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John Graves Speaking His Mind in the Blogosphere...continued
Messages, Media and Mediocrity (continued)
Jimi Hendrix, back in the fifties, brought a whole new dimension of technical wizardry to the electric guitar. He poured forth cascades of notes at breathtaking speed. He utilized eerie innovations of electronic distortions to enhance his flamboyant pyrotechnics (even adding such quaint touches as setting his guitar on fire, or playing it behind his head--but that's not relevant to my point). He's still considered by many to have been the quintessential, consummate performer on the instrument in the recent history of popular music.
I was amazed at his technical proficiency, but I couldn't relate to the content of his music. "What is he trying to say?" I found myself asking. In my perhaps dated perception improvising, even when a torrent of notes are gushing forth, is still supposed to produce a coherent, meaningful musical "line"--not just an exhibition of how many notes can be played in a bar (measure--not saloon).
It was a real breakthrough in motion pictures when the concept of editing emerged. Early moviegoers were upset when the first close-ups were employed. They felt they were paying to see a whole person--not just a face. Also, it took a while for audiences to accept the device of a cut, which eliminated the requirement for a chronological sequence of events. (When someone leaves the house for work, we can cut to his arrival at the office; we don't have to see him go to the garage, get in the car, drive through traffic, park, etc.)
Well, as happens with so many good things, young film and television editors, reared on the brief vignettes of Sesame Street and MTV, seem to be convinced that if a little is good, a lot must be better. They often try to cram as many images as possible into the few seconds allotted for a commercial, or promotional announcement--sometimes even with split screens. If product identification is the goal of the advertiser, it's a fruitless effort if you can't recall what car or beer was supposed to be the star of the parade of lightning quick cuts you've just been subjected to.
Special effects have come quite a way since George Melies' A Trip to the Moon, with its innovative, but clumsy theatrical stagecraft illusions. With the computer's amazing ability to realize, with uncanny reality, any image, creature or being that even the farthest-out writer's imagination can conceive, the special effects community has produced the same syndrome of superfluity. Mainstream filmmakers today seem to feel it's their mandate to surpass each previous cataclysmic epic, action-packed festival of blood-letting, or mutant monster munching with an even more extravagant explosion of gross-out mayhem. But where's the story?
Home pages on the web are often amazing, with their inventive use of color, graphics, sound and music. But along with being amazed, we have to wade through waves of banality in advertisements and solicitations. And often the copy stemming from the web pages is pretty puerile writing.
The late media guru, Marshall McLuhan, claimed "The media is the message". This concept usually engendered a number of blank stares from my university students, even after I explained that what he meant was that the delivery form of the message (TV or radio program, book, movie, etc.) had more impact and effect on the audience than what the message actually said, or portrayed. He further felt that media--which included speech, printing, art, radio, telephone, television--functioned as extensions of the human organism to increase power and speed. Looking at our current culture, it almost seems that power and speed have become the ne plus ultra of our increasingly yuppified society. Perhaps McLuhan's observations are even more relevant in the nineties than when he proclaimed them in the sixties.
Adlai Stevenson, who lost the presidency to General Eisenhower, voiced these words of caution way back in 1955: "The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discrimination of our minds, since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to discover whether we think something is good or bad, or right or wrong."
Some of us have become unbelievably proficient in the art of delivering messages--be it music, or film, or cyberspace. Would we were as proficient in making messages meaningful. Where will it go? Will McLuhan's famous description of the modern media as a "global village" mean that anywhere you'd go in the world there'd be no such thing as excellence of storytelling, richness of character delineation, exquisite music, or profound insights? I couldn't bare it
