The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Ray Bradbury

  • On Television

    They might be called Smart TVs for their clever capability to befuddle the old fashioned viewer. Long ago and far away are the days you walked up to the television set, turned a knob to On, turned the other knob to Channel 2, 4, 6, or 10, TV Guide in hand, reached over the set to fidget a bit with the rabbit ears antennae, and slid back to the couch to watch a recorded picture version of what your parents when young had listened to on live radio.

    Television has grown, if not matured; still, we haven’t quite reached the television walls Ray Bradbury predicted in “Fahrenheit 451,” where the entire wall is a television, and keeping up with the Joneses means adding additional TV walls until your room is entirely enclosed in TV, the effect being that you are part of the television show you are watching. But the new virtual reality headsets are probably skipping over Bradbury’s wall sets.

    One advantage of old television was that at the end of the broadcast day, TV rested – it went off, off the air. A sign off screen appeared. The station transmitters shut down, the Star-Spangled Banner played (absurdly, no game following), then a test pattern with a shrill hum signal, a high E organ note. Nothing more to watch. Midnight. You either went to bed or read a book. Or went out walking, nothing on television.

    Not that it matters what’s on television. Whether you’re watching “Masterpiece Theatre” or “All in the Family,” the “Red Skelton Show” or the “Andy Griffith Show,” “The Colgate Comedy Hour” or “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends,” you have to fill in the dots. Television is a DIY proposition.

    “The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today. The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to understanding the TV image.”

    Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 151, Signet Mentor

  • Theo Jansen and Advanced “Avatar”

    Caleb Crain, we learned yesterday, prefers movies that are true to nature, acoustic. He’s more interested in the Carny than the ride, while David Denby prefers the roller coaster, ignoring the Carny, and if he doesn’t have to leave the theatre for the ride, even better. Johnny Meah’s act wouldn’t make much of a movie for Denby. Yet it may not matter what the professional critics think because as their ranks dwindle thanks to the disappearance of newspapers we may find the neuroscientists filling the gap.

    Jonah Lehrer, who writes from a neuroscience perspective and explains things like why we stop at red and go at green and why some of us slam the brakes at yellow while others hit the gas, suggests in his Avatar review that there might be something wrong with the prefrontal cortex that prefers the acoustic; for some reason, the brain responds negatively to the film drug. Not to worry, though, whatever your brain seems to prefer, for Jonah’s commenter number eleven, David Dobbs, also a scientist, rebuts Jonah’s scientific argument and calls Avatar “impoverished.” As it turns out, the neuroscientists, like the critics Crain and Denby, also find different values in the film and the brain.

    I remember when the first Star Wars movie was released; I finally saw it a decade later. I’m sure there must be something wrong with my prefrontal cortex, judging from my taste in movies. In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, television technology has evolved from the little toads sitting front and center of the mid-twentieth century living room to screens that fill entire walls, and the best TV for one’s home fills all four walls, and the viewer literally interacts with the TV characters, becomes part of the show. Avatar encourages viewers to imagine a time when the film technology of Avatar seems as dated as the first Star Wars movie, and to imagine that that time is now – the fix must be for increased immersion, guaranteeing a string of sequels.

    In the 1960’s, during the height of the psychedelic craze, someone asked Salvador Dali if he took drugs when he painted. No, he said. Why would I take the drug; I am the drug. And when the scare was that rockers were putting secret messages in their recordings, some of which could be understood by playing the record backwards, someone asked Alice Cooper if he spiked his records with secret messages. No, he said, I don’t know how to do that, but if I did, the message would be to buy more records.

    If we are to be controlled by technology, what’s the point? We still have to contend with nature, our nature, the nature of others, and mother nature. Jonah, in his “review,” argues “why the Avatar plot is so effective: it’s really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.” Exactly, it’s consumerism about consuming, about being eaten alive by technology, and it’s yummy.

    And what of acoustic technology? Is there anyone out there creating creatures more fantastic than those virtually real ones we see via 3D in Avatar? There is. Check out this video. It’s Dutch artist Theo Jansen with his creatures, and they are more fascinating than anything you will experience in Avatar because while they are virtually non-tech, they are real; they have become part of nature, and you don’t need special glasses to view them.