LES CAHIERS DU TV

Out of the mouths of tube boobs

THE attempted rape of Edith J. Bunker is in effect the attempted rape of Lucy Ricardo, and of all the TV surrogate mothers created in their images.

When Archie and son-in-law Mike learn of the attack on Edith, they return to the Bunker house to search for the rapist. Suddenly they are bopping into each other in a slapstick panic that recalls such moments of Lucy lunacy as when Ricky, Fred and Ethel tumbled around hysterically when Lucy announced it was time to go to the hospital and give birth (to “Little Ricky”).

Television has given us new ways to measure the passage of moments, years and our lives.

—Tom Shales Washington Post

Like Ironside, Starsky and Hutch are interventionists. They are remote from the criminals they pursue, and are highly differentiated from them. Indeed, an important character in the series is their informant and link with the criminal world, Huggy Bear.... Like Ironside, Starsky and Hutch keep their distance from, and act on their world, imposing their own structure, which syntagmatically is close to Ironside’s, on the weekly succession of data. The world as posited by these two iconically dissimilar programmes, then, is largely the same world at the ideological level.

—John Fiske and John Hartley Reading Television

. . .The mind clouds. Because [Johnny] Carson and [Johnny] Cash are so morose, one thinks of some lines from the legendary German poet Rilke.

—John Leonard New York

But perhaps you were wondering about my own favorite Olympic event. Was it speed skating, par exempted . . . Somebody (was it August Strindberg?) once asked why there was such a scarcity, almost a dearth, of great novels—or, certainly, plays—on the subject of speed skating, and though there is no ready reply even now to the famed Swedish dramatist’s question (should he have been the one, after all, to raise it), it is possible that sports that contain an excess of gliding along are not easily translatable to the imaginative realm. So much for the strange fascination that Eric Heiden held for August Strindberg, though the two never, to the best of my knowledge, actually met.

—Michael J. Arlen The New Yorker

The crucial object in the opening shot [of the Shield-deodorant-soap commercial] is that flower-box with its bright geraniums, which is placed directly in front of the husband’s groin. This clever stroke of composition has the immediate effect of equating our hero’s manhood with a bunch of flowers. This is an exquisitely perverse suggestion, rather like using a cigar to represent the Eternal Feminine: flowers are frail, sweet, and largely ornamental, hardly an appropriate phallic symbol, but (of course) a venerable symbol of maidenhood.

.. .Thus, thirty seconds of ingenious advertising, which we can barely stand to watch, tell us something more than we might want to know about the souls of men and women under corporate capitalism.

—Mark Crispin Miller The New Republic

James Wolcott