With the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel, JOHN O’REILLY ponders the irony of a station devoted to a genre that warns us so graphically of the evils of TV
YOU arrive home after a hard day at the office. You flop into the sofa, press a button. Suddenly you are transformed into either a vicious psychopath or an oversized tuber. Welcome to the world of television.
From Noam Chomsky to Mary Whitehouse and Marshall McCluhan, the moving image and its artificial light have been attributed with awesome capacities to corrupt, deprave, distort and mutate. Rather than being a source of simple pleasure, the TV and its technological ally, the VCR, have become profoundly totemic, worshipped and feared in equal measure.
Now that a whole new channel is available to subscribers to Multi-Choice’s satellite “bouquet”, devoted to 24 hours a day of TV sci-fi, it is worth considering that many of the dominant myths surrounding TV are to be found in science fiction, a genre which happily makes myths and assumptions literal, magnifying our worst and deepest fears. Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days (opening on May 10) is just the most recent exploitation of the fear of the televisual.
The fear of the moving image has deep roots in Western culture (it is an alphabetic culture unlike the Chinese, for example, whose language of ideograms is essentially pictographic). Plato’s Republic, one of the great works of ethics, in fact inaugurates the odyssey of the entirely different genre of science fiction. The Republic’s allegory of the cave is often interpreted as a prophetic warning about the dangers of TV. In the story the prisoners trapped in a cave prefer the illusion of the moving shadows on the wall, thrown up by a fire, to the true light of the sun (reality) outside the cave. They try to kill anyone who would persuade them to leave the cave.
The cinema of contemporary science fiction appears to confirm this view that whatever the future holds in store for us, we will continue to be victims of the occult powers of the cathode ray tube. Take The Man Who Fell to Earth, which illustrates the problems faced by an alien whose knowledge of earth is derived from TV (both ET and Jeff Bridges in Starman are also educated by TV). The nightmarish descent into hell of David Bowie as the exploited and abused alien, Thomas Henry Newton, is accelerated by TV trash and alcohol.
This is the first model of telephobia: TV as a drug. Transfixed by a whole bank of TV screens, an overdosing Newton screams at the array of images: “Get out of my mind, all of you. Leave my mind alone.”
Another familiar metaphor is the TV zombie, the vidiot, a product of the replacement of the culture of the book by the culture of the image. This notion is the central theme of Franois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel, it pictures a dystopian world where books are banned and burned.
A primitive simulation of interactive TV exists. For Bradbury and the unusually polemical Truffaut, it is the texture of information of TV that is so damaging. Its flat, two-dimensional world of surface effects is a one-way monologue, in contrast to books which “show the pores in the face of life”. TV belongs to an accelerated culture which produces too much information, without the time to digest it or the opportunity to respond. All it can do, whether in Truffaut’s film or Death Race 2 000 or The Running Man, is produce spectacle.
Above all else, Fahrenheit 451 reworks the model of TV offered in 1984 — TV as the innately malevolent instrument of political manipulation and control.
It is, however, in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome that all the motifs of telephobia and its epiphanic overcoming are consummated. James Woods, who runs a cheap cable TV company transmitting video sex and violence, is literally sucked into the new technology of videodrome. He is accused of producing TV that desensitises and dehumanises. The agony aunt played by Debbie Harry speculates that we live in “overstimulated times”, constantly searching for tactile, emotional and sexual stimulation. TV feeds desires and makes them insatiable.
Professor Brian O’Blivion, inventor of the videodrome, is a barely disguised McLuhan of the future — a techno-evolutionist. “The TV screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain.”
This is TV as a prosthesis, an organ grafted on to our central nervous system. The technology graft produces a mutation of the species.
Woods’s insatiable voyeurism results in his infection by the signal of the videodrome, causing nightmarish hallucinations. He is transformed into a hermaphrodite of television as a vagina grows across his stomach. In customary conspiratorial fashion, the videodrome is exploited by a right-wing cult bent on purging American society of its perverts. Operated like a VCR, he is programmed (via videotape) to kill.
At the heart of Videodrome, like all science fiction which deals with TV, is the mixture of fear and fascination when confronted with this technology. If (as the proto-cyberpunk McLuhan would have us believe) the alphabet and Gutenberg rewired the infrastructure of the brain, producing new means of processing information, TV is faster and more tactile. And unlike the mental programme of the alphabet, the TV programme is external, which is why some theorists argue that TV undermines our human autonomy. It teaches us how to watch. Or, more chillingly, it watches us.
In prose more reminiscent of sci-fi than academic commentary, Dr Derrick de Kerchove writes in Television at the Crossroads: “While we read, we scan books, we are in control; but when we watch TV, it is the TV scanner that reads us. Our retinas are the direct object of the electron beam; hence we are being scanned.”
So remember, the next time you put your feet up for the evening, just what is the channel changer and who is tuning you?