Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message." I don't know the context. I have one of his books in paperback, somewhere in a box. Over the last 30 years I've picked it up several times and tried to read it, but don't get past a page of two before laying it down semi-permanently. It's that kind of book: that you put ostentaciously on a living room shelf to impress your latest conquest with how intellectual you are. With the passage of the years, it even comes to look like it has been read.
This morning I was thinking about ghosts of television past, and writing a little about them in response to a post in a forum.
Trying to crystalize my perception of what is different about television today, I remembered McLuhan's words.
You know, that's it. Entertainment network TV today is mostly about ... TV. Many of the reality shows that form a red tide over the airwaves are really about us watching them on TV. Instead of actors playing a part and pretending there is no camera watching, so that we the viewers can pretend the same, the cameras and the audience have become part of the show.
More and more, actors are personalities, and we see a drama or comedy in order to see performers we know about separately from their performance.
The medium has finally become the message.
I hate that. I hate it when an actor's presence or personality overshadows the play.
More honest today? Maybe. But also more hammy and less honest when everyone is playing to a camera and microphone. IMO.
Hide the cameras, hide the audience. The play is the thing.
O.k., so every groundling watching a play by Chris Marlowe, Ben Johnson, or Will Shakespeare thought to himself, "I could do that, I could be up there on stage," and went to see Richard Burbage do Hamlet, and every rapt viewer of the silver screen wanted to see Rudy Valentino, Lana Turner, or Bob Redford and not necessarily the parts they played. The difference today in TV is the way the audience and on camera audience reaction is the star of the show.
ReplyDeleteWe have been star-struck since the first storyteller had everyone ga-ga around the campfire at night after tucking away a meal of mastodon steak. Audience has always been part of the production, but not in the starring role.