TV-free for more than three months, we stayed last night at a motel in Frackville, Pennsylvania and couldn’t resist taking a gander at the tube. I was shocked to see how artificial and contrived it all seemed. The actors were not real people, nor were they actors pretending to be real people. They were actors trying but failing to act like real people. They were, at least to me last night, no more convincingl than those archaic Egyptian sculptures.
Try this experiment. Switch on the TV and then surf from channel to channel. I guarantee that you’ll be able to tell within ten seconds whether the person you see on the screen is acting in a "daytime drama," a TV series, a documentary, or a movie. The style of performance in each of these genres is so heavily conventionalized that the cues become immediately obvious to the TV-literate. (By the word "convention." I mean "an agreed-upon departure from reality"). Good actors have assimilated these conventions. When they appear on screen, they gesture and smile and speak in agreed-upon but unnatural ways.
My new perspective was an artifact of the three-month hiatus. Temporarily unfamiliar with the style, all I could see were the conventions at work. Of course actors are always faking, but I had stopped seeing it. In Frackville, it all became transparent, offensively transparent. And because it was so transparent, it wasn’t worth my time, especially when a little clicking brought me to baseball.
I wonder how long my resistance will continue. Not very many days, I imagine. I’ll forget.
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