Wednesday Weltanschauung in a Box

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

Nature, it seemed, was as huge as Gormenghast

Titus Groan, at long last! I'm going to miss you, you weird stony bramble-garden of a book! Also, props to Baby Titus for developing a personality in the last ten pages or so, even if that personality is just "fussy baby who doesn't want to stand on a raft in the rain." Poor

Comments

[osprey_archer]

My impression is that until 1998 or so, everyone who wrote about television considered it mental junk food. It's not good for you but you can't stop because it's so addictive. It's not even potato chips, because potato chips are at least delicious, and these writers never seem to see anything good on TV, it's a totally subpar snack food that no one really likes but people keep mindlessly eating anyway because it's there.

I'm not sure if TV got better in the 90s or if writers just became less embarrassed about admitting that they actually enjoyed their favorite shows. Maybe now that writers could start decrying the internet, complaining about television seemed passe.

Or maybe the rampant consumerism and violent distractingness of television has finally numbed us all into loving Big Brother.

[evelyn_b]

I get the impression that TV did get a little better in the 90s on the whole, though I have no way of knowing how accurate that is. Maybe American TV got more flexible, in terms of story structures and subject matter, because of the rise of cable?

Maybe now that writers could start decrying the internet, complaining about television seemed passe.

I suspect that is what happens with a lot of novel forms: something else comes along to distract the curmudgeons and the former worst thing ever gets bumped into the "culture" category with all the rest of the ex-death knells of culture as we know it.

Video games came in for a lot of blanket dismissal too until a certain point (probably a little later than TV?) even though there were imaginative, likeable, complex, even thoughtful & melancholy games to be had from at least the mid-late 80s on.

[osprey_archer]

I know that the 90s were when complex arc story-telling became popular on television - I think because it became easier for people to catch up on episodes they missed, because they could record TV on their VCRs, whereas before if you missed an episode that was pretty much it, that episode was gone.

I think episodic TV can actually be pretty high quality, but that is perhaps easier for critics to ignore than a show with a complicated story arc, during which characters grow and change. It makes TV more like a novel, and therefore perhaps easier for nostalgic critics to appreciate?

[evelyn_b]

Oh! That makes sense, yes. In my family growing up, we sometimes taped movies directly from the TV but never TV shows -- I never saw a "long-arc" TV plot until much later, probably Battlestar Galactica was the first for me, and that was on DVD in 2008.

(Quantum Leap was extremely episodic, but it also sort of had an arc? Though I didn't see that until 2008, either. It was a big year for me and TV).

[liadtbunny]

Does Miller mean TV is like moving desktop wallpaper, which is why no on likes it/cares? That's one old theory. In the 80's and 90's they were concerned about MTV and everything becoming like MTV and destroying the kids concentration, maybe they should have been locked in a room with 'Dark Shadows' to calm down.

'Titus Groan' for The Jim Henderson Workshop? The massive Countess does sound idea for anime though.

[evelyn_b]

Hi, Porco Rosso!

I don't know if moving desktop wallpaper was available as a reference point yet in 1987! It might have been, but I didn't see it until 1992 or 93, in the form of a flying toaster animation. The flying toasters were a huge delight to everyone in my family when we first got the new computer -- we would show them to guests! so. . .I've come off the subject.

The picture of TV throughout this book is a little more active and insidious than desktop wallpaper; it's background noise that also shapes and limits our fantasy life and view of the world, which I don't think anyone ever accused those toasters of doing. (I could be wrong).

Jim Henderson Workshop Titus Groan would be amazing, and animated Titus Groan would be, too. I want them both to exist! In the puppet version, the Countess' perpetual escort of white cats would have to be a whole lot of discrete puppets (or live cats?) but in the animation, they would sometimes appear as an almost liquid living mass, a rippling, yowling feline sea.

[liadtbunny]

*waves back* :D

The flying toaster sounds way cooler than the TV!

Explains how Henry Jenkins came up with 'Textual Poachers' in the 90's about fan culture and how watching naff TV wasn't passive and didn't limit people's views. He reckoned women wrote slash (even when George Lucas told them not to) to create a non-sexist world where gender didn't matter, hmm, I have slightly different views on that. My fave fan study though was the one where the researcher got a load of Morse fans drunk on red wine and recorded their views!

The animated cat sea would be amazing, like Nausicaa! Henson would have to use cat puppets. I don't hold high hopes for real cats co-operating with trainers for long...

[wordsofastory]

Even if you got nothing else out of it, I'd have to love "Watching Television" for bringing the phrase "sudden riots of break dancing" into existence.

[evelyn_b]

There are a lot of great turns of phrase! It's a great book to curl up with if you feel like being acid and knowing about pop culture for a little while, which maybe we all do sometimes? (I know I do).

[lost_spook]

Yeah, I think someone who writing about TV assuming no one could like it is enough to give you pause about whether or not they should be allowed to write about TV.

(I think also, while TV was considered the most ephemeral medium here - hence all the junking - and always lesser than theatre, I don't think you'd have found that particular attitude, because the BBC had those Reithian values embedded in it - to entertain, educate and inform - and all of it was essential mini-theatre, whereas in the US TV seems to have been pretty commercial and the 'small screen' - i.e. small cinema in the home. So, bashing certain kinds of TV - and *cough* 100% bashing of American TV might happen, I'd be very surprised to find a similar UK comment. Although you never know. Academics are by and large even weirder than the rest of us. And I just wrote most of this comment in parentheses.)

[evelyn_b]

That is an interesting point! The essays in this book are entirely about American TV and its relationship to American culture as viewed by American critics through a thick lens of pessimism; you wouldn't necessarily know from reading most of them that any other countries were producing TV at all, with the exception of Japanese car commercials.

[lost_spook]

I once did Media Studies in the mid 90s. I have thoughted about TV, even if you can't tell from my constant lack of brain these days.

(I actually got to make my friends and relations watch Doctor Who and then write an assignment about it. It is still the most fun I ever had in school, college or uni.)

Basically, you TV book sounds as if it inclines to what must surely even then have been the outdated and over-simplistic hypodermic needle audience theory. Media Studies people everywhere would shake their heads, but also they had not (as of the 90s) ever been able to come up with a fully complex and working model of audience theory, other than it's complicated and how you can go some way to demonstrating this by making all your friends and relations watch DW and then answer questions about it.

[evelyn_b]

Media Studies! That doesn't surprise me, given your interests. I wish now that someone had made me watch Doctor Who and answer questions back in the 90s, but there was no one around to do it. (What episodes did you select as representative? Or did they have to choose on their own?)