By Sam Watermeier
Last week, I wrote about the intimate power of television, specifically how a talk show host can make you feel like he is sitting right next to you in your living room.
While "The Tonight Show" exhibited intimate power with its static shot of retiring host Jay Leno bidding farewell to his audience of 22 years, HBO's new series, "True Detective" has demonstrated another major power of television — its ability to make you feel like you are on a roller-coaster ride in your living room.
The crime drama did that quite literally last Sunday night with a six-minute, unbroken tracking shot following detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) amid a robbery gone awry. Acting undercover as a member of the Iron Crusaders biker gang, Cohle participates in the robbery in order to gain access to a meth cooker who may be involved in the murder he's investigating.
Tensions rise and bullets fly as the gang raids the stash house and Cohle runs all over the housing project with its leader as a hostage. This unbroken scene is an exhilarating fly-on-the-wall moment that pulsates with you-are-there immediacy. As the show's director, Cary Joji Fukunaga said, this kind of unbroken shot is “the most first-person experience you can get in a film.”
The shot is a visual embodiment of the show — a sustained surge into a world of crime.
Just as Jay Leno's farewell speech was poignant regardless of whether you watch "The Tonight Show," this sequence in "True Detective" works as a stand-alone adrenaline rush. Of course, it is all the more powerful when you are immersed in the show's history and world.
Whether sitting you in front of a talk show host as he bids farewell to his audience or thrusting you into a crime world, television is immersive. You may watch it in your living room, but it takes you to another world.
By Sam Watermeier
Painter Steven James explained art best. "Nature is larger than life, and that's the way art
should be." Cultivation theory founder George Gerbner would argue that nature is larger than life because art made it seem that way.
According to the cultivation analysis, heavy television viewers (who watch more than four hours a day) are more likely to see the social world as a reflection of the one depicted on TV. But if the social world is like the one on TV, wouldn’t we see less people glued to
their computers?
In this age of passive online communication, TV
allows us to vicariously experience more upfront, honest expression. Take the
HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The hero Larry David says the kinds of
things most of us only feel comfortable expressing anonymously on the internet.
Impure thoughts are funny on TV because they're usually unexpressed in real life, David says.
Therefore, the social world
isn't what we see on TV, as Gerbner’s theory suggests about the
way people perceive it.
Rather, television provides an idealized version of it. Even reality TV is essentially a fantasy or an amplification of the everyday. Surely women don't bicker as viciously all the time as they do on "The Real Housewives."
David says he never worries about crossing the proverbial line because that's what viewers expect him to do, especially on HBO. It's his responsibility to express what they cannot, to be a vessel for their frustrations.
The nature of TV is that it is a
special dimension, giving its inhabitants a sense of power to do things others
normally wouldn’t in real life.
It's troubling to step back from a show like "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and realize you and most others around you are not as open and honest as Larry David's character. As Pablo Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."
Apparently, David’s blunt honesty is bleeding
over into more objective television as well. Even so-called "fair and
balanced” news television is clearly becoming a myth, moving from a "just
the facts, ma'am" approach to more theatrical and opinionated entertainment
(e.g. "Morning Joe," "The O'Reilly Factor," etc.) There's a reason why people turn to the tube instead of other sources in the world outside of it — the reason being that television provides sensational spectacle. As soon as something is filtered through a camera, it loses a sense of raw reality and becomes something more exciting — a funhouse reflection of it.
Our world will never completely be like the one on TV, as Gerbner suggests, because the very nature of television is larger than life. When heavy watchers see it as a reflection of their world, they are idealizing, imagining a reality that is as big and exciting as the art of television.
