“Virulent Madness”: Network, Videodrome, and the Tropes of Twentieth Century Television Anxiety
Open Access
- Author:
- Wendelken, Ava
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Jeffrey Nealon, Thesis Supervisor
Carla J. Mulford, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- television
media theory
films
movies
videodrome
david cronenberg
network
sidney lumet
paddy chavefsky
media panic
horror
satire - Abstract:
- Television, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, is hardly the object of much significant protest. After almost one hundred years in existence, television is a medium which has had its potential for hysteria at the hands of cultural critics rendered inert; in fact, one might even argue that television is a celebrated medium, one that is beginning to approach the high cultural status of literature and film with the rise of so-called prestige television programs like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or Mad Men. This continues to appear true as budgets and production values for television programming continue to rise. For many decades, however, television was the object of spectacular critical focus. Like many other communications technologies, its integration into society as a medium was met with strong reactions of deeply polarized valances. For some viewers, the growth and development of television was a net good, and the medium itself represented a bounty of information that was now accessible to the average American – a democratization of leisure that symbolized and enshrined a kind of freedom to enjoy oneself into our culture. For other segments of viewership, however, television began to seem like a locus of simmering anxieties over the trajectory of society. To critics, the changes it rendered to entertainment media seemed to symbolize, if not single-handedly bring into being, significant and profoundly negative changes to humanity as a whole. Throughout the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, cultural critics voiced a number of concerns about the role of television in daily life. Was television making children stupider, or worse, more violent? Was it overtaking such established, esteemed media as film, the novel, the print newspaper – forms which were assumed to be a prioi better for the mind? Was it going to render the cultural works of the previous generations obsolete? Most concerning of all: was it going to be so persuasive in its ability to produce images that it would make us lose touch with reality altogether? For the most part, we see these instances of moral panic cropping up primarily in non-fiction sources like media theory, government policy, and the news media during the late 20th century. In this thesis, I seek to examine how these views and perceptions of television crop up in fiction sources through the analysis of two films – Network (1976, written by Paddy Chayefsky) and Videodrome (1983, written by David Cronenberg). Within these films, one can see a profound preoccupation with the dangers and risks of television’s pervasion in society in a manner that clearly reflects the fears of the time in obvious as well as subtle ways. Themes such as sexual deviance and violence, youth and obsolescence, and psychosis individually flesh out complicated beliefs about the power, influence, and phenomenology of television viewership in the 1970s and 1980s. By analyzing these films against one another and against a wider context of historical anxiety about the role of television in moral and social life, we can see embedded themes regarding our culture’s beliefs about mass communications technologies – and ourselves – more clearly. Additionally, given the nature of the media panic as “sisyphean,” as sociologist Amy Orben puts it (“The Sisyphean Cycles”), these insights can play a role in how we critically examine our relationship to contemporary mass media technologies like the Internet and social media. When critiques are leveled at these newer mediums, it can be valuable to remember past debates in order to more accurately assess the role these technologies ought to be granted in mainstream life.