The Camera Age

...Finally, Arlen agnostically remarks in passing that studies by social scientist George Gerbner "suggest that the more television an individual watches, the more he or she is likely to be inclined to violence...

...The path from the McGill Grub-street postcards in England circa 1941 to the slick technological products of Hollywood in the late 1970s is exceedingly complicated, and Arlen's acknowledgment of this point does not make his transference of Orwell's observations any more convincing than his conflicting appropriation of Eliot's highbrow sentiments...

...58), But the Calvinist doctrine of original sin places the genesis of such phenomena back in the Garden of Eden before the creation of technology...

...Furthermore, in a spirited attack on what he considers the sloppy and adversarial methods sometimes used by 60 Minutes ("The Prosecutor"), Arlen argues that such journalism can "drift fairly far from that orderly or reporterly presentation of information that the Founding Fathers probably had in mind when they invoked their crucial safeguards for our press...

...In An American Verdict (1973) Arlen wrote a chilling account of the acquittal of the Illinois State's Attorney and twelve Chicago policemen who participated in a pre-dawn 1969 raid which left Fred Hampton and another Black Panther party member dead...

...However, the First Amendment was adopted even though the brand of journalism practiced in the late eighteenth century was quite sloppy and adversarial...

...Yet a major problem that Arlen's metaphor encounters is that the members of his first group are representatives of the brutal side of human existence while moon men are total strangers to it...

...The magazine, however, did run Aden's strongly-worded pieces attacking American foreign policy in southeast Asia and the mass media's coverage of the debacle...

...Instead of preaching a creeping socialism to the "new" or over-educated class in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the New Yorker remained preoccupied with the state of bourgeois life...

...The Camera Age is also dotted with intellectual errors...

...This aesthetic side to Aden's criticism was overshadowed during the Vietnam-War era by the overwhelming political content in his most memorable essays...

...What Robert Warshow said about the magazine in the 1940s remained basically true throughout the 1970s: "The New Yorker at its best provides the intelligent and cultured college graduate with the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict...

...With a mod-: est, disarming style Arlen nicely dissects and analyzes the good, the bad, and the ugly of television programing - the made-for-TV movie Friendly Fire ("Surprised in Iowa, Surprised in Nam"), the docu-drama Roots ("The Prisoner of the Golden Dream''), the cult of youth on network television ("Baret-ta's T-Shirt"), the one-dimensional treatment of evil in prime-time melodrama ("On Giving the Devil His Due"), the "artificial realism" of network news and documentaries ("On the Trail of a 'Fine Careless Rapture' "), the ritual of the Oscar ceremonies ("The Big Parade"), and the prime-time serial hit Dallas ("Smooth Pebbles at South-fork...

...Although it is blasphemous to suggest in some intellectual circles, most of Aden's essays compared quite favorably with Dwight Mac-donald's work as a critic of mass culture for the New Yorker in the 1950s...

...Throughout the essays, Arlen reveals an exemplary sensitivity to visual presentation as well as narrative structure...

...In a similar essay emphasizing the helpless passivity of the airplane passenger as well as the television watcher ("Prufrock Aloft...

...The shortcomings in such an approach cannot be spelled out here, but it can be pointed out that Ar-len's own best essays on television have helped to demolish glib, elitist generalizations about the monolithic passivity, impotence, and banality of modern life...

...nevertheless, his main thesis is that television violence pacifies, not incites, viewers by instilling in them an exaggerated fear about the pervasiveness of violence in the real world...

...In one essay ("What We Do in the Dark") Arlen pursues far too seriously an analogy between watching television and masturbation...

...In the essay preceding his Prufrockian excursion, for example, Arlen writes an apol-, ogy ("Jim Peck's Cabaret") for a morning game show featuring husbands and wives called 3's a Crowd (which seems to be a spin-off from the more well-known Newlywed Game...

...Nevertheless he still suggests that "Orwell's perspective on the subject is not a bad guide to 3's a Crowd...

...This stance does appear to provide the basic critical framework for Arlen's analyses of most prime-time serials and specials in The Camera Age...

...As Conor Cruise O'Brien has argued in Writers and Politics, by the time Macdonald had become a New Yorker critic his once trenchant radical analysis was horribly confused by the highbrow "tendency to run together [critiques of ] the masses and those who manipulate them...

...The critical response to Arlen's work suggested that he had stepped perilously close to the limits of respectability: the Time reviewer was appalled that "the author's sympathies are pointedly with the Panthers" and the New Republic reviewer severely chided him for portraying the case as symbolic of "a pervasive American mood of repression not as a vicious but local scandal...

...In another essay ("The Moon Men") Arlen tries to construct a metaphor for Soviet dissidents, Vjetnam veterans, and the mentally disabled as "moon men from the dark side of the moon...

...William J.Fulbright: It seems to me that Senator Ful-bright's views on Vietnam are fairly well known by now, and that NBC . . . was trying to rather too evidently to appear as the Giant Communications Network Not Afraid to Air the Voice of Dissent . . . It all sounded very safe and institutional, and rather like a rerun...

...Arlen is probably correct to be skeptical of Professor Gerbner's conclusions...

...In this instance Arlen flatly rejects the elitist sentiments of Eliot and adopts the proletarian mantle of George Orwell...

...The discrepancies in Aden's viewpoint become more confusing when he goes to the other extreme and actually expresses a lowbrow position...

...Despite the evidence of all these virtues in one television critic, a few of the essays in The Camera Age do suffer from lapses in critical imagination...

...At one point Arlen remarks that it is a comforting illusion ' 'for the remaining Calvinists in our midst to believe it was technology that brought human incompetence and arrogance to the planet" (p...

...Pope McCorkle "THE New Yorker," declared Irv-1 ing Kristol in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), "has become the liberal-chic organ of the 'new class.' " Like most of his neoconservative opinions about culture and politics, Kristol's assertion amounted to nothing more than a half-truth...

...Prufrock Before the Television Set"), Arlen goes so far as to embrace the sour view of modern mass society espoused by the high-priest of elitist criticism, T.S...

...Arlen rightly pleads in his defense that television is an extremely elusive cultural medium - "hard to pin down, almost impossible" - and the fact that his viewpoint occasionally gets tied up in knots should not overshadow his more frequent successes of unraveling the messages of the medium...

...Nevertheless, Arlen sometimes fails to avoid the trap of highbrow snobbism...

...Aden's Vietnam essays served as the centerpieces of two collections of television criticism from the New Yorker: The Living Room War (1969) and The View from Highway 1 (1976...

...Arlen's standard position in favor of the mass nature of the medium but against most of the status quo in programing usually allows him to negotiate an admirable path between the cul-de-sacs of complete highbrow castigation or lowbrow celebration...

...Perhaps sensing the confusion created by his uncharacteristic swings from Eliot to Orwell, Arlen adds an "Introduction" to The Camera Age which tries to redefine his critical position...

...Nevertheless in light of The Camera Age it is tempting to suggest that Arlen has always been just as concerned with scene as with meaning - that he was not simply appalled by the Vietnam War but that he was also intrigued by the view of it from the American living room and Highway 1 in Vietnam...

...But on most evenings of the year, in most households of the land, it is a safe bet that the nation's favorite television programs are being viewed not only happily but satisfactorily while a myriad of . . . parallel activities are going on...

...While Macdonald-a former editor of Partisan Review and Politics- undoubtedly displayed a superior intellectual breadth, Arlen possessed a more painstaking critical discrimination...

...Rather than arguing that such shows represent the epitome of modern mass vulgarity, Arlen totally reverses critical direction and suggests that "most of our popular television game shows" represent "artifacts of popular culture" that affirm traditional "working class" mores...

...Yet it seems evident that Arlen should avoid trying to pick up the complex intellectual threads of yesteryear's grand cultural critics...

...Arlen grants that "Orwell's representations of working-class marriage and humor" in such essays as "The Art of Donald McGill" needs some updating...

...Three examples show the varying significance of Arlen's mistaken judgments...

...Television is certainly a powerful authority...

...Naturally, these generalities have a certain amount of truth to them, at least some of the time, at least now and then...

...So is the tendency to write from conflicting viewpoints once in a while...

...The problem with television, he argued in the introduction to The View from Highway 1, "is not that it serves a mass audience but that it serves this audience so badly.'' Aden's superior critical diligence is again on display in many of his recent New Yorker essays on television collected in The Camera Age...

...This Utopian strategy accentuates Arlen's critical confusion and hopelessly garbles his critical position...

...As his title made clear, Arlen chose to see the outcome of the trial as a characteristically American miscarriage of justice...

...Aden, on the other hand, consistently exhibited his ability to make such a crucial distinction...

...During the last decade, however, the New Yorker did occasionally display a sharp analytical style that exposed the differences between bourgeois ideals and bourgeois reality in a less than gentlemanly fashion...

...He does much better when he simply follows his own modest notion that television can but does not usually serve its mass audience well.e its mass audience well...

...Although such mistakes do tend to suggest the limitations in Arlen's critical range, a fair share of slips are probably inevitable in a collection of thirty essays written over a period of four years...

...Perhaps another indication of An American Verdict's impropriety was that it failed to run in the New Yorker...

...An impressive practitioner of this critical mode was New Yorker staff writer Michael Arlen...

...In his very first piece on Vietnam (1966) Arlen gave notice that he would not accept any gestures of token dovish-ness from the networks and blasted an NBC "Vietnam Report" special with Sen...

...In effect he tries to resolve the contradictions by splitting the difference evenly between highbrow rejection and lowbrow acceptance: . . . Television is variously defined as all-powerful, manipulative, hypnotic: a dark, electronic necromancer...

...His comparison of television with masturbation, for instance, smacks of the bitter aesthetic defensiveness of Macdonald...