>Issues about how people's tastes are to be molded, and what they
>"really" want, are very tough ones. On the one hand, we have
>"Comrades! After the Revolution we will all dine on caviar." "But
>Comrade, I don't like caviar." "Comrade! After the Revolution you
>will dine on caviar--and like it!"
Well, he probably would, eventually - guess that's what we're talking about ...
>But I also believe in the elevation of taste. I think a world in
>which large numbers of people are watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden
>Dragon" is a superior world to one in which large numbers of people
>watch "Red Detachment of Women" or "Terminator IV: Infiltrator." But
>I have no confidence that any sort of Hand--Visible or
>Invisible--will lead us to a good world as far as matters of taste
>are concerned.
Back in the sixties there was a weekly show on *commercial* telly in England that used one small sound stage, one bespectacled little man, and one camera. That little bloke was one AJP Taylor, and all he'd do was speak into the camera, let his face do a few things, and present episodes in modern history such that he'd suck half the country in. I saw a clip of it the other week (Taylor was explaining why the bolshie revolution was not the consequence of correct revolutionary theory, but of horses), and it still scrubs up a treat! Yet the powers-that-shouldn't-be have been sure for decades that 'talking heads' don't work, and that 'no-one ever went broke underestimating the American audience'. How the fuck would we know? In Britain, commercial telly came second, following the Beeb into the Pommie lounge - so the Beeb got to define what broadcasting was. Lotsa poncy Reithian soft-fabianism (ya do get sick of all those flouncy old gowns and Oxbridge accents), sure, but lotsa good crowd-stretching entertainment, too.
'Course, 'global forces' have had their way over the years, and even the Beeb has been ground down a bit, but the Pommie line in popular drama (say, 'I Claudius' and 'Callan' in the seventies, or 'The Monocled Mutineer', 'Cracker', and 'Prime Suspect' in the nineties) still assumes a willing and able audience - and obviously still gets one. And Beeb policy is to kill a series after, say, 13 eps, whether it's kicking ratings bottom or not. Which encourages new people and new ideas a bit. There were some healthy trends in US comedy there for a while in the late eighties/early nineties, for example, but I reckon the commercial imperative, to bleed an idea dry, has rather taken the shine off the promise on offer in that little flicker. I remember hearing that Gene Roddenbery couldn't get any of the bean counters interested in Star Trek, a very new and daring idea in its time, until he hit upon the idea of telling one that it was just like Wagon Train, only in space. I remain a committed Doctor Who man, meself (production values be fucked!), but that's another example of the innovation-freezing tendency of commercial priorities, eh? So I'm talking about a modest little socdem idea here, one where you might just find out caviar can be quite nice ...
>Claims that what we need is a return to the classics especially
>irritate me, given that there is absolutely nothing Quentin Tarantino
>could teach William Shakespeare as far as the body count is
>concerned--consider the last scene of Hamlet. Or consider the Iliad
>as the original slasher novel. Or consider the poem by the sensitive,
>romantic Gaius Valerius Catullus that begins:
>
>All fuck the two of you, each the way he likes it--
>Oral for Furius, anal for Aurelius...
Well, they did have a raison d'etre other than the shedding of blood'n'garments, though - but I wasn't really talking about violence per se (that communication-direct-effects/cultivation-of-violence stuff has never quite convinced me) I was talking about what happens in the rest of the show - and what opportunities and encouragements the audience have to rove a bit - mebbe even get a new clue or two. It's good for us.
Cheers, Rob.