The banality of Saturday night television viewing even with the insertion of multiple cable programs seems designed to make the viewing audience forget what life is all about. Comedy with an edge, with a theme that in some way or other resonates with the daily experience of its viewers is far better than the slapstick on the edge of not funny but rather boring films that predominate the nightly selections.
Even the multiple scenes of blood splattered on faces or the transcendence of animals to escape the perils of earthy denizens as provided in HBO’s True Blood is an improvement over the English comedy films that I could never and still can’t laugh at or with.
I don’t know what would satisfy my need to feel connected. I seem to be getting more and more on the periphery of life’s experience that others appear to be part of but I think it’s more to the point that we are all sitting waiting for something to happen albeit, another deastrous hurricane, an abrupt change in the stock market, another bubble burst, a return to or a drastic deviation from what we once took for granted(both would be traumatic).
These are the chaotic times, not so unfamiliar to generations that came before us but no one taught us, prepared us for how to deal with these turbulent days. We are spoiled Americans who seem for the most part to assume food is there for us to eat, the weather will follow a predictable pattern, the seeds of life ever after are laid firmly for us and we assume their presence; but all of that serenity, all of the foundation of our security seems to be eroded and only on the ever expanding television screen does life go on as if there is nothing else except what we know, have known and expect to know regardless of the defiance of an inescapable reality.
Maybe the youth of today will teach us how to live without work, how to fill our days without feeling the emptiness that twins with idleness, how to make a film for general consumption that reflects the emptiness of our hands that have so little value in the creative process of our lives.
We make nothing, we do little, we wait to be called up for what we don’t want to know about or listen to, the sound of man-less drones as they further the cause that we don’t support and never will.
See Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney' Paper Man (DVD)
starring Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow, Hunter Parrish and be assured that the future of television viewing and film sellection might one day speak to you and me about us.
Commentary by
Linda Zises
WBAI Radio
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