Studio Monitor

MICHAEL J. ARLEN writes about television much the same way Nabokov wrote about the appalling manners of the bourgeoise--as if from a great height, but always with a folksy, familiar smile. In a way it's a style that accentuates the very elegance it is perhaps trying to diffuse; a style all the more fitting to The New Yorker, that dual bastion and mausoleum of literacy, where Arlen's "The Air" column regularly appears. The New Yorker's literacy is a curious one, of course, harking back to the most Anglophilic time in our history. It is a magazine to be read in a mock-British accent, or at least some boarding school equivalent--and Arlen is something of the quintessential New Yorker writer. It seems odd, then, to see him turn his meticulous attention to the quintessential chasm in American taste--namely television--but the results are often brilliant. Arlen doesn't so much watch television as he holds court with it. In the end, television never had it so good.

Television is lowbrow--our electronic lowest common denominator--and it has none of the charm (like, say, detective novels) to propel it into the realm of any sort of artistic appreciation. It's not just the game shows, and it's not just those godawful pre fabricated housewives choosing between potatoes or stuffing or sinus drainer. It goes beyond that, somehow. There's always been a certain embarrassment about television, as if at its center were some yawning pit, some frivolous darkness upon which we can project the worst of our adolescent self-images.

And no matter how many World Premier Ballets PBS produces from Houston, Texas, or how many times some news team makes you an unwilling eyewitness to a disaster, watching television is still deeply rooted in guilt. We make great gestures toward making the medium into some sort of genuine art, or at least some genuinely stylish entertainment--but that's about as far as it goes. It's just not a form to arouse that sort of passion. If one employs Salvador Dali's Paranoid Critical Method, one starts suspecting that television's visceral meretriciousness is what we actually adore. In a medium populated by yahoos of the most defiant sort, the rest of us cannot help feeling like minor league aristocrats. Maybe we watch to make ourselves feel better. Maybe we watch to feel superior to the mob of Americans which lives "out there" somewhere--out in the Midwest probably.

STILL, THIS strangely ubiquitous medium--what Arlen calls "a huge, shared, strangely experienceless experience," has become so omnipresent in a sly way that it's easy to ignore it altogether. Television criticism itself is a relatively new phenomenon--at least criticism that goes beyond the daily newspapers or the T.V. Guide's promo columns. That started happening as television became more sophisticated or, at least, more technologically sophisticated. Once t.v. evolved into something beyond the simple transmission of stage plays--when video, mini-cams, and that all-important ability to edit came into the scene--the force of the medium creeped into the national consciousness. With books like Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President 1968, people began suspecting that television had some extraordinary power. Then came the Vietnam broadcasts, the moon shots, the Olympics. Television began validating an awful lot of experience, and television criticism came into its own.

Arlen, too, came into his own during this time. Two previous collections of criticism, The Living Room War (1969) and The View From Highway 1 (1976) were prime examples of the states of the art of this new form. There was something exciting in reading about second-rate trash that was taken seriously. It was somewhat akin to reading a sociological study of elevator passengers. Arlen also wrote a great deal about news and how television had changed the way we receive our information, and about Vietnam coverage and other such "news" events. He wrote well and with great insight. Suddenly there was meaning in the mundane.

The Camera Age, Arlen's latest collection, is also full of meticulously well-crafted writing. Thirty pieces, all written in the last five years for the pages of the New Yorker, are here. There are essays on "Dallas," on Olympic coverage, on the most ridiculous of game shows. Arlen has extraordinary control, often just quoting dialogue verbatim; it seems all the more ridiculous in print. (A game show question asks "Which part of the contestants anatomy droops?" The husband answers "chest." His secretary answers "boobs." When the wife matches them for the grand prize, the three of them go into happy hysterics.) There are the usual New Yorker sensibilities--weekends in the Connecticut countryside and children falling off horses and the like, but it is all understated, just passing familiarities. Still, they do not obscure some wonderful and what you might like to call historical pieces. A dissection of "Roots" and "Roots II" or his analysis of the high theatrics of "Sixty Minutes"--with all its supposedly real life drama as Rather hones in on all the world like a '30s prosecutor--manage to put television's strange short-term memory into some sort of historical perspective. The hype and the emotions television elicits from its unwitting audience seem all the more insidious. He even includes in this volume a brilliant piece. "What We Do in the Dark," in which television becomes one of our cultural sexual artifacts, and television watching (alone, in the dark, vaguely guilty), a horizontal self-hold--a species of masturbation.

ONE SENSES, in some of these pieces, though, that Arlen really doesn't want to talk about television at all. A piece on "Dallas" becomes a piece on the transition of American manners; a piece on "Shogun" becomes a brilliant essay on captivity literature. Arlen writes in a fine, high style which is extraordinarily articulate, and often one feels television simply doesn't supply enough raw material. One senses, too, that after 11 years, Arlen would really rather be writing about something else; but as his criticism digresses, the results are intriguing in themselves. The author of such nonfiction books as the National Award-winning Passage to Ararat and Exiles seems to deserve better than the media wasteland, and as he makes his forays into such subjects as Hawthorne and the Puritans, America's new manners or our shifting perceptions of the Vietnam War, he is exhilarating. It is sometimes unfortunate that he cannot simply follow such leads from the start.

Of course, there's something strange about reading literary television criticism at all. Somehow form and function seem skewed. When you read it in the pages of the New Yorker (which for years ran a racing column that inexplicably described the decaying Aqueduct as if it were Epsom Downs), the feeling starts hitting you even harder. One wonders--why is it there? Clearly people do not watch "Dallas" to muse over the fact our interrelationships are destabilized and smooth. On the other hand, it seems a strange intellectual game--a furious overcompensation--for one to watch a soap opera and then be able to find intelligent reasons for the act later in the week on the pages of our slick arbiter of taste. Either way, it jars. Somehow it smacks of elevating the form without changing the content. Who knows? Maybe Chekhov would have watched the Iowa State Opera's version of "Boris Gudonov" complete with introduction by a genuine Russian. Then again, our ultimate pop icon Elvis Presley probably was closer to popular sentiment when he plugged his Sony with a .38, explaining to his manager, who lay wounded by the richochet, in that wonderful Memphis drawl--"Nobody should have to put up with that shit."