Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Television and the masses

Six years before the first American commercial television broadcast in 1941, the still experimental technology for transmitting wireless images had already been denounced by the film Murder By Television (1935). A low-budget drama starring Bela Lugosi, Murder By Television was freighted with protracted dialogue scenes and an implausible storyline involving a murderous identical twin (Lugosi) who transforms an experimental television signal into a "death ray." In this climactic scene, the good Lugosi explains the technology behind a remote murder committed by the lethal transformation of an international television broadcast signal by bringing it into contact with an "interstellar frequency." Although experiments with television transmission had been under way for nearly a decade, audiences for this film likely would have perceived the high resolution, synchronous, global broadcast images seen here as part of a futuristic science fiction fantasy. Although Murder by Television predated TV as a domestic technology by more than a decade, this scene offers a revealing glimpse of the anxieties that often attend new technologies in general - and broadcast television in particular.

In 1957, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (which ironically starred future American TV icon Andy Griffith) articulated a sociological critique of the dangers of radio and television for mobilizing mass social movements based on a cult of personality. In this scene, Griffith, a popular TV personality, advises a conservative politician to reform his personality and public persona to appeal to the lowest of the low: the uneducated simpletons who watch TV. The mise en abyme structure of A Face in the Crowd allows the filmmakers to present a devastating critique of TV and its "live" audiences, in contrast with the presumed intelligence and sophistication of asynchronous, distributed theatrical film audiences.

John Frankenheimer's Death Race 2000 (1975) also focused on audience complicity in the production of a hyperviolent spectator sport in which street race drivers score points for running over civilians in a day-long, televised extravaganza. Going far beyond Kazan's depiction of TV viewers as mere bumpkins, Frankenheimer portrayed audiences for the Death Race spectacle as bloodthirsty mobs, mindlessly cheering for the violent deaths of civilians and race contestants alike. Frankenheimer's film served as an inspiration for the controversial arcade game Death Race (Exidy 1976), which is still cited as among the most gratuitously violent games of all time, although the game's low-res graphics pale by comparison with its cinematic progenitor.

The following year, Sydney Lumet's Network (1976) shifted the focus of the film's critique from audiences to the potential for abuse of power by media corporations. Paddy Chayevski's script presented a cinematic rant against television that allowed the Hollywood film industry to ventriloquize a critique that could just as easily be directed at the corporate conglomeration of the film industry that was already under way in the late 1970s. This scene cleverly distinguishes between "live" TV audiences and remote ones, but like A Face in the Crowd two decades earlier, a sharp distinction between cinematic (good) and televisual (bad) audiences is strictly maintained.

Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) returned to the critique of television viewers as illiterate morons who mindlessly imitate what they see on screen and the vacuity of an American political system that is pathologically averse to engaging with social realities. Among Hollywood film's most devastating critiques of television is the character played by Peter Sellars. Never having received a formal education, Sellars' Chance the Gardener (later Chauncey Gardiner) is barely able to function in society except by watching and imitating the actions of characters on TV. In the course of the film's mean-spirited critique of television and the American political system, Gardiner also proves to be an ideal candidate for elected office in the vast wasteland of Presidential politics.

This page has paths:

This page references: