Blog Post #3 3-4-11
Before experimenting with my use of television and film, I did not realize how differently I was effected by each of them. I use both television and film as an escape. They both take me to an alternate world, where for a period of time I am invested in other people’s lives. However, I find in my own life, television to be much more prominent. Ever since I was little, I have had a set of T.V. shows I have watched every week. This year I watch Gossip girl on Mondays, One tree Hill on Tuesdays, and Vampire Diaries on Thursdays. A film on the other hand is not regularly scheduled. You experience it for two and a half hours, and then it is over, and unless you know there are sequels coming, that is all the impact it can have on your life. This week I am also doing a project on Atonement. Even watching it in my room on my computer, I found Atonement to be a hot medium. This is because I realized there is so much more to look for in a film then in T.V. T.V. is more about a story, about the various events of the characters, while Film is about everything they can fit into a two hour time period. In Atonement, there is the story of the main characters. However, there is also this magnificent estate covered with beautiful gardens and ponds, centered around a gigantic mansion. The score of the movie focuses you in on the sound of the typewriter, as a source of tension and climax in the film. Then you have the various symbolism throughout the film. Atonement is about much more than the story, the film is about taking you completely to 1930’s England. McLuhan’s chapter Movies: The Reel World describes how “film has the power to store and to convey a great deal of information. In an instant it presents a scene of landscape with figures that would require several pages of prose to describe”(288). Film needs to fit so much into it in such a short amount of time and make the escape of seeing a film, so real, that much more then the story is required to make it successful. Being a hot medium, the film has to suck the viewer in, focusing them in on the screen for two hours, so many more elements are needed than in T.V.
Watching my weekly T.V. shows I find that the shows are much more about the story. They are set in the same scenes every week, and no sets are that elaborate. The music is usually a rock or acoustic song that involves a current artist who’s emotional lyrics fit that of the scene. No original scores are added like in a movie.
T.V. finds success in its audience’s deep connection to the characters. This connection is what keeps the viewer coming back week after week, so it is much easier to become trapped in the fantasy of T.V. in my case. One tree hill has been my favorite show for eight years. In the words of Meyrowitz in his novel No Sense of Place these characters have become my “para-social friends.” I talk about them with all of my friends who also watching the show saying “I can’t believe that happened to them” or “oh my god I feel so bad for her.” It is completely ridiculous I feel so connected to these characters, but through my experiment this week I found out that T.V. is about this connection. Brooke Davis is my favorite character and for the last eight years, I have wanted her clothes, her boyfriends, and her career. I also have wanted her to succeed and grow, and as she does so I feel like it is one of my friends growing up. Nowadays, there are sights such as www.tvfanatic.com that allow you to go on the site, find the music played in the episode, look at quotes from the night, and find spoilers, for those like myself who are too anxious to wait for next week. If we were not so invested in these characters then what would we come back for. With movies, if you do not connect to the characters, but the movie is visually appealing and the characters bring something interesting to the table, then there is still an appeal to a two hour movie. However, if I hated every character on One Tree Hill, no way would I keep going back for more. We follow these stars fictional lives and clothing trends, almost as much as our own.
McLuhan’s chapter Movies: The Reel World centers on the idea that “the film pushed this mechanism to the utmost mechanical verge and beyond, into a surrealism of dreams that money can buy”(290). I think this quote applies to both film and television, because both represent certain ideals. Twilight the movie and The Vampire Diaries both take us to a world we could only ever find in a fantasy. They are both about vampire boyfriends providing the allure of dangerous gorgeous men, who we know we could never have in real life. They make the relationships of vampires and humans work to form an ideal loving relationship. They also make the female protagonist, normal, middle-class, small town girls, so they directly address who is probably most interested, creating a dream world we begin to live in. These fantasies, suck us in at the time, providing the best escape we could imagine. However, they also provide the most dangerous, as none of this can ever come true, even after we spend week after week, or hour after hour hoping. Films and Movies have different functions, but they both result in the same thing, the escape of fantasy, an escape that I use all the time.
The Vampire Diaries
Vs.
Work Cited
McLuhan, Marshall. “Movies: The Reel World.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994. Print. 284-296.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. “The Separation of Social Place from Physical Place.” No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
It's interesting that you feel that television is more prominent, or that it has more of an impact on your life. That makes a lot of sense, I think, because of the nature of television. The television show needs to hold your attention for an entire season so it's a slow build, making you feel more and more hooked as each episode passes. A film works faster: action, climax, resolution in less than two hours. Sure, a film can captivate you probably more intensely than a television show does in the moment, but it's also over before you know it with nothing to look forward to.
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