We don’t like TV, but we’ve made some good movies about the medium

by Jim Piper

June 2007

"You aren’t really anybody in America if you’re not on TV."
—Nicole Kidman, To Die For

No medium is more despised by Americans than television. We feel guilty if we watch too much of it. We deplore the descent of The News into inconsequentiality. We subscribe to hundreds of cable channels, yet we feel unfulfilled after zapping through them. We worry, rightfully, that TV steals the souls of our children.

And the commercials–good Lord, the commercials! We smolder at the deception Corporate America sends out over the tube–now a fashionable flat screen you hang on the wall–but go on buying the Navigators and overpriced medications it flashes at us.

The irony is that over the years a group of commendable movies, constituting a kind of genre, has been made about TV. None is flattering. These films do not depict intrepid TV news reporters, crusaders for justice, or weighty talk shows about the arts. Instead, they criticize, warn, satirize, and disparage.

The estimable team of writer Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan made a spooky film in 1957 called A Face in the Crowd, about the talent of a compelling TV personality to rivet viewers. Andy Griffith, of all people, played the demagogue. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described Griffith in this film as "volatile and scary, with great homespun charm but no inner warmth. He has a loud laugh that erupts out of nowhere, but look into his eyes. He’s as cold as a lizard–yet so engaging that people would want to be around him, even understanding that he’s basically evil."

Then came the greatest of the anti-TV films, Network, directed by Sidney Lumet and released in 1976. People loved it but felt it was a bit over the top. No matter. Who can forget those iconic characters–William Holden as the guilt-ridden executive; Faye Dunaway as the high-octane producer Holden slept with; Peter Finch, made alcoholic and mad by irrelevancy, raging against the machine from open windows.

The peculiar Canadian writer/director David Cronenberg did a strange film about TV in 1983, Videodrome. It’s about a pirate TV station emanating from somewhere in Asia that specializes in snuff and the torture of women. "[Videodrome] is just murder and torture. No plot, no characters," said James Woods, who starred. If you thought Network was excessive, you won’t have much feeling for Videodrome. Or, you might find it less excessive if you watch it as metaphor.

Our own California governor starred in a dark about-TV movie in 1987 called Running Man. It takes place in a bloodthirsty future where criminals, free to run, are then hunted down and killed as sport. Omnipresent TV cameras record pursuit and execution. You can’t help but recall O.J. Simpson’s televised Bronco getaway or any number of sensational CNN stories, shot from helicopters, about this or that fugitive dashing frantically from car to 7-Eleven.

The Truman Show (1998), directed by Peter Weir, is a comedic horror show, a solipsistic masterpiece starring Jim Carrey, who has no real life. Instead, he’s just a character in a continuing TV show. His world is all props and sets. Janet Maslin commented: "[Carrey] drives to work (in a car with concealed dashboard camera) after waving merrily to his neighbors.... Truman himself lives in a houseful of dimples with his too-perfect wife, Meryl, (played by Laura Linney), who coyly drops the brand names of cocoa and lawn mowers." All the people in Carrey’s life–wife, friends, and employers–are actors in on the deception. It’s a nightmare we’ve all had, intensified by contemporary surveillance.

And now we have The TV Set, a dandy addition to the genre. It doesn’t like TV either.