Media
McConnell, Frank
a finger to make sure each reaches the happiest of harbors for and which grows ever more sinister as Fergus keeps learning he knows it's useless. That's the way Neil Jordan seems to...
...The so weiter...
...And Dr...
...It's been around on the radio for years, plicated interfaces of public role-playing and contemplative pri- and was beautifully sent up in the Dolly Parton/James Woods vacy, has taught them that this is "the way people act...
...Jane: Her people in oral cultures are more "scripted"-bound by strict codes Husband Won't Change His Underwear...
...It's the contestants who are fascinating...
...Because if "media" are important at all, they're important as ways of telling stories...
...The anonymous callers all plains why Sam Donaldson holds down a job...
...It is also scalding- "Newhart" or "Roseanne...
...Put it this way...
...But what fascinates me is not so much the differences among, say, print, film, and electromagnetic media as forms of transmission, but the differences among them as ways of saying what a "story" is...
...But this time he's not bowling, only tossing a terly, is one of those fellows, whenever you talk ball up and down...
...V. instantly pigeonholes their story on its members (victims...
...You see, Jane, it's yourself you're performance...
...Steve, I think you just have to A crucial break-of-noon figure here is Hamlet, whose tragedy face your fear of being different, and then you'll see that fear is largely that he can't decide, until it's too late, which paradigm go away...
...Protestant, print culture uses the model of the private journal and This is not exactly a Manhattan-Project big secret...
...The Paine Theorem becomes obvious if once every lustrum in the last half-century...
...Same-o same-o on any other game show, any other talk show, even with the folks interviewed on the local news: we have become among other things, a nation of standups and sound-byters...
...The Tube is excruciatingly intimate and immediate, a alogue that solves every installment of "Mary Tyler Moore" or kind of apotheosis of novelistic interiority...
...Remember, when to say, "but I couldn't tell you everything about her...
...And the middle of the second presidential debate-at peril of falling they've altered because all of us now are the protagonists, not outside the "story" (read: "reality") altogether...
...novelist, is still more of a writ- anymore...
...John S. Dunne tell us, they're the very stuff of our existence: your first theology and our quintessential humanity...
...It demands that performance agonies, as if they were all living in a sitcom, where of course and behavior be equally privileged: that, in fact, they be the the human condition can be dealt with in the same snappy disame...
...Viscott's instant, add-hot-crisis-and-serve, catch, I think, is that "secondary orality" isn't secondary and analyses of these disembodied selves take on a-what?-a beisn't really oral at all...
...And thenhe's operating under: which kind of story he's really in...
...a kind of "secondary for byte, he's the best around to get you through the languors orality": returning us to the state of turbulently unorganized inner of nine to ten-thirty A.M., unless-and this is universal-you've life and ferociously adversarial public performance that distin- got a previously-unread Dickens around the house...
...But the rules have subtly altered...
...A Wittgenstein of the couch-potatoes: now there's a helluva ambition...
...Oral cultures privilege musing internal harmony, too...
...Ted: Can't Talk To His Father...
...A heartbreaking scene early in Malcolm on ninety minutes each day from Monday to Friday from L.A., X exemplifies this...
...These good peoBut TV culture, I'd suggest, imposes an even harder psychic ple imagine their agonies, and Dr...
...As for Jaye Davidson as Dil...well, I'll just thoughts as the Irishman becomes more and more deeply in- say that Davidson is the latest wonder of the Western World volved with Dil...
...plete with characters, fictional and historical, who behave the Nowhere is this more striking than in the growth-industry of way they do because the form of the novel itself, with its com- over-the-air counseling...
...hostage plays and movies the way everyone does now...
...the blonde pincushion of macho I.R.A...
...The movie, Straight Talk...
...And they do it, of course, because unlike their ancestors in the age of Groucho, they have grown up with the Tube, and have come to assimilate these gestures and articulations as paradigms of selfhood...
...They-I don't knowstructure...
...angry at, not your husband...
...And it struck me that people like that just don't exist Jordan, a former (and future...
...that is, they adopt, quite naturally, the pose and the poise of professional TV "personalities"-the body language, the right facial cast, even the right crispness of speech...
...his characters move through their destinies...
...He's created them, Jordan certainly knows how to pick and guide actors...
...er than a director...
...And in that sense the Tube is a triteenth-century novel, and the nineteenth century itself, are re- umph of ecumenism: two varieties of tsuris for the price of one...
...Step outside be not better or worse than the same sorts of games of identithe borders of that tense, magic pentangle-as when George ty we've been playing since we first became human-that is, Bush innocently checks his watch, before the bloody nation, in first became storytellers...
...Miranda Richardson takes Jude, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God...
...Viscott has an impressive list of credentials and, film noir gangster-duds) traipse through a Detroit park playing besides being exceptionally vetted, seems an exceptionally good at being-Bogart and Cagney...
...libbing with the contestants before asking them the silly quesIn one respect, The Crying Game has been a tad overrated...
...But right after Fergus's second attempt to make love to Dil, an encounter that blasts all further intimacies, Jody appears effery Paine, who's an editor of the Wilson Quarjust once more...
...And it may nicants in numbers of, minimally, seven digits...
...Well, okay: this certainly ex- But after a while you get edgy...
...louts in the film's first Consider just one visual motif as an example of Jordan's lov- third, and believably turns her into an assertive brunette vamping irony: the spectral reappearances of Jody in Fergus's assassin in the last...
...He does so, by STARRING IN OUR OWN SCRIPTS winning Dil's love...
...Und the act of reading itself allows an escape into "interiority...
...what story you think you're in, and I'll tell you who you really think you are...
...The first one occurs when Fergus, only briefly and let you discover this unique creature for yourself...
...Every he's responsible for them, but he knows that they are the pris- member of this cast brings out the doubleness of his or her charoners of Neil Jordan Land where terrible things happen to good acter...
...The smile on his face is still good-natured with him, comes up with Something Really Smart...
...of our own journals or novels or movies-but, God help us, of Catholic, oral culture uses the model of the confessional...
...Steve: Married, But of behavior and deportment-than folks in print cultures, where Thinks He's Bisexual...
...And probably coalesce into one monotone, public/private voice...
...His best visual work you compare the-call it the "aura" of the original "You Bet is in the creation of the bar where Dil and Fergus rendezvous Your Life" with that of the current reincarnation featuring Bill Cosby...
...So Fergus must A NATION OF STANDUPS intervene to reverence the memory of his pal...
...This, of course, is what obsessed Saint Marshall McLuhan, whose work seems fresher with each passing year...
...And stories are important because, as grand folks from Virginia Woolf to Northrop Frye to the Rev...
...The game takes two players, analy public, numbering its simultaneous, instantaneous commu- lyst as top banana and analysand as straight man...
...His script is audacious but his execution, though "Wha," I said...
...The nine- the examen de conscience...
...a finger to make sure each reaches the happiest of harbors for and which grows ever more sinister as Fergus keeps learning he knows it's useless...
...Jody's ghost, in spotless white sweater and plus fours, now appears bowling a cricket ball (arguing about sports MEDIA helped bond the young men during the soldier's captivity) and smiling the most guileless of smiles...
...All is well, apparently...
...At this point, Jody seems like a noble spirit betrayed by his faithless lady...
...fellow: a benevolent Rod Steiger, say, with a soup con of Paul David Toolan's brilliant overview of the work of Walter Ong Sorvino's hooded alertness and just the right tincture of a (Commonweal, November 20, 1992) suggests, among much else, newyawk accent to guarantee that this guy don't dance...
...After their first sexual encounter, Jody's spirit reappears, still smiling, still bowling...
...that have appeared on Broadway or in movie art houses at least See what I mean...
...Not to get faux-profound on you, but one of the things I keep fumbling for in these columns is an understanding of what ex20: 26 February 1993 Commonweal actly the Tube is, as a version and model of human meaning, and how the meanings it imposes determine or deflect the meanings we make...
...That's the way Neil Jordan seems to watch more about Dil...
...tions...
...But now it's taking root in the prepared impact of film on behavior is, if anything, even more apparent soil of the Tube...
...Jody the Groucho would spend five or ten minutes interviewing and adinnocent victim has become Jody the presiding spirit of irony...
...Tell me "Remember now, you're all celebrities...
...but also knowing, perhaps a bit apologetic, even a bit taunting...
...No acquainted with Dil, sees the silhouette of the girl against her greater forbearance hath any movie critic than to forgo discusbedroom's nightshade embracing the shadow of Dave, an idi- sion of the unique Jaye Davidson...
...Stephen Rea makes of Fergus both a potentially lethal people and worse things happen to terrible people and where street fighter and the most innocent of sad sacks...
...our own miniseries...
...Byte that TV is establishing (has established...
...Und so weiter...
...Will you trust me on this...
...print cultures (including film) privilege behavior...
...guishes oral from print cultures...
...FRANK McCONNELL Commonweal 26 February 1993: 21...
...The young Malcolm and his ghetto pal, both is Dr...
...at least, not little too much like all those other I.R.A...
...dexterous, is rather conventional in terms of blocking and shot "They were so spontaneous," he said...
...Forest the night watchman making his rounds never calls out the hour Whittacker, the sleepy Samson, perfectly captures both Jody's and "All's well" but only sings out the Dylan Thomas line, "Oh, innocence and his mischief...
...applying the Jeff Paine Theorem-you get it...
...in zoot suits (the zoot suit itself being a baroque elaboration of Now Dr...
...RICHARD ALLEVA otic roughneck...
...David Viscott...
...Never mind that, as a spontaneous wit, the only thing Cosby has in common with Groucho is that he likes cigars, too...
...Out here on the Second Coast the latest entry, and well-documented...
...I was watching reruns of the old `You Bet Your "I know you'd like to wring my neck, Fergus," that smile seems Life' show," Jeff was saying...
...A certain rhythmic tameness makes the first third a they didn't think of themselves as `being on TV...
...Not only do they know they're on TV, but in Paine formulation-they think of themselves as being on TV...
Vol. 120 • February 1993 • No. 4
