500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I was receiving some sage advice recently from a colleague after showing him a television pilot we’d made. “TV is turned up to 20 now,” he said. “Everything has to be loud.” True: For television to work you need crying, screaming, fighting and clawing.
As I aggressively bite the head off a chocolate turkey left over from Thanksgiving, I’m considering just how extreme things have become. Ad-man and provocateur Donny Deutsch was doing a show called “America the Angry” on MSNBC and got himself kicked off the air because the show may have angered Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC star, or at least angered Olbermann’s boss, according to The New York Times. You know things are heating up when a television show about people getting angry on television gets cancelled because it made some television people angry. That’s what you call a feedback loop.
Even feedback loops can speak the truth, however. Keith Olbermann is mad. Jim Cramer looks mad even when he’s just crazy. TV weathercasters, usually a sanguine bunch, are edgy. According to The New Yorker, researchers at George Mason University found that 25% of television weathercasters agree with the statement that “Global warming is a scam” and 80% of them don’t trust “mainstream news media sources.” They are idiots and that gets me mad.
I guess mad is catching. A few years ago I was doing a documentary for A&E about blowing things up. For a summer I tip-toed around trip wires and det cord and tried not to explode. I survived to write this, and I learned something. When making the film we wanted to find out if expressing anger allowed you to move on with your life. We gave people sledge hammers and let them bash apart a car and tell us how it felt. (“It felt great! Can I smash your car too?”) Yeah, that was the problem – anger just led to more anger. Psychologists we interviewed confirmed this. Getting mad can be healthy, but don’t expect just one angry episode. Anger feeds itself and it’s not a victimless crime. I’ve gotten mad lots of times and it takes its toll on the people around you, unless you smash things while living solo in your cave, which sounds boring.
I’m not expecting television to be nice, but with everything turned up to 20, much of that angry noise is showing us new ways of rehearsing anger, not reducing it. That’s how Thich Nhat Hanh described angry actions in his book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. He wasn’t talking about television. But he might have been. Some call tv talking furniture. That’s wrong. It’s screaming furniture now.
I’m going to bite the rest of the head off that chocolate turkey and find something else to do besides watch the loud little box over there in the corner.
Photo credit: scriptingnews via Flickr and Creative Commons license.
Bob Ellal // Apr 23, 2010 at 6:57 am
Lee,
You hit it on the head. The small screen has taken on some of the attributes of stage acting: wide, sweeping movements so people in the back can see the drama, totally unnecessary on TV shows or film. A caricature. It must be the influence of reality shows, and celebrity reality shows–”overacting” to increase the controversy and thereby get noticed. The most important thing is to achieve celebrity, or even notoriety. Not, of course, distinction.
It enrages me! I’ll have to channel my anger into positive action–and go beat up some homeless people. I bet if I get caught I’ll get on TV–and possibly land a book deal and a large advance. Then I can explain how I’m really the victim here. It wasn’t my fault; when I was a child my brother got better presents at Christmas! It warped me for life.
Bob
Natalie C. // Jun 2, 2010 at 7:11 am
Thanks for the article pointing out the anger on TV. I don’t watch much contemporary TV (Ironside from the 70′s is a current daily favorite!), but when I occasionally turn on the TV in the afternoon to see what’s on at lunch time, I am aghast at the reality shows that are full of people being angry at each other. I get sucked in for a few minutes, then quickly turn off the TV. I certainly don’t need that kind of television in my life.
You wrote another article about Unseen Forces, and along with your anger article, it reminded me of a book by Tsultrim Allione, the founder of our local Buddhist retreat. “Feeding Your Demons” is about listening to internal anger to figure out what your ‘demons’ are angry about, then addressing the issue to give the demons what they want, which causes ‘them’ to retreat. To many, it may sound like hocus-pocus, new-agey stuff. But when you reflect on anger and demons alongside particle physics, dark matter and unseen forces, it really does make sense.
I’m enjoying your 500 words and will watch for more. Thank you for the articles, and for the great photo of the cyclops from the Sinbad movie – the best cyclops EVER (in my mind)!
-natalie
Lee Schneider // Jun 2, 2010 at 9:30 am
Thanks for commenting! Not too many people would know where that cyclops was from – so good catch! Many people argue that we we the entertainment taht we deserve, that it’s only a reflection of ourselves, etc. But I hear of more and more people doing exactly what you say – turning it off … and doing something else.