Moving Pictures
I guess this started when I read a recent report on the decline of trust in America. The authors concluded there were a number of potential reasons: “large-scale global economic, social and political “shocks” have shaken people’s faith in a variety of democratic institutions including government; poor performance in effectively safeguarding the public interest and delivering expected services erodes confidence in government; growing political polarization contributes to a diminished willingness to support a shared political enterprise that necessarily operates through compromise; an increase in economic inequality and a declining belief in fairness of government weaken trust in the institution; and declining economic mobility diminishes faith in government as a mechanism to provide opportunities for all.[i] Was that all? I was worried. By focussing on government, I felt the writers had missed an important point. Trust has declined, not just because we no longer have faith in the government, but also because of increasing about who and what to trust more generally, and that, I want to suggest, has its roots in a longer process of change.
When did our inability to be confident in what we heard and to whom we listened begin? That is a question suitable for historians, and I suspect it all began a long time ago. However, my specific interest is in the role of the visual media. The importance of what we saw was dramatically changed with the advent of film, cinematography, and the movies, a change that was the beginning of a long, slippery and rather depressing slope.
More than a hundred years ago, ‘moving pictures’ first appeared on the big screen. According to Wikipedia, this is said to have been late in December of 1895, when ten short films by the Lumiere brothers were shown in Paris.[ii] There had been pictures before, but they were ‘still’ pictures, photographs and realist paintings, but the movies were different. We could see people in the process of doing things, acting out stories. When we look at those early movies today, most of the films were jerky, primitive, and utterly unconvincing. I suppose that’s to our modern eyes, and they must have looked quite remarkable when seen for the first time by the public of the day.
Things changed rapidly with two innovations. The first was the advent of the ‘talkies’ in the late 1920’s. Now the films became more gripping, the story more able to claim our full attention. The second, just a few years later, was colour in films. After that there was no holding back the advance of the cinema. Led in America by the mega-studios based in Hollywood, going to the movies was big business. Large screens, and later the wide screen format ensured the process was more and more immersive, pulling the viewers into the story playing before their eyes. Hollywood and Bollywood, adventures and documentaries, love stories and horror films, and today the adventures of a plethora of Marvel comic book heroes; everything from compelling stories through to sad and second-rate B-pictures.
However, it is the next development that holds more interest for me, and that was the advent of television. This also got under way in the 1920’s. Although there were precursors to his work, it was John Logie Baird who took the critical step, as he demonstrated he could transmit a signal between London and Glasgow, and later between London and New York. Soon after, live broadcasts became possible. Why does this innovation interest me? It is because the television brought moving pictures into the home, and the experience changed from going out to the cinema, (rather like going out to the theatre), to the family staying at home to watch what was being broadcast.
The early days of television, like the early days of cinema, were rather primitive. Sets were fragile and unconvincing, and the resolution of the image was weak. As late as the 1960’s, I can still remember being absorbed in the early episodes of Dr Who, with carboard sets being bumped into by the invading Daleks, while Jon Pertwee battled valiantly to stave off an alien invasion. I can also remember Mary Whitehouse, scourge of the permissive society, which she translated into attacking anything remotely interesting on television. Her regular attacks proved a great incentive for viewers to watch the shows she panned, and overcome their laughter at missed lines and failed special effects! She complained about Dr Who’s “frightening and gory content”. We wished.
By the 19980s, all that had been changed. Police shows were increasingly realistic. Dramas managed to run the gamut for strange behaviour in a small American town to fun and games on the beach with an assortment of life-saver guards surrounded by skimpily dressed young men and women. Reality television began (there’s a fine addition to the compendium of oxymorons, right up there with military intelligence!): Dutch television’s ‘Nummer 28’ [iii], followed soon after by Big Brother, can be seen now as far more than a sociological phenomenon, but as a critical tipping point between fact and fiction, leaving us quite unable to be certain about what was true, and what wasn’t. Donald Trump is behind the times, complaining about fake news at least 20 years after the event!
Moving pictures on television offered us the opportunity to see characters on the small screen who were just like ourselves, trading on our desire to be ‘like them’ (and not to like them!!), living their hopes and disasters. Those programs sat alongside performances by those distant and alluring ‘stars’ whose every activity would fill another chunk of our screen time, as well as launch a slew of magazines to offer inside stories, analyses of who is ‘hot’, and the latest gossip (“he was seen with her, just days after she broke up with …”). Television as wish fulfilment, up close and personal.
Today, even this is slipping into the past. Families don’t gather round the set any longer. Now each person has his or her own device. As one of my favourite cartoons has it: “we’re all together watching television, but we we’re not watching television together” as each member of the family is glued to a different screen – except for one mournful, ignored dog we can see! We no longer need to watch the same programs, and we certainly have no need to pay attention to broadcast services: we can stream what we want to see when we want to see it; you on your device, I on mine.
And what have we lost? Robert Putnam saw television as one of the sources of the slow but steady disintegration of communities, in a research study published under the evocative title ‘Bowling Alone’.[iv] He was right, insofar as being able to see ‘moving pictures’ at home meant there was no need to go out for the experience, and cinemas are still fighting the rear-guard action to change the process and get us all back out again. What he couldn’t have foreseen is that television was also to lead to the disintegration of the family. Gone are the days when mum, dad and the children sat down to watch a program at 7.30 pm (we might note in passing that in many homes in those days access and decisions about what to watch were mostly ‘left’ to controlling fathers. Now the sharing that takes place is within the peer group at school, among students at university, or friends gathering to eat out.
I suspect I am in danger of exaggerating what is taking place, and there are many good things about the breakdown of (often patriarchal) families. But I do see lots of data suggesting that the sense of community and family is severely diminished. Not entirely lost, and there is some evidence that out there in the small towns and hamlets of the US there are communities reappearing out of the economic restructuring and personal life changes that have beset them; equally, many families still work hard to ensure they all spend time together.
Whether or not I am correct in my views about the attenuation of links between people, I feel more strongly about two other things I see as under threat: imagination and distance.
Imagination is a precious thing. We see it in young children. Absorbed by a pile of Lego bricks, a doll, a toy car, even the box the present came in, a young child can make up stories, adventures, and dramas, happily creating events and worlds entirely from his or her own immediate reality. But once the screen grabs the child’s attention and the artificial visual world takes hold, imagination is subsumed to a minor role, filling in little bits of back-story while the focus is on the compelling events on the tube, YouTube or some other video source.
Some of us still exercise our imaginations as we read books (rather like flexing a muscle regularly?). The words in a book are like a skeleton, around which our own ideas fill in the flesh, the dress and the appearance of the characters. It is a truism to say we all read the same words, but don’t experience the same story.
There is a strange transition that takes place in listening to an audio book. The voices colour and shape our response to the story, the inflections, accents and hesitations give a specific solidity to the characters, reducing the scope for our imaginative work. Great for non-fiction, I am still uncomfortable when I hear some books on tape (that dates me, audio books are on disk or MP3 players now!!).
Does this matter? I think it does. Every year I meet with students who are would-be entrepreneurs. They are excited about their innovative ideas, and are keen to turn them into successful businesses (translation: they want to become rich). But their ideas are so often somewhat prosaic, minor improvements at best, and mainly copycat thoughts. There’s money, they believe, in games, or in new ‘apps’. That’s not such a worry, and I cannot expect a group of students to suddenly develop a collection of exciting and innovative business proposals. Incremental improvements are fine.
However, the more worrying challenge when I ask them to think about their customers – the people they believe will buy the product or the service they are developing. They can name the typical customer, but find it hard to ‘stand in the customers’ shoes’, see how they might respond. Who will buy their game? People like themselves. Why? Why would they buy your game as opposed to all the others on the market? They watch ‘Shark Tank’ or some similar show, and conclude the key ingredient in success is being dynamic, vivacious and exciting: when we talk about making a pitch for a business, the model they have in mind is a TED talk. Glitz and glamour, and overhyped statements should win the day!
A significant part of what I see is imagination replaced by mimicry. Follow the opinion leader, copy the successful entrepreneur. We can thank Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for a generation of abrasive, over-confident business builders who seem to have lost personal consideration, the use of their ears and who ‘know’ they can do what they want. Present well: that means going to the gym, developing abs and pecs. As for reading books, and learning about life from novels: what can a book tell you better than a ten-minute talk on how to be a success?
Imagination and distance? The more we watch, the more we are in danger of losing our ability to stop being involved in the lives of others. The film of that name was based on a stunning idea, watching a film about an observer slowly becoming inescapably involved with those on whom he was supposed to spy, an allegory for what we were doing watching the movie in the cinema. More than that, the observer gets drawn into the lives he is monitoring, and feels drawn to participate: however, in the end, he can’t do that; their lives are always closed to him, seen through the camera, heard on the recorder.
The more what we watch becomes closer to our everyday lives, so distance appears to disappear. We live the lives of those on the desert island, vying to be a survivor. We too are athletes, attempting to complete the crazy obstacle course, risking wipe-out to be a ninja warrior. Solve the crime, as the detective on screen patiently lays out the clues that matter.
Does that matter? For sure it does. Right now, we can see thousands, no millions of people, who feel they are close to Donald Trump, standing alongside him as he treats them like friends. Out on the stump (the place he prefers to be) he is always reminding them of what he is doing for them. Up close and personal on Fox News, no wonder no-one sees that this is an illusion, that his promises are cover for his own self-interest and his desire to wipe out the achievements of anyone who preceded him.
Up close and personal works on Trump, too. If he sees a commentator on Fox News identifying a crucial issue, recommending action, he accepts the input. He’s not a fool – he certainly knows how to start a new fire to distract attention from events in another part of the farm. But he is captivated by the medium.
The clue in this is that distance is shrunk by emotion. Grab hold of a person’s values, you can influence them. Manage their emotions, and you have in your hands. If imaginations are at risk, if we are losing s sense of distance, it is because we are emotionally involved. We live the lives of others emotionally, driven by their fears and elation, scared alongside them, delighted as they are delighted. Our lives are experienced through the lives of others, moving pictures to move us.
Marshall McLuhan would have loved to have been a commentator today. The medium is the message? Absolutely, but could he have foreseen how completely the medium substituted for lived experience. With Alexa to guide us, soon we will no longer need to do anything but stay at home and live in and through the cocoon of senses that surround us.
[i] Final page of What Happened to Trust? the draft second chapter of Renewing Trust in America, released by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, and made available by The Aspen Institute, July 2018
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_television
[iv] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, Simon and Schuster, 2000
