Notebook: Format And Anxiety

...sent the transcript down to be processed for publication...

...Generally the children were wooden and brow-beaten...

...And in subsequent conversations I came to realize, what would never have occurred to me, that most people do not notice the actuality, what is really present, on their TV screens...

...It was a sample of nursery-school, with a teacher and half a dozen four-yearolds...

...it is his privilege...

...It was the public role that was beyond her...

...That's odd you ask me that," I said, "since my friend Jules here just did...

...At best there is an unpleasant battle in the studio...

...The last time I was approached by a man from CBS, I said I would require a forfeit...

...In one case, as I shall explain, I was myself swept into the anxiety and it took, I guess a year off my life...

...The network announcement, however, with its brass fanfare and zippy montage, had the usual ulcer-producing ugliness...

...In short, the contest was a gimmick, simply an expense of spirit, it had no animal or social reason for being...

...It is also dangerous to make a recording, for they will likely cut out your meaningful sentences...

...Any attempt to "correct" the conditions I have been describing must result in some other phony format, some other wooden framework...

...I have no doubt that many essays appear, signed by fine writers, that have been emasculated in this way...

...She was entirely front, and when she moved, to turn to the reader of the letters, it was as a solid block...

...The Nation would be an appropriate vehicle for this kind of news...

...Interrupted, Max made a pitiable face and my heart went out to him...

...And if the aim is to make the mass-audience more critical of what it swallows, the worstpossible method is for a respected manto take the products seriously—or ironically— and then cavil about them...

...A gentleman—he was in insurance—seemed to hedge his guesses according to the probabilities of the game rather than interest in the commodities...

...I don't much look at Last fall I was at a hotel in Galesthe movies, television, or the other burg, Illinois, where I was to give a popular arts covered by Show maga-speech at Knox College, and I switchzine...

...if they had been Ohrbach's, she would have priced them on the nose...

...With a sour face, Grauer had the camera turned on him, asked a brusque question, and received an interesting reply...

...Editing like this keeps reinforcing a stereotype and finally, alas, makes it be all the reality there is...

...The master of ceremonies of all this acted the zany, putting on a funny hat, etc., and this was what it was...

...He suggested a few small changes, which were improvements...

...and I went to my brother's where there is a television machine...

...But the thirdmonth I was altogether at a loss...

...Her cheeks and brow were generally immobile while she moved her mouth...

...She was in a tightly controlled panic lest anything spontaneous occur, and she kept saying, "Now let's not go too far because we want to open the big door that goes into Wonderland"—"Let's not reach for our cookies yet...

...Indeed, the only elements out of context were the commercials, and they were bad...

...To expose our society, one doesnot need to look at movies, etc...

...Finally, I watched a psychologist who answered letters from listeners, which were read rather obsequiously by a man probably on the staff of the station...

...Nevertheless, the half-hour had one satisfactory minute, the Ivory commercial...

...This ad and another used the buddy-buddy "You see" that I find insulting: "You see the folks at Heinz have been blending...

...In an art-work there is no format and less and less is taken for granted...

...It was impossible, observing all this constraint and suffering, of animals, small children, and the hard-working woman, not to become quite ill...

...Let me describe four programs...

...So tell your mother to get this game at --, the phone number is XY-z 8222"—this to tiny children...

...It was a Giving Away of Commodities to the one on a panel of contestants who guessed closest to their list price...

...It was typically what Boorstin has called a "pseudo-event...

...This recalled to me many previous moments of disgust and indignation when we would be listening to terrible radio reports about the invasion of Hungary or a crisis in the United Nations, and they would be interrupted by a jingling commercial beneath the dignity of a grown man to write or speak...

...I do not know if they were paid...

...I felt a compassionate desire to cut the song-and-dance and get to the reality, the person herself who was over-controlling all this behavior...

...I wasonce a movie-reviewer myself, on Partisan Review, twenty years ago...

...They were there, apparently, simply to win...

...I wrotea theoretical article on the esthetics of the Shape of the Screen...

...Romper Room was the name of this torture, though the little boys wore the usual long trousers and the girls proper frocks...

...You see Milk of Magnesia does more for you...

...Next was Your First Impression, again a game, consisting of guessing a Personality from a few clues...

...I'm here because your station has preempted the audience and I have something to say...

...from time to time one would give a spasmodic skip or hop...

...Brothers was the movement of her body...

...Occasionally, if I am immured alone and his guest was Max Lerner, the with a TV set, I switch it on...

...The audience is not there in any present or esthetic way...

...They take the baseness and absurdity of the human figures for granted, and cease to notice them...

...During the course of this show also, we were assured, by an actor dressed in a white jacket, that "90 per cent of doctors themselves take aspirin...

...Many were as if stunned...

...Professionals do not plug ads...

...But the worst is when I am completely snowed and emasculated by the format—it is too quick and glib for me—and then I determine not to go back there...

...The editor agreed to this with mild enthusiasm...

...Then a small lamb and goat were brought on, tugged by the leash to keep their noses in the camera...

...May I urge my fellow writers to publicize all such incidents, so that the critical intellect can do its job...

...She seemed competent to handle the children, but not in this format, in front of a camera, where every second had to be chock-full...

...But it is hard to retain one's identity...

...The more sophisticated, accepting the format and the devaluation of persons implied in it, discuss whether it is well or poorly done for what it is...

...to ask her, "What is the matter, dear...

...I need not point out to the readers of DISSENT that it is by such means that our society presents us with its dull and dangerous mon olith...

...They pledge not to, but I have known them to lie...

...Then Ben Grauer of NBC-TV came to cover the picketing and he started, predictably, by asking me, "Why don't you picket the Kremlin...

...When there has been a battle, they won't have me back there...

...This pattern has begun to happen to me frequently, that work of mine is commissioned, accepted (and paid for) by the work ing editors, but is vetoed by the "decision makers...

...Next morning, putting aside my notes, I described to the community at Knox the Jack Paar show of the night before, which some of them had watched...

...and gave up...

...Ordinarily, as an author in the field, I would expect to pay attention to such questions and answers...

...occasionally, however, at moments whose meaning I could not fathom, her brow would suddenly furrow with intense questioning perplexity that seemed to say, "Am I doing all right...

...Unlike any other commercial I saw, this had a pleasant drawing and a nice plastic flow into the pictures of a baby and wash on the line, in subdued tone and texture, and with a reasonable pace of cutting...

...If we do not band together on this, we are ruined...

...But the persons also are caught in the wooden framework and generally express the strain of it...

...yet he was treated by Paar and the format of the show with a disregard bordering on contempt...

...On the whole, the effect of the performance (on me) was the unease that arises in the presence of irrelevant and misplaced effort...

...For some reason, also, the little nursery school kept reverting to nationalism and militarism, starting (age 4) with a flag salute and pledge of allegiance, and repeating, "C'mon now, be soldiers . . . walk like soldiers...

...She had one commercial pitch— for Office Temporaries, "Use your spare time profitably"—and this was disastrously deflating of her precarious authority...

...The first was not, on the whole, anxious-making...

...In a few weeks, however, he phoned me and told me apologetically that Huntington Hartford, the publisher of the magazine, had absolutely vetoed the essay, and he returned it to me...

...Yet under these frantic circumstances, she still had to get them to perform and not freeze, and so she was continually tensely urging, "C'mon everybody, now we're going to have physical fitness fun...

...was Jack Paar, of whom I had heard...

...In order to get the right tone, I decided to watch the common or household variety, rather than the big evening programs or the dramas...

...This explains the puzzling double standard that obtains, how or dinary intelligent people are not over come by rage and nausea...

...The studio had made her up to be a tidy image of suburban competence...

...Her shoulders were held firm, so her hand gestures, again, did not flow or spring from...

...At one, I was picketing my publisher with a sign, "Take Time Off to Stop the Cold War," and a friend, Jules Rabin, who had walked from San Francisco to Moscow, came by to march up and down with me in the snow...

...it was rather a mixture of sadness and compassion for the anxiety, the tension, and the fright manifested on the screen, in most of the persons, in almost all of the format and timing, and in the texture of the commercials...

...She did not move but moved herself...

...I have had occasion to experience how the format stops thought and feeling also for the persons in the program...

...I could not habitually watch these programs without emotional damage...

...The essential idea was entirely false, for although most of the action was "for the children," everything was directed toward getting mama to buy at a certain "friendly" department store...

...he tries to cut me off...

...and in due course sent me a check...

...Why don't you ask him that question...

...Max is, in my opinion, wrong-headed and boring, but he is (sentimentally) earnest...

...C'mon everybody, be children, everybody in Romper Room...

...On the other hand, to achieve documentary naturalism, or the feeling and imagination of art, would require allowing the spontaneous, the unscheduled, the empty, or the honest...

...her but were pushed forward...

...Yet this dramatic incident was edited out for the broad cast...

...It go to a movie to see what that is like...

...How in such a case can the Americans make sense of the news, follow a train of thought, or indeed retain any notion of the reality of the world...

...This is the usual hip criticism of "popular culture...

...Upon the advice of John Oatfield of Radio-TV Reports I chose March 28th from 11 A.M...

...C'mon everybody, let's sing Chickadee happy and gay—" and she would sing in a strained voice, but the children would be mum, or mumble, or make inhibited frightened gestures...

...A third, a Jewish lady from Brooklyn, did poorly because the commodities were not really for her: they were spring-time suburban items, patio furniture, a golf-cart, a line of Robert Hall dresses...

...C'mon all the Jacks fall down...

...She did not give her voice out to the listeners, nor did it come from deep enough in her throat to reveal herself...

...What I saw astonished and enraged me...

...The zany suddenly assumed a solemn tone and said, "Remember that in Krispy crackers the flavor and crispness are twice protected," and he gave a box a little proprietary tap...

...I have also had to withdraw articles in a rage because the editors of magazines with large circulation have asked me to delete or tone down accurate pointed references...

...Let me mention a sobering incident of another kind...

...But the astounding thing about Dr...

...About once a year my wife and I ed on the TV before going to bed...

...I shall mention exceptions...

...The next program, however, made me sad, compassionate, and ill...

...was nothing like disgust or anger...

...11 When Robert Wool, the editor of Show, asked me to write something for him, I at first refused, for I had nothing to say.* Then I recalled my experience at Knox, and I suggested that it might be interesting and useful to report on a couple of hours of the TV as I actually experienced them with an innocent eye, at least a TV-innocent eye...

...An interviewer asks me a question about which he or she cares nothing, and I have to say, "Why do you ask that when you couldn't care less...

...But the agony of the show was the suffering of the teacher...

...Obviously, such responses are disastrous to any use of this serviceable medium as communication, or to this audience ever having a thoughtful or artistic experience...

...This was stupid but not unpleasant...

...This made it a meaningless competition, to be merely skillful, merely to excel...

...or they are being sketchily reminded of the various symbols of American society and reliving their own psychosexual pathology (this is Parker Tyler's theory of the movies...

...Or perhaps I am answering a question and the master of ceremonies, e.g., Eric Goldman on a program ludicrously called "The Open Mind," suddenly becomes fearful because I am criticizing the network or even introducing a sexual subject...

...They are perhaps carrying on an unconscious revery...

...I was shocked at only one point, when the teacher left the group to demonstrate and speak for an ad, for Green Thumb Plant Set...

...Every sentence was too fast...

...I am often on the radio and sometimes on the TV, for these have a wide audience that I like to reach...

...one could not take a breath...

...you see...

...They simply go along with the formats that stop thought and prevent feeling...

...Again to my surprise, my response * The kind of criticism of popular culture that even a good journalist like Dwight Macdonald does, seems to me tobe futile...

...The contestants were eager for the commodities, or at least interested in them, as well as in doing well, so the contest was not merely a painful competition...

...It would be beyond any one...

...If this painful feeling is not experienced by the spectators (I do not know if it is), it is because they are glued in it themselves...

...she should resolutely refuse to say it...

...Jack Paar switched to a gentleman who did card tricks, and I switched off the set...

...This of course was unheard of and impossible...

...I will say it...

...Perhaps, however...

...My first month, there was, blessedly, Chaplin's Great Dictator, worth writing about...

...A Heinz commercial was frantic in its cutting and gave one indigestion, too quickly showing stalks of rice in a field—in a hand—a baby—a glass container—a box...

...To my surprise this had an extraordinary effect...

...Macdonald does take them seriously, in which case there is nothingfurther to say...

...It was deft and not especially stupid, but unlike the Pricing Commodities game it had no relevance to the appetites of the contestants...

...I cannot but think that this was dishonest reporting...

...She did not stop rattling away...

...but this particular doctor made it difficult, because she allowed herself to project nothing from the screen...

...She behaved, to my judgment, as if a little beyond her depth, although she was of course perfectly adequate to the routine wisdom allowable on such an occasion...

...we'll get through it...

...It is a peculiarly deadly kind of censorship, since people take photographs as signs of reality...

...At one point Max, obviously disturbed, was discussing the necessity of forgiving Germany because of the needs of the Cold War, when suddenly Paar cut him off to hold up a silk stocking and make a pitch...

...he did less well...

...to 2 P.M...

...Some times the effect of this was ferocious...

...What could the audience identify with in such a case, except an exercise in oneupping...

...it is more direct to look out the window or the front page of the Times...

...The lady who won, and had won the day before, had a shrewd eye and a greedy joy that were quite appropriate to the game and marked her as a champion in this kind...

...It must occur often...

...This is unpleasant...

...Does anyone have a suggestion how we can use their media and yet protect ourselves from being edited and abused...

...If this is indeed the general situation with the audience, I am afraid that the whole enterprise had better be discontinued: it is our duty to boycott and destroy it...

...The nextmonth I looked in vain, and finally covered a festival of D. W. Griffith at the Museum of Modern Art and reviewed a book on it by Iris Barry...

...I suppose the effect is inevitable in the commercials themselves, for their time is evidently scheduled to the second and greed crams them over-full...

...By and large the tension and anxiety in these presentations seem to start from the commercials and spread over all the rest...

...Her smile, appearing after she had made a point, seemed primarily for herself and secondarily to say to me, "Bear with me...

...I doubt that the whole can be remedied...

...historian and journalist...

...I often wanted to switch this one off and spare myself, but soldierlike I stayed with it for this report...

...Last winter some of us engaged in a series of peace demonstrations in New York...

...Then there is nothing for it but to take him by the arm and say, "Look, I'm not being paid for this...