Television
Sunday, October 15, 2006
It's hard to keep up with television. Even the bad shows require complete immersion to be understood. You can't just jump on the ride in the middle and say you've seen a show. "I haven't seen it seen it" is a TV formulation, a way of saying you've glanced at it but don't understand it. Anyway, I'm not keeping up with television very well. I've never seen Lost and I haven't seen seen 24. I hear they've both got all the excellent post-millennial angst we're not really getting from the movies these days.
I have excuses: I work nights and don't have cable. Plus, it's hard to find people to talk to about the medium, even people who like it, who don't also find it necessary to laugh it off, so that nothing gets done in sharing it with others. I'm halfway through the entire run of Buffy right now, and well inside of season 2 of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I guess I'm watching about 4 or 5 episodes of television a day, up from the last five years which were a starvation diet of zero-TV-watched. Now I'm looking at other shows I might have missed: Veronica Mars? Carnivale? and wondering when this fascination is going to run its course, and whether or not it will lead anywhere. Am I wasting my time?
With serialization, nothing is sure. Maybe that's why television is the only medium that satisfies right now. That, and video games--about which, more later--are the only media that have zero anxiety about their status as well-made objects, ignoring the fine sentiment of novels and the vacuous iconoclasm of contemporary art. I've gone pre-modern in my reading as well, and get a lot more satisfaction from viewing today's world through the fractured lens of Sir Thomas Malory than through the well-vetted theses of John Updike or Jonathan Safran Foer. The new Hardyment biography doesn't seem to be anything too fresh, but it's well-written and brings the more homely elements of Malory's 15th century world to life, and reading Le Morte D'Arthur next to T.H. White's The Once and Future King is a great education in what happens when you bring ancient pre-modern bloodrites into the modern world. Here is Malory on the "noble" art of Jousting, written during the English civil war: "And if so be ye can descrive what ye bear, ye are worthy to bear the arms. As for that, said Sir Tristram, I will answer you; this shield was given me, not desired, of Queen Morgan le Fay; and as for me, I can not descrive these arms, for it is no point of my charge, and yet I trust to God to bear them with worship." And here is White, after World War One, on the same subject: "But Sir Ector...said that the battle of Cercy had been won on the playing fields of Camelot. This made Merlyn so furious that he gave Sir Ector rheumatism two nights running before he relented."
The point is not that these little nuggets are especially great or central to the art of the stories which incorporate them, but rather that they are revealing asides, worked over, contradicted and reaffirmed by their authors through the process of long-haul serialization, and further undermined by the retelling, at a remove of 400 years, of the same story by two authors. They are antithetical to the spirit of what we like to think of as great art but are more entertaining and affect us more in an uncertain time, when anything very certain is surely also very destructive. In this sense, the old saw about television telling the same old story over and over again seems more and more like a good thing.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:58 PM,
