When paper letters were the only affordable means of communication, most
people did not write or send them, because not writing to your awful cousin in
Poughkeepsie was a much easier and more eloquent way of saying “Fuck you!” to
her than actually sending her a letter reading “Fuck you!” would have
been. The new or pseudo-new media of
communication, by effectively bringing us into one another’s presence,
encourage us to adopt the present-specific mode of expressing our
hostility. Thus the so-called social
media would be more properly termed the anti-social media, and the rudeness the
historically purblind decry in these fora is merely humanity’s native
tone. Thankfully, Moore’s so-called Law
assures us that the days of such ubiquitously smellable shit-talking and typing
are numbered; for on the day when the latest mobilephonetablet is no faster or
smarter (except perhaps in a stylistic sense) than the latest but one, the thrill
of using such an engine will summarily and permanently evaporate, the mobilephonetablet
will take its place alongside the post-it note and disposable razor in the
class of commodities we take utterly unsentimentally for granted, and humanity
without the walls of the domestic dwelling unit will mercifully revert to being
a race of close-mouthed hermits. In the
meantime, the mobilephonetablet and the various proprietarily named fripperies
it has engendered and facilitated will join company with Justin Bieber and
global warming as mild but constant vexations visited upon the would-be
civilized person via the mouths (a.k.a. north anuses) of other people
decrying his freakishness in not taking them seriously enough in some fashion. But the would-be civilized person cannot take
these ephemera seriously in any fashion, and least of all a polemical one. That the world has for quite a long time been
getting ever shittier he vehemently asserts, that it is measurably shittier now
than ten or twenty or thirty years ago he willingly acknowledges, but that it
is significantly shittier now than then is a notion that he will never
deign to grace with the soupcon of a smile, for in doing so he would
effectively be hanging out his card and setting up shop as a mere laudator of
the already long-since barbarous auld lang syne of living memory, as a
mountebank trading on the fraudulent notion of the 1970s as a prelapsarian epoch,
when he regards his true vocation as that of an Entferntervergangenheitsreinheitsseher,
a communicant with the purity of the distant past of pre-living
memory.
That
said-stroke-having said that (the that in both cases effectively being
the very first sentence of the preceding paragraph, to which the remaining
sentences merely add much needful if tedious illustrative evidence), there is at
least one technologically dependent transformation of recent years that has
caught me completely off-guard and left me utterly gobsmacked (I am no fan of this g word, but it seems by
now to stand in much the same relation to surprised or overwhelmed as “bullshit” has long stood in relation to humbug
or balderdash, namely as the only word forceful enough to convey the
meaning nominally contained in the more genteel terms). The change I am referring to is the by now
more or less fully accomplished digitization of all new or newly reproduced mechanically
reproducible images, and in particular moving images, the transformation
of movies and TV shows from phenomena originating directly from the chemical,
electrical, or magnetic excitation of corporeal matter into phenomena
originating only mediatedly from such excitation, and directly from the
immaterial empatternment of entities purported to be ones and zeros. It was a change that took me completely aback
(or, rather, genuinely aback, the distinction between afrontness and
abackness being a binary or digital-esque one that does not admit of
gradations) and has left me finding the world not merely a more depressing
place (that progression is par for the temporal course) but also a
stranger one. And as vis-à-vis probably
all such changes, in hindsight one feels remarkably obtuse in not having seen
it coming. One had after all known for
decades that the mimetic sector of the phenomenal world was becoming ever- more
digitized. When was it that one heard
one’s first demonstration of the hyperphonographic properties of the compact
disc, via that J. C. Penny’s (or Sears) floor model player, and its
ostentatiously ffr-spanning rendition of some unnamable orchestral
warhorse? (While I do not remember the
identity of the piece, I somehow recall that the disc—which could be viewed spinning
all those seemingly impossibly numerous hundreds of revolutions per minute through
the player’s transparent lid—was at least partially robin’s-egg blue in color
[but surely the record labels weren’t yet bothering with painted upper
surfaces, trusting the public to be seduced and dazzled by the naked
prismatizing silver].) 1983? At the very latest, 1984, when one was twelve,
presumably still young enough to take such a transformation in one’s stride. And even one’s first acquaintance with
digital moving pictures scarcely postdates one’s attainment of one’s majority:
how vividly (albeit dimly) one remembers that postage stamp-sized Q*******e
realization of the video for Radiohead’s “Creep” that came bundled with the
system software for certain M*******h computers in the autumn of 1993. Whence I can only conclude that quasi-paradoxically
it was the early saturation of so many subsectors of the mimetic sector of the
phenomenal world with digitized things that left me unprepared for the
digitization of that final (or is it perchance only the penultimate or even the
antepenultimate?) one. Because the
digital LP replacement and the digital nickelodeon flick or flipbook were not immediately
followed by the digital full-fledged studio-produced motion picture or
television program, it was easy enough to assume that there would never
be digital FFSPMPs or TV programs, that producing audiovisual records of such
gloss and sheen and depth and range and sheer, ineluctable bewitchingness was
one of those “things that computers can’t do,” that it involved some arcane
artisanal mystery akin to that entailed by the manufacture of authentic Delft
china or Stradivarius violins, as if every frame of the master of a Hollywood
blockbuster had to be individually prepared by people in surgical caps and
masks laying on layer upon parti-colored layer of powdered chlorides and
nitrates with apparatuses resembling pepper-grinders, or every micrometer of
videotape for the latest episode of Home Improvement had to be inscribed
with its corresponding micrometer of pseudo-sine-wavage by people in radiation
hoods and gowns waving their arms about in front of the to-all-appearances completely
motionless capstans like virtuosos of that early electronic musical instrument
known as the Theremin. Obviously, (in
hindsight) though, movies and TV programs have always been manufactured by
means of industrial processes relying on lightning-fast image-registrations
with which the producer (by which I term I mean not only or mainly the person
bearing that job title, but also the director, cinematographer, script-writer,
et al.) needed to have no conscious involvement, and therefore the delay in the
emergence of the digifilm motion picture or TV program could only have been
owing to the temporary inferiority of the digital moving image, which could
only have been owing to the (temporarily) inadequate processing speeds of
existing computers and storage capacities of existing storage systems (CD ROMs,
Bernoulli drives, or whatever else happened to be state of the art at any given
year). Once the digitally produced
moving image was technically not only equivalent but superior to the
best-generatable analogue one, the supersedence became a foregone
conclusion. And on the score of this
superiority I am under no illusions. The
reader may rest assured that the balance of the present essay is not going to
be one of those willfully ill-informed or disingenuous tributes to the rich, lanolin
slathered Corinthian leather-like, life-bearing organicity of the older medium,
of the sort that one associates with, say, the lovers of gramophone records. In the case of a televisual image, the
digitization-worthiness has always been intuitively obvious even to the naked
eye. One had only to come within a foot
of the television screen to see that its picture was composed of a finite and
in principle countable number of indivisible squares of light (specifically
red, green, or blue light), such that any computer-generated televisual image,
however egregious its limitations, would never be falling short of a standard
that one believed to be perfect. Of the
wartsandall-ishness of movies, on the other and more prominent hand, one was
blissfully ignorant: one fancied that every filmed image was made up of wholly
analog-ic lines and splashes of color (or grayscale), and that no matter how
closely one drew to that image, or many times one enlarged it, one would always
end up seeing some thing or collection of things that lacked a border along at
least one geometrical axis; that at no point would a film image resolve itself
into a mosaic of mutually tangent but isolated squares (or hexagons, or
octagons, or what have you). Of course,
one was familiar with the notion of a “grainy” film image, of a film image that
was at least partially made up of visibly discrete units, and one was familiar
with specific movies—mostly older ones—that were prevailingly composed of such
images. But one assumed that these were
aberrations, no different in kind from out-of-focus shots or wear-and-tear
induced scratches on the celluloid, neither of which impugned the mimetic
prowess of the medium itself. Little did
one know that the intrinsically, infinitely analogic properties of film were
likewise an illusion. I have not
investigated the chemistry or physics behind this phenomenon at any length or
in any detail—or at all as a matter of fact—but I have been told or led to
believe by people in the habit of crediting only creditable sources that these
analogic properties break down at a dispiritingly coarse resolution, that
conventional celluloid film stock, be it of even the most recent laboratory
standard (i.e., the latest-day equivalents of Technicolor and Eastmancolor),
can register only a dozen or so hues of color or grayscale that will cease to appear
to blend into each other when viewed if not by the naked eye at front-row
viewing distance, then at any rate by the eye aided by a magnifying glass
placed a few inches from the projection screen.
Needless to say, by the early years of the previous decade digital
moving images that did not break down into their constituent pixels when
subjected to such scrutiny were rolling off the assembly lines of Palo Alto, and
that by then the celluloid film’s days were numbered in a more than technically
fanciful sense.
This is of
course not to say that even now a majority of the digital moving images one
comes across in the daily round of commerce with electronic media are of
Alpine–standard (that’s the antithesis of b*g-standard) 1990s’ Hollywood
cinefilmic quality. The minuscule frame
size of the standard Y** T**e video, for example, is imposed not by the visual
scope of its typical displaying medium—say, the fourteen-inch screen of a
largish laptop—but by the incredibly low resolution of the video itself, which
is such that it is only when its images are viewed as if from across the width
of a football stadium that they can trick us into mistaking them for faithful
copies of real-world entities–an illusion that even an old nineteen-inch
low-definition TV set displaying over-the-air analogue reruns of Gilligan’s
Island managed to pull off by seeming to keep its images only as far away
as the length of a ping-pong table of perfectly ordinary, garage-friendly
dimensions. There is no inherent
or invariable superiority of fidelity in a digital image, any more than
there has ever been any inherent or invariable superiority of fidelity in a
digital audio recording, although the history of the reception of both
digital sense-registrations leads one to believe that this superiority has been
and continues to be generally taken for granted. One recalls that way back in that
millennium-closing year 2000, when the first, pre-castrated version of Napster went
viral as one would say nowadays, that much of the hysteria about the
platform on the part of the so-called music industry and its millions of
disinterested partisans (one must never underestimate the culturally
industrialized other-directed human being’s proclivity for identifying with the
oppressor [although I think some nicer word than “oppressor” should be come up
with to designate people who merely want you to give them your money and are
using much less coercive means of trying to get you to part with it than a whip
or gun]) emanated from the notion that the recordings disseminated gratis by it
(Napster), were perfect copies of the CD, LP, or audio cassette tracks
from which they had been derived. These
recordings were so conceived because in those days, when cassettes remained the
only medium of home recording that was both reliable and affordable, the only
sort of imperfection of audio fidelity that anybody had any notion of was
analogue and contingent in character---surface noise, tape hiss, wow and
flutter—all of them were successful realizations of the contingent corporeal
world’s effort to contribute its own unruly two cents’ worth to the would-be
necessity-driven message of spirit.
Little did anybody then seem to realize that digital recordings were
subject to their own sui generis form of imperfection, an imperfection
imposed not by chance and the medium itself but deliberately by the curators of
digital archives both amateur and professional; that the degree of this
imperfection, visited on the recording by a process known as compression,
depended on how much –or, rather how little—storage space the curator was
willing to allocate to a given chunk of music; that even the audio standard of
the original compact disc, with its pathetic 16-bit sampling rate, had been a data-capacity-per-square-unit
of space-imposed compromise that fell well below the threshold of apparent
perfection of fidelity (presumably the fact that CDs were so much smaller than
LPs was owing entirely to problems of torque and whatnot imposed by their
rotation speed, as caeteris paribus a 12-inch laser disc would have yielded
appreciably higher fidelity than a four-inch one); that what with the average
Napster user’s hard drive’s possessing the storage capacity of roughly two CDs,
and the library stored thereon of several thousands of minutes of music, in
point of median sound quality the average Napster download was barely a match
for the likewise telephonic “Operaphone” broadcasts that Marcel Proust had reveled
in during the previous fin de siecle. On the evidence of our collective
experience of similar switchovers in more remote times, one would have every
reason to suppose that by now, fourteen years into the millennium, we would
have all grown savvy to the limitations on aural experience imposed by
compression, and moved on to a standard of audio reproduction undreamt of in
the original Napster days, such that CD-quality sound would have long since
been demoted to the status of a pathetic
pis-aller suitable for only the most prosaically quotidian
communications—occupying a niche of the prestige level of AM radio (which, by
the way, despite having been deprived of its crown as the predominant purveyor
of live audio content nearly forty years ago, has not yet disappeared and is
unlikely to do so until analog radio en bloc is phased out [but who
knows how far off that day is, given that by all rational rights analog radio,
being the bearer of a less complex signal, should have been forced to give up
the ghost long before analog TV, and yet analog TV has been dead a full five
years now]). Instead, the MP3, an
avowedly sub-CD quality medium, is both the industry standard and consumers’
format of choice for downloaded music.
What gives? Whence comes this
voluntary regression? Or is it even
voluntary? Is it possible that the very
idea of a distinction between superior and inferior sound-images is
indissolubly tied to the old analogue recording media—or, to be more precise, a
phenomenology of listening attuned to the potential shortcomings of such
media—such that only those old enough to remember when LPs and cassettes were
the state-of-the-available sound-reproducing art are still capable (supposing
it to be a capability and not a disability) of caring about or noticing
deficiencies in sound reproduction, and that when shove is reached by push, anybody
under the age of say, 35, will reflexively, unthinkingly go for the maximum
time-span and number of tracks even if the
sound quality delivered therein is of sub Edison wax-cylindrical poverty?
“Who knows? But in any case, this is supposed to be an
essay on visual media, from which everything you have been saying about
all these entities and phenomena pertaining to sonic media, cannot but
constitute a pure digression.” Actually,
I’m not sure that it is a pure digression.
For whether we are talking about the reproduction of sight or the
reproduction of sound, it would seem that the past quarter-century has
witnessed some sort of radical reorientation of the viewer’s or listener’s
horizon of expectations. Formerly, from
that hot or cold, rainy or bone-dry, blustery or sultry day in 1830-something
when Louis Daguerre legged it down to the patent office with his big glass
plate tucked under one arm, right up until that hot or cold &c. 2000-something
day when the last pop album was released not only in CD but also in cassette
format, everyone seemed to be under and revel in the impression that mankind’s
means of representing to itself the world around it(self) were constantly
improving and asymptotically approaching the moment of indistinguishability
from the real McCoy. From
black-and-white still photography we moved on to color still photography; from
black-and-white 16 mm motion picture film we moved on to color 35 mm motion
picture film and thence to color 70 mm motion picture film and thence (in
selected cinemas) to that three digit-millimeter’d monstrosity known as Imax;
from acoustically recorded records we moved on to electrically recorded records
and thence to CDs; from mono sound we moved on to stereo sound and thence
(eventually, a decade or two after the false start known as quadraphonia) to surround
sound. Every day and in every way we expected
ourselves to be more fully, richly, and accurately in touch with the
world accessible by the senses than we had been the day before. Now—and I say this while candidly
acknowledging the legitimacy of the interjection of a Mixalotian-dimensioned but
occasioned by the recent and for the moment still-current recrudescence of
pandemic hope in the possibility of universal 3-D cinema and television–all
that seems to have changed. Now[adays],
we (or should I say “they” or “you all” [or “you guys” or “yins”]) seem to care
only about the accessibility and fluency of the mimeme, and no
longer to give a fig about its fidelity to the mimed phenomenon. If, when streaming (how I pine for an
equivalent of so-called for grammatical entities other than count
nouns!) a movie, we (or “they” et al.) are forced to wait so long as two
seconds for the picture to refresh—in other words, to endure the briefest spell
of still imagery or blank screenage–we stamp our feet and shake our fists with
all the apoplectic fury of a mid-twentieth century paterfamilias protesting a
meteorologically induced interruption of The Wide World of Sports by a
simultaneous catch-as-catch-can assault on the horizontal and vertical holds of
his rooftop aerial-attuned living room hog of a 24-inch console set. But provided the transmission elapses without
a single hitch of this kind, we spectate upon its fruits as fully satisfied
customers, devoting not a micrometer of our so-called attention span to the
matter of whether they are every bit as verisimilitudinous, as still life in
motion-like, as their counterparts on DVD or Blu-Ray.
The whole of the
preceding two paragraphs, I blush to admit, is intended to function as one big,
walloping, waddling disclaimer of sorts, one that in hindsight I now see would
perhaps have been more seasonably sited before the essay proper rather than
within it—but fudge it, what’s done is dun, &c. You see, when I alluded or referred some
pages ago to cinema projection-screen images “that do not break down into their
constituent pixels” when viewed with a magnifying glass, I was alluding or
referring to a phenomenon that I had not as yet experienced at first eye, and
that indeed I have not as yet experienced as of this writing. When I hear from those who have been to
screenings of digital films in chain multiplex cinemas that during such
screenings “you can see the pores on the actors’ faces,” I must assume that the
state-of-the-art technical standard of cinematographic mimesis has surpassed
anything obtainable in the most upmarket and recent-vintaged pre-digital
cinematic setting. But I myself have not
been to a screening of any movie at a multiplex cinema since, at the latest,
2003, when, if I am not mistaken (though I may very well be) old-fashioned
analog cimefilm was still the universal standard at the consumer end. The virtual entirety of my acquaintance with
the post-analogue cinemascape has in fact been mediated by, at the quasi-immediate
or gateway level, my 14-inch 2010 laptop screen with allegedly high-definition
capabilities and my 2008 19-inch low-definition non-flat ordinary television
screen; and at the unabashedly mediate level by the reproductive limitations of
the original DVD format and the nearly equally ancient DSL interweb connection
system-cum-protocol, together with whatever such limitations are imposed by
N*****x et al./&c. on the so-called server end of the inline delivery service(s). Accordingly any animadversions I may
subsequently formulate (and I plan to formulate scads of them) on the
unsatisfactory character of the new digifilm standard by comparison with
certain standards of yore may for all I know be vitiated by the impurities
imposed by the intervening media just mentioned. The reader may very well believe that it is
incumbent upon me, before I go off half-c***edly shooting my mouth (or, rather,
fingers) off about digital movies, to take the trouble to see one in all its
blackhead-infested pore-exposing glory; if so, I no less abjectly than warmly entreat
him or her to remit to me the ninety dollars I conservatively estimate would be
required to convey me by taxi to and from the nearest digitally equipped
multiplex, which local lore informs me is sited somewhere in the remote hinterland
of central Anne Arundel County, well past the airport. Failing such an offer, this essay will at
least have as its standard of reference for digital motion photography a
composite version thereof that I fancy is not radically dissimilar to that
carried in the heads of the majority of present-day Americans, who, even if
they do make it to the proper digicinema
a couple of times a month, still do the bulk of their moving image
watching at home, on their televisions, or at work, on their computer-screens;
a standard, that, moreover, will perhaps be ideally apposite in that its
historical foil (i.e., the standard with which it will be unfavorably compared in
the aforementioned animadversions) was one with which I was likewise most
familiar through the domestic media.
*
Now begins the
essay proper, and with it our embarkation on the journey back to its eponymous
golden age, the (I repeat the title to spare you the admittedly more than
negligible effort of scrolling back up to it) “golden age of videotape and 16mm
film.” In introducing a reader to an age
it is customary—and indeed held to be but the barest degree of civility—to
supply him or her at the very start with a pair of book-ending years, the year
marking the beginning of the age in question, and the year marking the end
thereof, respectively. And that I might
not be thought to be breaking with this custom out of sheer frowardness or
wantonness I shall supply such a pair—viz., 1970 and 1986—right here and now
(or by now there and then), well before the full stop terminating the present
sentence. But before I employ either of
these years in its civilly mandated bookenderly function, I must in all candor
and frankness confess that there is more than a whiff of if not arbitrariness
then certainly factitiousness about putting them to such a use. You see, DGR, as this is a
subjectively-grounded chronology-cum-analysis (I point this out explicitly just
in case you’ve only barely figuratively been sleeping so far), in tentatively
situating the left or earlier bookend at 1970, I am bound by default to mislead
you into supposing that I was watching videotaped or 16 mm-filmed moving images
in that year, which is not true, as I was not even born until 1972. “So then this year marks an
uncharacteristically objective watershed.” That’s not quite true either, for by 1970
both videotape and 16mm film had been widely used in television for many
years. Vis-à-vis videotape, at least, one
has only to think of the funeral of President Kennedy in 1963. But I did not see a second of the footage (if
footage is a word that may be as aptly applied to videotape as to film) of that
funeral until its twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1988—in other words, a full two
years after the right bookended year of 1986.
Which brings me to the significance of that year—a mite prematurely,
though, as I have not yet fully elucidated the significance of the left bookend
year, 1970. And so in full the
significance of this year is that no television program originally filmed or
recorded before that year has ever been surrounded by the aura or imbued by the
perfume of romance that surrounds and imbues virtually every 16mm or videotaped
(or 16mm-cum-videotaped) program made from that year onwards. But this significance has in turn some
apparent objective basis, in that it very probably was in 1970 that videotaped
television really took off as the industry standard—or, at any rate, took its
place as a co-standard alongside 16mm film—owing very probably to its new
encoloration. To be sure, color
videotape was not actually invented in 1970, but to my young (ca. 8 to
14-year-old) eyes it might as well have been, in that as soon as I acquired the
habit of looking out for copyright dates on television programs, that was the
earliest year I ever espied, and indeed, I can remember the very program in
whose credits I espied it, namely Let’s All Sing a Song, a
musical-educational series that was hosted by the redoubtable
banjoist-cum-folksinger Tony Saletan, and that I along with thirty or so other
eight-or-nine year olds was regularly (or at any rate not infrequently)
compelled to watch by my second grade teacher, Mrs. Foster. Let’s All Sing a Song was for me a
watershed or milestone or whichever other clichéd metaphoric vehicle is most
appropriate for designating something separating two (of only two) historical
eras (yes, yes, yes: cf. the B.C. / A.D. divide if you must): in being in color
and on videotape it was a segment of the modern world, yes, but it was also the
oldest segment thereof; any more ancient soundtracked moving image
segment, in being on film (as I then assumed all pre-1970 moving image segments
were), might as well have been generated in the same month as the first Laurel
and Hardy talkie or The Wizard of Oz (which one of course depended on
whether it was in black and white or color), even if its last frames had still been
being exposed at 11:59 p.m. PST on December 31st, 1969. By the time I became acquainted with a single
item from the slender corpus of pre-1970 color videotaped television—I suppose
it must have been a Laugh In rerun—I was well to the right of the right
bookend year (1986, in case you’ve already forgotten) and so the watershed or
milestone could no longer be budged back a single inch. So anyway, what happened in 1986 that made it
epoch-breaking? (I write epoch-breaking
and not era-breaking because just as in a sense or arguably we are still
living in the iron age [or era], in that all subsequent eras [space, nuclear,
information, &c.] are in a sense or arguably but pseudo-ages, so I [if only
I] am in a sense or arguably still living in the modern, color-videotape
post-Saletanian era, to which, as I have already hinted, all other eras [chief
among them the digifilm one] are in a sense &c.) Certainly it was not the supersedence of videotape
by some other medium, for television shows continued to be recorded on
videotape in the thousands for at least another decade and a half, and indeed
for certain genres of television program—talk shows, news magazines, and every
sort of show centering on a public performance, were it of the Rolling Stones
at NFL Football Stadium X or the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center—there was
no practical alternative to it. (To be sure, during this period such spectacles
were occasionally filmed, but most often for release in cinemas [consider,
e.g., The Last Waltz and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl]—doubtlessly
because the typical television production budget was not large enough to recoup
the costs of all the hundreds of hours of chronographically redundant film [to
say nothing of the parts and labor involved in running all those
multiply-stationed cameras simultaneously], most of it ultimately unused, that
were requisite to adequate realizations of the busy-ness and spontaneity of
these events.) Nor did 16mm film disappear from the televisual scene before the
advent of the millennium; for although by the mid-1970s videotape had usurped
many of its old offices, it remained the most-favored medium for the more
expensive situation comedies and the less expensive drama series and
made-for-TV movies; not to mention its impressive career in the service of that
most quintessentially fin du vigntieme siecle televisual genres, the pop
music video. (Indeed, throughout the 80s
and 90s, there was no surer sign of a band’s accession to the big time than its
switching from video-making on videotape to videomaking on 16mm film.) What happened in the mid-eighties, rather, was
that the symbiotic marriage of video and 16mm film appeared to
end, that television programs that made mutually complementary use of both
media ceased to appear to be made; such that when I try to recall dual Vid-16mm
shows that I have become smitten with since then, I inevitably alight on some
pre-1986 production I first saw as a rerun—The Sandbaggers, for example,
or Van der Valk, both of which were aired on my home media market’s
second public television station in the early nineties. From 1970 to 1986 it seemed that on switching
on the telly one had a good chance of spectating on a recently produced dual Vid-16mm
mixed media program; from 1986 onwards it seemed that one could not reasonably
expect to come upon anything new or newish that was not either all video or all
16mm in medial provenance. “But why,
given that the title of this essay alone proves that you held both media in
high regard, should you have been disappointed in a transition that seems to
have left you liberally supplied with fresh instantiations of both of them?” Ah, to answer that question, “I must,” in the
words of a writer whom I dare not name, lest I mislead you into thinking I know
much more of his oeuvre than the sentence I am now in the middle of quoting,
“trouble you with a bit of history,” the history of my early (some of it very
early—i.e., pre second grade) reception of television, which will in turn
require me to trouble you with a bit of history of television itself (or,
rather, television as it was for the world at large, for I would not
hypostatize that television as a Ding an sich at the expense of my
television.) (I hope you realize that throughout the preceding sentence,
including its concluding parenthesis, I was talking about a
viewing-phenomenology-cum-productive apparatus and not about a cluster of
individual television sets, although what with television being an
OED-accredited count noun, you are certainly well within your rights to
misconstrue me along those second lines).
This history-fragment must begin (or, at any rate, is most conveniently
begun) with the introduction or undraping of a certain elephant, the elephant
in the room (i.e., the room that is this essay) that is 35 mm-and-upwards film. Of course, in a certain sense, the reader has
already met this elephant, which in a certain sense has never been concealed,
for I have indeed already both explicitly mentioned and implicitly alluded to
several 16mm+ gauges of film. (The mentions may be tracked down by a verbatim
search query; the allusions are to be found in the droppings [ugh!] of names
fairly tightly associated with 35mm and up [e.g. Eastmancolor].) But heretofore I have either explicitly or
implicitly ascribed to them an exclusively non-televisual and narrowly
cinematic bailiwick; in other words, I have treated them as though they were
media one only ever encountered (or, perhaps more appositely, had ever
encountered) at official Milk-Dud and popcorn-purveying movie theaters. The truth about 35mm+ media’s presence on
television is in fact rather more complex—or, to put it less gently, completely
different. In the first place, in
deference to the antiquity of these interlopers’ residence in the headquarters
or palace (albeit also in defiance of the modernity of one’s discovery
thereof)—one must acknowledge that beginning at least as far back the early
1960s, 16+ mm films were especially commissioned for broadcast on television. Ten or perhaps even five years ago, I would
have been not merely loath but positively defiantly unwilling to make such an
acknowledgment. Until ten or perhaps
even five years ago, I assumed that all film destined for televisual broadcast
had been of 16mm gauge. But then, one
sultry or bone-dry night between 2004 and 2009, I was watching my Russico DVD
of Grigory Kozinstev’s masterly (and some would say definitive) cinematic
realization of Hamlet, or perhaps his equally masterly (and
equally said to be definitive by some) cinematic realization of King Lear—in
either case, a black-and-white movie presented under the aesthetically
equivocal offices of the letterbox (remember that my TV set is an old-school
square model, via which all gains in authenticity of aspect ratio come at the
cost of a reduction in size of the image)—and I was struck by the indoor (or
studio-set) scenes’ cinematographic dead-ringerly resemblance to the
black-and-white episodes of the early 1960s’ American television series The
Wild, Wild West, which in turn had mutato mutando always struck me
as cinematographic dead ringers for the full color run of the original
Shatner-centered Star Trek series.
But how could this be, given that the Kozintstev Shakespeare movies,
being letterboxed, had certainly been shot on 16mm+ film? The seeming contradiction could only be
resolved by the supposition that The Wild, Wild West and Star Trek
had been shot on 16mm+ film—presumably on 35mm film. Of course, that supposition immediately
elicited (N.B., DGR: elicited, not begged) the question “What did
the producers of The Wild, Wild, West and Star Trek do with those
extra 19 mm of film?”—i.e., with the 9.5 inches on each side of the frame that,
falling beyond the blinders of those old-school square TV sets, would have been
exposed in vain? To this day, that
question remains as unanswered as the one musically posed by Chuck Ives
probably roughly and possibly exactly a century ago. But this unansweredness need not concern you
or me right now (or, indeed, perhaps even ever); for our present purposes it
suffices to hone the above presumption into an assertion, and from that
assertion move back into anecdotal mode as a propaedeutic to a mildly modified reiteration
of a slightly f(a/u)rther-above generalization, as follows: Star Trek
and the Wild, Wild, West had been filmed on 35mm stock, and the moment I
realized this I began performing a kind of comparative mental split-screen
screening of ST and TWWW alongside as many other filmed TV shows
as I could remember, towards the end of ascertaining which of them had likewise
been given the full (or any rate a fullish) Hollywood treatment
between the sprockets (“The Columbo so-called mystery movies? Almost certainly. The Partridge Family? Possibly.
But Mary Tyler Moore, The Bob Newhart Show, and Eight
Is Enough? Almost certainly
not. Indeed, that troika of programs
practically defined the look of stateside commercial 16mm television,
aFaIWC. But what about those big-budget weekend
second-tier-celebrity-cowcatchers and weekday evening soap operas, the likes of
The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, and Knot’s Landing
and Dynasty, respectively?
Possibly but by no means almost certainly.” And so [albeit not much f(a/u)rther] on.). So, as I said, a great deal of expressly
televisual television in our period (remember: 1970-1986)—and more
specifically, as we have just seen in the preceding parenthesis, prime-time
television—was evidently 35-mm in provenance.
But in addition to this swath of properly televisual 35-mm offerings,
during our period prime time, together with its late-night schedule follower,
was perennial host to movies originally and relatively recently produced for
and released via the cinema—in other words, very nearly axiomatically, movies
shot on film gauges of 35 mm and upwards.
Now, because, as mentioned before, in those days television sets were
not shaped in such a way as to accommodate the geometrical proportions of a
widescreen film image, and because, as not mentioned before, letterboxing had
either not yet been thought up or (as is more likely) thought up and
immediately dismissed as a piece of poncey arthouse cinema-fannish wankery, the
preparers of cinemagenetic movies for television broadcast (or perhaps even the
broadcasters themselves, at the moment of transmission; I suppose either would
have been capable of it) would simply zoom in on the film-frame in order to
make its complete vertical aspect commensurate with that of the television
screen, thus cropping the aforementioned 9.5 inches of horizontal aspect on
each side; then, through a repertoire of camera maneuvers known as pan-and-scan,
they would every now and then shunt bits of the frame aside, to the left or to
the right, in order to make room for other bits that they supposed the viewer
would take more interest in. Thus, the
televisual preparer effectively served as a second director, subdividing each
shot (actually, perhaps only most shots, as presumably there were plenty
of shots in which from beginning to end nothing interesting was deemed to be
happening in the margins) into a series of sub-shots. Most of the time one didn’t notice these
interventions, but occasionally one did and was unsettled by them (without at
all knowing why, as the incommensurability of aspect-ratios was a discovery one
made only long after 1986): for instance, in a scene of a profile
tête-à-tête across, say, a broad table, each of the interlocutors would be seen
only while he was speaking, such that one was repeatedly and bemusingly denied
the pleasure and intelligence afforded by a so-called reaction shot. Surely, one reasoned, it would have made much
more sense to film the chinwag as a static shot, with both waggers in view from
beginning to end. Little did one know that
it had in fact been filmed in just such a manner. But probably more disruptive of one’s
so-called viewing experience in the case of these retrofitted movies was the
palpable impoverishment of resolution effected by the aforementioned in-zooming. Even mutato mutando—that is to say,
with all due regard for the inferiority of resolution of pre high-definition
television screens—as seen on television, and even when hosted by the primest bits
of real estate in the reigning network’s prime time schedule, cinemagenetic
movies looked much less sharp, much less crisp, much less properly cinematic,
than in the cinema. And the f(a/u)rther
the hosting was sited from these A-listed sites, the more egregious the pan and
scan-induced shortcomings, limitations, and distortions tended to be, and the
more often were they augmented and compounded by other, non pan and
scan-induced shortcomings &c. that were equally or even more egregious. Take, as something approaching a limit case
of viewerly awfulness, the example of a movie shown on a local, independent,
non network-affiliated station at 2:00 on a weekday morning [not that it was at
all common in the most usual present-day sense for a station to be on the air
at such an hour during our period; and for this very reason any station that
was so was to be regarded as common in the most usual pre-ca. 1920
sense]. In the first place, the movie
was likely not to be anywhere near new.
This is not to say that it was anywhere near likely to being a classic
from the so-called golden age of Hollywood—an early Marx Brothers vehicle, say,
or a Bogart-centered noir picture, or a Powell and Loy-powered screwball
comedy—no: in those pre-TCM days such films—which, being black-and-white and 16
mm-gauged, were largely immune to the depravations now in point (albeit also
subject to their own, more aristocratic, strains of corruption)—tended to be
aired on Sunday afternoons, either on one of these independent stations or on
one of the two quasi network (i.e., PBS)-affiliated public stations. (The independent channels’ Sunday morning
schedules, on the other hand, were the preserve of golden-age shorts—The
Little Rascals (a.k.a. Our Gang), newsreels, the original Lone
Ranger series, Laurel and Hardy
and Three Stooges one-reelers,
and the like. [Among the many praiseworthy reasons that I have never been able
to bring myself to jump on to the seemingly backless bandwagon of
microgenerational solidarity—the peremptory fiat that as a nominal adult one
should tog oneself out cap-a-pie in the cultural bric-a-bric that were
explicitly fabricated by the culture industry of old for the consumption of
children within two or at most three years of one’s own age (such that I, being
born in 1972, am required to collect memorabilia of the live-action Incredible
Hulk show but prohibited from dropping references to H. R. Puffenstuff
[target birth year-swathe: 1965-1969 or He-Man: TBY-S: 1974-1978]), not
the least compelling (or praiseworthy) has been my awareness that courtesy of
the sheer dumb luck of the draw a significant proportion of my childhood and
teenage television viewing was devoted to movies and programs that had been
produced years or even decades before I was born—that, indeed, I actually found
it harder to avoid The Little Rascals &c./et al. than most of the
official kiddie-targeted programming of that time; an awareness that is
naturally consubstantial with the surmise that most of my exact and near-exact
contemporaries were likewise all too familiar with many of the cinematic and
televisual mainstays of (in the words of the voiceover lead-in to one of the
newsreel-rebroadcast series) “those thrilling days of yesteryear,” and that
their garish display of enthusiasm for their own microgenerational niche is
made not entirely in good faith.] The
late-night offerings of the independent stations tended to be drawn
indiscriminately from the vast but finite pool of non Oscar-awarded R-rated
movies released between five and fifteen years earlier. By this I mean not they were necessarily bad
movies or even good movies that required any Golden Gate Bridge-dimensioned suspension
of disbelief to appreciate—I am not talking here of, for example, the
stereotypical late-night B-grade horror movie (e.g., Night of the Living
Dead), the likes of which in our market tended to be shown only on or
around Halloween [in contrast to the stereotypical daytime B-grade horror movie
(your Peter Cushing ‘60s Hammer anvils, Stateside ’50s Werewolf operas,
&c.) which were regularly seen on the Saturday afternoon Creature
Feature slot presided over by the imitable yet irreplaceable Dr. Paul
Bearer])—but merely that, having generally not been graced with the most lavish
budgets, they tended not to sport the flashiest cinematography, being
prevailingly composed of mid-focus interiors rather than deep-focus outdoor
panoramas. Moreover, they tended to be
presented with a minimum of broadcasterly second-directorly intervention: only
the predictable recurrence of the usual commercial breaks dissuaded one from
believing that the entire screening was
being superintended by a single feckless dogsbody of a station graveyard-shifter
who had simply pointed a camera at a projection screen and stepped out for a
two-hour cigarette break. But beyond and
probably above this, the relative age of the films imparted a peculiar aura of
insalubriousness to them. I am not
talking here in the main about the films qua medium-alienable documents
of a particular historical microepoch—although that quaness certainly
did come into play—but about the age of the physical print, the three or four
canisters of celluloid that served as the material basis of the broadcast. You see, over time—and even a fairly brief
time at that—old-school color film has a tendency if not exactly to fade then at
least to apply to itself a treatment of spectroscopic selection, as a
consequence of which greens and blues soon find themselves being crowded out by
reds, yellows, browns, and oranges. Even
in the all analogue days this process could be sharply retarded if not quite
arrested by scrupulous storage within certain humidity and temperature
thresholds, but only a small fraction of the total volume of cinema-ready
film-stock was ever vouchsafed such storage, and the fraction of that fraction
that ever made it on to the late-night non network-bolstered airwaves must have
been infinitesimal. One assumes that in
1977 George Lucas took whatever pains preservationists assured him would be
necessary to keep the master prints of Star Wars in pristine condition
for the six(!) years that remained until its first television broadcast, such
that throughout that broadcast I felt more or less as though I were reprising
my only previous viewing of the film, in some north Tampa cinema, half a
lifetime (as far as an eleven-year-old was concerned [the phenomenon is
beautifully encapsulated by Dean Stockwell in Paris, Texas]) earlier. One likewise assumes that in 1980, Michael
Ritchie, the director of The Island, a minor thriller starring Michael
Cane, took no such pains over that film’s televisual destiny, such that
throughout my first and only viewing of that film, at 11 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. or
thenabouts on Channel 28 or 44 on a ca. 1985 Friday or Saturday
night-cum-Saturday or Sunday morning, the tropical mugginess that was its
genius loci seemed to emanate principally not from its eponymous setting, but
rather from the material tissue of its celluloid base, which looked as if it
had been liberally smeared with a preparation of Red Dye No. 5-infused
Vaseline. And generally speaking, if one
were pressed to choose one adjective to describe the look of televised 35-mm
cinema during our period, one would unhesitatingly opt for hot—provided,
of course, that that word were purged beforehand of every last dram of
extra-thermometric connotation (i.e., of all its associations with sex, pre-bop
jazz, &c.). Supersaturated as these
moving images were with the aforementioned reds, browns, and oranges, they
could not fail to give the impression that the world they depicted was one of
oppressive, and indeed life-extinguishing, warmth. “But are not red, brown, and orange the
signature hues of autumn—of the season of ever-crescent coolness?” Indeed they are, but in order to impart to
the viewer a sense of this E-CC these hues must participate in an image of
superlative crispness, an image in which each and every fallen leaf and
newly bared tree branch (or pumpkin or turkey wattle) is sharply and cleanly
set apart from its neighbor, as if these items have just been freeze-dried out
of all tendency to fraternize with one another.
When the constituents of an autumnal-paletted image are allowed to bleed
into each other, the effect is one of ever-crescent hotness abetted by an
equally ever-crescent humidity; as if the entire composition is about to
implode into a single undifferentiated glutinous mass of infernally superheated
goo. And owing to the axiomatically
blurrier resolution of panned-and-scanned 35-mm film (and possibly also to the
remoteness of the print used from the master print [I remember reading
somewhere long ago that the films shown by local TV stations were copies of
copies of copies of &c.]), it was this second genre of autumnal-paletted
image that the typical late-night independent station-screened movie habitually
presented. Watching one of these movies
from beginning to end was like sitting for two hours in a sort of sauna with a
Victorian dress code, but frequented exclusively by people hailing from the
1970s and early 1980s. I suppose the
spiritual nadir of my late-night indie-station movie-watching career came at
the very end of our period, or perhaps even slightly after that end, during my
spectation of Hardcore, a relentlessly grim 1979 release in which George
C. Scott plays some sort of ultra-conservative Bible-thumper (a member of the
Dutch Utterly Unregenerately Unreformed Protestant Church of Christ the
Unregenerate Underwear-Nonchanger, as I recall) trying to retrieve his runaway
teenage daughter from the sub-demimonde of illegal pornographic movie
production. Perhaps not quite needless
to say [for I understand that nowadays on most channels almost anything goes
after a certain hour of the night], the film had been edited to such an extent
as was intended to forestall its bringing the blush to the cheek or shudder to
the spine of a person even younger than myself, such that what survived of the
sex and violence could not on its own have been enough to traumatize me. But combined with the saunified and
infernalized autumnal palette, it proved quite unbearable. In scene after scene, the heroine was forced
to submit to some unspeakably terrifying or degrading act while cooped up under
lock and key in a “King-of-the-Road”-ishly small closet of a room carpeted in a
fiery ochre shag fabric whose every shageme seemed to be straining to lick
one’s eyeballs; a room whose hazily white windowless walls deprived one of even
the hope of escaping to cooler, freer, safer, kinder, or otherwise more
wholesome environs.
But all the
afore-described visual deformations, for all their oppressiveness, by no means
exhausted the reservoir or mine of misery supplied to me by the televisual
screening of 35-and-up-mm cinemagenetic movies, for there was also an auditory
(or audiogenetic) component to this misery. (Incidentally, the present
paragraph even less arguably constitutes a digression than the earlier
audiocentric passage does or did, although—and here the reader will simply have
to take my word for it—the arguing to that effect is best postponed to a later,
if it-is-to-be-hoped not too distant, paragraph.) Even in the pre-Dolby all mono days of ca.
1950-1980, movies produced for the widescreen cinema were soundtracked with a
three or four digit-watted sound reproduction system in mind, a sound
reproduction system capable of re-delivering the timbres of steam whistle and
howitzer blasts, quadruple-fortissimo orchestral tutti, and Niagara Falls at
their original volumes and then some, and (what was even more important) with a
faithfully uneven distribution of those volumes among the panoply of
frequencies each of these timbres idiosyncratically participated in (such that,
for example, the steam whistle would be expected to have a very loud high or
treble end, and the howitzer blast a very loud low or bass one); such movies
were also, it should also be mentioned, soundtracked with a large and happily
wide-awake audience in mind, an audience that was positively aching to have its
eardrums pummeled with such larger-than-life mimeses of such louder-than
(everyday)-life phenomena. The
audio-reproductive powers of the average and indeed even the highest
above-average television set, on the other hand, were confined to a single two
to four inch-diameter’d loud (or rather soft) speaker cone powered by a one or
at most two-digit watted amplifier. It
was a setup roughly consubstantial in strength with a largish but still
eminently portable transistor radio, and ideally suited to conveying ordinary
conversational speech at the volume it would be heard in an ordinary actual
chinwag, and hopelessly un-cut out for conveying any sound even slightly louder
or bassier or treblier than that. One
assumes that shortly before or after the introduction of stereo TV at the very
end of our period television sets with more forceful and capacious pipes began
to be manufactured, but none of these made it into our house until long after I
had moved away—indeed, possibly not even until the present millennium. For the entire duration of our period, the
vanguard or upper threshold of my domestic television-programming consumption
was marked by a nineteen-inch set with a sound-reproducing apparatus that one
could efficiently muffle with the palm of one’s hand (yes, even one’s not-yet-full-sized
child’s hand). Only once, twice, or at
most thrice a year was this pauperly audio regimen enlivened by louder and
higher fidelity fare: these were the occasions of the so-called stereo
simulcasts, when, in the laudable aim of giving the best possible presentation
to some (usually live) broadcast event of nationwide significance or historical
importance—e.g., the National Symphony Orchestra’s annual Independence Day
concerts, or an operatic or orchestral performance commemorating some milestone
in the career of some eminent singer, composer, or conductor—one of the public
television stations would team up, as they say, with their shared so-called
sister station on radio; such that the radio station would double the
soundtrack of the broadcast in its usual high-quality FM stereo sound. On these occasions, and these occasions only,
one got a televisual earful that one was more inclined to invite in than to
block out, and that was indeed not markedly inferior to the best sort of
televisual earful I am now capable of wresting from the 1990s-spanning
sound-reproduction system to which my television and laptop are both connected;
or, indeed, I suspect, to the best sort of televisual earful the average
present-day American household is capable of wresting from whatever combination
of gadgets it employs for the conveyance of the sonic part of its
motion-picturely genres of choice. You
see, my family’s living room high fidelity system, although hardly exorbitantly
high-budget, was of borderline audiophile quality, in carrying and emitting, as
I recall, a full hundred watts per channel, and as near as I can tell the
amplifying and emitting side of audio reproduction has not improved much or
perhaps even a jot in the intervening three decades, except perhaps at the
bottom end, such that while in 1987 I would have preferred silence to an
audition of, for example, a Mahler symphony over a portable monophonic cassette
recorder, I will now grudgingly if not quite cheerfully in a pinch (i.e.,
essentially, the pinch imposed by travel) stoop to listening to a conductor’s
complete discography of Mahler over my laptop’s invisible built-in
speakers—this because amazingly enough the engineers have somehow contrived to
impart to the laptop the sound-reproductive capabilities of a mid-1980s
ten-watt stereo so-called boom-box. And
as for analogue FM sound—why, to this day, when weather cooperates, I will
always record the Saturday matinee Metropolitan Opera broadcasts from the FM
analogue over-the-air signal provided by my local so-called classical music
station (WBJC) in preference to BBC Radio 3’s simultaneous digital online feed. But here I really am on the verge of
beginning to digress, because any further speculation on the merits of an
analog versus a digital audio signal will inevitably bring us back to the vexed
(if not necessarily Ivesianly
unanswerable) question of the weightiness of the detractions introduced by
digital compression. Let it suffice for
us to take away from this mini-excursus on the stereo-simulcasts the inference
that if such simulcasts had been the norm rather than the very rare exception, and
more specifically, if they had by some economically incomprehensible logic been
extended to broadcasts of 35mm+ movies, my infantile and early-youthful disposition
to such movies might very well have been very different, which is to say much
more favorable. As it was and so happened,
the audio segment of each and every inch of 35mm+ film footage I became
acquainted with outside the cinema before the age of 14 at the very earliest
was conveyed to me via the impossibly small medium of the aforementioned
child’s hand-sized single television speaker.
If I had only ever taken in such audio segments in a state of bright
eyed-cum-bushy tailed wide-awakeness, while seated bolt upright on the living
room sofa and bathed in the Kellogg’s raisin bran-worthy light of the matutinal
sun streaming through the living room curtains (for our living room faced and
indeed still faces east), I might (again) have been much more favorably
disposed to them. But owing to the
typically nocturnal scheduling of 35mm+ offerings, I was perforce obliged most
of the time to hear these segments at night, and owing to the double-digit hour
sleeping schedule imposed on me by nature and nurture working in tandem, I was
perforce obliged to hear them in a state of sub-alertness usually verging on or
decaying into somnolence. Naturally, my
mandatory retirement hour was not static throughout our period: at this
period’s beginning (or rather the portion of its beginning that begins with my
earliest memories—i.e., ca. 1976) I suppose I was made on so-called school nights
(i.e., Sundays through Thursdays) to go to bed by seven, while by its end I am pretty
sure I was allowed to stay up until ten.
And on each of these school nights, I was required to sleep in my
bedroom, which did not have a television.
(Whether or not I have any right at this point to thumb the underside of
my suspenders [i.e., the things that hold your pants—or, rather, trousers—up,
not the things that hold your stockings up] and nod with the unsmilingly smug
equanimity of a bow tie and boater-sporting nonagenarian male member [!] of the
minor New England gentry naturally depends on whether the reader has reacted to
the preceding sentence with a look of appallment of the sort the most polite
Anglo-Saxon does not blush from obtruding upon a fellow Anglo-Saxon who confesses
to having grown to a full and healthy adulthood without having seen, let alone
used, so much as a square of toilet paper [I understand the Continentals have
their own apparatus for cleaning up en bas] ; which of course in turn
depends on whether or not a television is now something children are
universally expected to have as readily to hand as toilet paper, a disjunction
that, being a childless singleman who for the past twenty years has made a
so-called beeline for the nearest open or force-openable exit the moment
anybody has mentioned his or her child or children, I am naturally incapable of
resolving. But I think I should at least
mention the look and the counterlook, lest, in case the television-owning child
is now indeed the norm, the reader should suspect I grew up without toilet
paper as well.) On Friday and Saturday nights, a more relaxed dormitory
dispensation tended to prevail: while I was invariably still required to turn
in at an hour that was early by adult standards (albeit perhaps a good two
hours later than the school-night hour), I was often allowed to take my rest in
a sleeping bag laid out on the floor of the living room. And because at least until midnight on each
and every one of these Friday and Saturday nights—or, rather Friday
nights-cum-Saturday mornings and Saturday nights-cum-Sunday mornings—the
television was both on and turned up to full (or at softest half) volume, my
sleep was then frequently interrupted (or, during dreams, pervaded) by the din
of Howitzer blasts, Niagara Falls, quadruple forte orchestral tutti, and the
like, as filtered through the distortion-ridden medium of a single digit-watt
soft-speaker cone being violently shaken almost to the shredding point. On the whole, it was awful. Mind you, I do not wish to blame my parents
for this awfulness, for the author of my misery was without a doubt myself, as
I regarded sleeping in the living room with the television on (and with the
lino-shelled concrete living room floor for a mattress!) as an unalloyed treat,
and would have been inconsolably disappointed (as indeed I very probably was on
more than one occasion) if I had ever been deprived of that treat (as indeed I
very probably was OMTOC). But what
phenomenon in life is more common than the treat that is really a trick? The living room weekend sleepover of my late
single and early double digits now strikes me as a sort of practical-aesthetic
forebear of the weekend bar-hopping of my late twenties and early thirties (or,
to record the chronology more frankly, mid-twenties through mid-thirties): a
genre of situation one sought out over and over again even though it seldom if
ever yielded any moments of pleasure. I
suppose the compulsion in each case was catalyzed principally not by the
expectation of pleasure but rather by the dread of pain at not finding oneself where
the action was—which essentially meant finding oneself not behaving in
conformity with the species-being of one’s then-current Shakespearean age of
man, of being cooped up indoors (whether the door was that of one’s childhood
bedroom of or of one’s adulthood apartment) when one was simply supposed
as a red-blooded nine-year-old to be staying up as late and catching as much
late-night television as one could; or as a red-blooded twenty-nine-year-old to
be staying up late and downing as many 400 percent-upmarked beers as one could;
such that it is probably unjust to upbraid one’s former self for being unduly
perverse in his choice of recreations, inasmuch as one’s present self’s
aversion to such recreations most likely springs in the main not from any
subsequently acquired insight into their essential pointlessness and
pleasurelessness, but rather one’s sense of their unseemliness in a
register that in virtue of one’s place on the amusement park-ride conveyor belt
of life one simply cannot not avoid feeling. Another way of putting this is to say that
were I now suddenly presented with some document attesting with indefeasible
officialdom to my being nine or twenty-nine years of age, I would very probably
immediately (or, rather, at the next Friday or Saturday night) betake myself to
the nearest living room floor or drinking establishment, respectively, in
flagrant contradiction of my forty one-year-old’s flagrant lack of interest in frequenting
such a locale.
Speaking of
flagrancy, the past dozen or so sentences have indeed amounted to a flagrant
digression from our topic; and yet despite their flagrancy, I make no apology
for them, although I will tender the following apologia for them: that they
amount to something that I would very much like to say in some setting, and the
present setting seems better than any other that I can imagine. “But why not,” you ask, “simply write a
separate essay on the factitiousness and experiential imperviousness of
age-designated recreations?” Because, I
retort, such an essay would perforce have to include an exposition of my
childhood self’s late-night weekend routine, an exposition that would perforce
bore the pants (or trousers) off anybody who had already read the present
essay; and, moreover, make me look like a right besonnenheitslos git for
banging on verbatim or nearly verbatim about something I had banged on about
some weeks, months, or years earlier.
But anyway, by
this point both the digression and meta-digression have spent themselves, and
so let us return to the topic digressed and meta-digressed from, namely the
late-night audiophenomenology of my
childhood, via an exemplum, an aural analogue to the above-described George C.
Scott movie, namely the lead-ins and lead-outs of the network Given-Night
Movies. Whether any particular network
or night is more to blame than any of the others for these lead-ins is beyond
my ken, or, rather, will, to find out.
All I know is that throughout our period it seemed as though no
cinemagenetic movie could be shown at night on a network in the absence of a
veritable battalion of heralds seemingly equipped with the full panoply of orchestral
or wind-bandial brass instruments (trumpets, cornets, trombones, French horns,
sousaphones, etc.); a battalion that thrice or four times an hour would usher
the movie into or out of a commercial break with a raucous and extensive
quintuple (sic) fortissimo tucket, sennet, or fanfare; a tucket, sennet, or
fanfare of such loudness and length that no matter how drowsy I had been before
I laid me down to sleep, I could count on being roused every ten or fifteen
minutes from that sleep as thoroughly as if by the last trump. How could I fail to develop an animus against
such an interlude, or to the medium to which it served as a wrapper, namely telecast
35+ film?
Whence (i.e.,
from this animus), at long last, to my itemization of the virtues of the first
of my two eponyms, and simultaneously to a very probably gratuitous resolution
of what should be a glaringly apparent contradiction in my argument, although
TBT/TTTT, I strongly doubt any empirical reader of this essay will yet have
noticed it. (Such is the helotophilic myopia
of empirical readers nowadays [i.e., roughly since the last turn of the century
but one]: refer to a historical microepoch ever so passingly without appending
the full statute book of rights that were then denied to so-called
underprivileged groups {for my unabridged assault on this bugbear, please see
my essay “Gluttony and Panpsychism”} and they will call the police on you, but maintain
that orange is puce in one sentence and puce orange in the next and they will scan
the two sentences in succession as unperturbedly as a steamroller gliding over
two adjacent squares {or whatever they’re called} of sidewalk.) The apparent contradiction becomes nascently
apparent as early as the second sentence of my second paragraph, when after
having described the advent of television as the most recent “great fall”
“since the dawn of the industrial age,” I complain of having been “gobsmacked”
by the digitization of, inter alia, the moving images shown on
television. “Why,” the attentive and
empirically very probably nonexistent reader will query at this point, “should
you be ‘gobsmacked’ by any change impinging on television when you have
effectively denounced television as a barbarous medium?” The answer to this question may smack of
willful frowardness in its virtue of its cursed circuitousness, but as it happens
to be the truth--or, at any rate, as near as I can get thereto—it deserves a
full airing, as follows: “Like any person born in the developed world (and,
indeed the developed world plus perhaps the better part of the undeveloped
world) in the past half-century, I was at least diurnally bombarded by
televisuogenetic sounds in the womb, and by televisuogenetic sounds combined
with televisuogenetic images from the earliest moments of my egress from that
chamber and thence for many years, certainly long past my attainment of the age
of discretion. From this fact it follows
that I could never have started out by regarding television as barbaric and
that any sense of the barbarity of the medium I have since acquired has arisen
via some sort of process of subtraction, of a sudden or gradual
(and in either case sustained or recurring) withdrawal from the regimen of
glare and din that I was initially perforce compelled to regard as altogether
natural and civilized. And the initial
and as it turned out definitive moment of such subtraction was provided by
videotape.
