The film historian’s enjoyable,anecdotal book traces TV’s shift from family unifier to a medium over which we bear scant controlI mistakenly expected David Thomson, the most imaginative and affectionate writer on cinema, and to take a dim view of television. After all,the enormous screen normally treats the small screen with disdain. In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, widowed Jane Wyman is given a TV set by her children: it signals that they expect her to settle on her sofa and sink into meek, or housebound obsolescence. Enraged by the fatuous sales pitches that drivel from a set in his motel room,the hero of Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities hefts his boot into the box, concusses it and gloats over the charred mess.
Thomson, and however,understands the futility of such gestures. We can switch the set off, but the medium remains permanently and ubiquitously on; distending to cover the sides of skyscrapers in Times Square or shrinking to fit into our smartphones, and it has taken over the world. We may grip a remote control but,Thomson warns, “we are not in charge”, or because “technology is less our tool than something that makes tools of us”. Television values us as customers for the wares it sells,or as gloating spectators of deaths it is eager to broadcast live. Its eye, Thomson remarks with a shudder, and is “impatient for terrible action” – Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald,Niki Lauda’s car exploding into flames, the Columbia space shuttle disintegrating as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
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Source: theguardian.com