The Extra Dimensions of Motion Pictures
A database of useful concepts with inspiration from the works of Jerry Mander and Neil Postman on being enlightened of and initiated into the powers of Motion Pictures .
Here is a database under “continual” construction for media concepts which are offered as a vaccine against the “viral” specimens of mass media. It is a soon to be added portion of the THOHT WORKS project which concerns experience derived from written and spoken language. This would be a motion picture THOHT WORKS and I consider it the same project as it is about guarding against the distortions of consciousness derived from mass media.
Television has the Power of a Spiritual Transmission in a very marketable form and format.
One of the inherent dangers of Television is that it in some sense proves the idea that a “transmission from outer space” can totally transform your perception and communicate stories, emotions and ideas which virtually anyone can comprehend to a degree. The idea is that television and motion pictures are the real life corelate to the spiritual transmission of knowledge from a master, guru or wise one that you can read about in Buddhist, Hindu and even western esoteric books. When you watch a movie it is an artificial and passive experience of a series of images and sounds. One difference between the idea of a spiritual transmission and a television transmission is that any television transmission is a sponsored product of advertising interests. Spiritual transmissions from a guru can also be a piece of advertising for private interest, but the hope is that the invisible transmissions of knowledge from a spiritual teacher are done with a more altruistic motive than influencing you to buy something you don’t need.
For now everything below this line consists of concepts derived from Mander and Postman.
1 The Medium of the Experience defines the real part of the “Experiences” as related to any medium (art, cinema, literature, etc.).
Though we often feel like watching a movie about something gives us a real experience of it, the reality is that we have stared at a screen of “flickering light, ingesting images which have been edited, cut, rearranged, sped up, and slowed down … in hundreds of ways.” (p.25 Mander)
Even though I worked in media and read media criticism and pondered the dangers of it, I still sometimes make the mistake of equating a movie experience with a real one. It is a strange thing that happens. It is very much like meditation or being walked through a guided meditation, except the movie experience is very much more controlling and manipulative and limited. All the images are arranged to be experienced in a particular order, and with the music added we are told how to feel about it.
Some of you may recognize Marshall McLuhan here.
2 Television colonizes experience with artificial experience, standardizes value and creates artificial need according to the marketing goals of big corporate interests who have the money for advertising and mass media.
In the section called The Inherent Need to Create Need, Mander writes Advertising exists only to purvey what people don’t need. Whatever people do need they find without advertising.” (p.126, Mander)
To clarify the point he explains on page 127:
“People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meat, sodas, sugary cereals, candies. A food in it’s natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. Hungry people will find the food if it is available. To persuade people to buy the processed version is another matter because it is more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. The need must be created.”
He details a 9 part appraisal of the “natural advantages” of Television. You might call them 9 propositions about the power of television. Or the 9 Powers of Television….
1) Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too…. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost.
2) Television changes the nature of artificial environments from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside.
3) Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it aids commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone.
4) Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it.
5) Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence.
6) Though television passes for experience, it is really more like “time out,” as we shall see later. It is antiexperience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the world. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other.
7) By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising.
8) By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison.
9) Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power.
3 “The Media of Communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.” (p.9 Postman)
Considering the omnipresence of media this quote is somewhat illuminating as to how our consciousness is dominated by its influence:
“When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies politic. Our conversations about nature and about ourselves are conducted in whatever "languages" we find it possible and convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.” (p.15, Postman)
The case is illustrated further using a quote from the iconic Alexis de Tocqueville:
from his Democracy in America, published in 1835: "In America," he wrote, "parties do not write books to combat each other's opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity and then expire." (p.37, Postman)
In America the printing press, the pamphlet and the newspaper gained a sturdy hold on American minds, which superseded the more considered opinions offered in books.
3b Television's potential for creating a theater for the masses.
There are also claims that whatever power television might have to undermine rational discourse, its emotional power is so great that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent forms of racism. These and other beneficial possibilities are not to be taken lightly. (p28-29, Postman)
Works Cited:
Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. 2nd ed., Quill, 1978 (1st 1977).
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books, 2006 (first pub. 1985).
