ACTUALLY, A CHANNEL DEVOTED ONLY TO THINGS FOR WHICH "PEACH-COLORED FLESH BALLOON" IS A METAPHOR WOULD PROBABLY MAKE MONEY: I'm often criticized as a person who can find fault in anyone or anything (example: I can't even think of Mother Theresa without being annoyingly reminded of the crone in that old lady/young lady optical illusion, though I hasten to add that unlike some I've never incited a mob to boo her). Still, even I am not one to criticize incremental improvements in technology -- increases in memory capacity, data transmission speed, fuel economy, sound clarity (that means you, vinyl fetishists) and, of course, television picture resolution.
Yet along comes the Boston Globe, ancestral cave of anti-progress neanderthals like Dan Shaughnessy, to tell me that standard-definition television is better than HDTV. Matthew Gilbert, who apparently just saw HDTV for the first time, thinks that it is "commodified realness, the world tweaked for effect." Apparently, all of the lighting and makeup and special effects and graphics and costuming and set design and sound editing and hiring of implausibly attractive people that we used to see in standard-def -- that was just gritty realism presented neutrally by saintly broadcasters untainted by any impure commercial motive.
Maybe I'm just proving Gilbert's point, but I can barely even watch SDTV any more. Every time I watch Reaper or The Daily Show (or the Buffy DVDs) I have the same thought as when I see footage from early 1980s videotape archives or stumble across an image from a Jack Kirby comic book -- "we actually enjoyed looking at this stuff?" Yes, I'm easily entertained by bright and shiny things. But if you, Matt Gilbert, are not, may I make a suggestion? Buy some vaseline and smear it on your glasses (or, if you don't wear glasses, directly on your eyeballs). Presto! Your realness is instantaneously uncommodified.
No comments:
Post a Comment