The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television by Chris Horrocks

Author:Chris Horrocks [Horrocks, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, dir. Nicolas Roeg).

This psychical and physical invasion by television contrasts with spiritual assault through its technology. This appears in movies showing television as a channel that possesses the viewer, often invoking supernatural forces or providing the means for the uncanny and repressed to return to judge, condemn and torment the living. The movie Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper) shows television as the object channel from the vengeful dead. The protagonist’s daughter, Carol Anne, is an innocent medium paralleling television’s bridge between the consumer present, exemplified in the new family home, and the ancient and recent past, the burial ground on which it is built. The classic motif of the television in horror is the screen’s rendition of ‘dead time’, the image of electronic snow accompanied by the sound of static after the station has shut down for the night, before some unscheduled programming of an unearthly kind. In films such as White Noise (2005, dir. Geoffrey Sax), the television screen visual static provides the means for a widower to contact his dead wife, therefore putting himself at some risk from demons who are attracted to those who watch white noise in the hope of intercepting messages from the other side. The appearance of dead time on the television after network stations have closed down during the night is also a nostalgic reference to a time before non-stop broadcasting. Arguably Poltergeist itself, as a commodity of the film industry, projects the television as the alien object threatening the movie studios, at a time when the latter did not have a stake in the cable channels of the 1980s that introduced movies directly into the home. From this perspective it also suggests ‘hysterical, and partly ironic, affirmation to parents who felt that allowing R-rated films into the family room might just signal the end of Western civilization’.33

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