![]() When he tests this hypothesis by attempting to kick West, the Twonky paralyzes his leg. Trout concludes that the Twonky is actually a robot committed to serving West. After West demonstrates the television to his friend Coach Trout (Billy Lynn), the coach declares the television set to be a “twonky”, the word he used as a child to label the inexplicable. ![]() Yet the television soon exhibits other, more controlling traits, permitting West only a single cup of coffee and breaking West’s classical music records in favor of military marches to which it dances. When the television deliveryman (Edwin Max) returns to settle the bill, the television materializes copies of a five-dollar bill in order to provide payment. West soon discovers that the television can walk and perform a variety of functions, including dishwashing, vacuuming, and card-playing. Absentmindedly unaware of what has taken place, it is only when the television subsequently lights his pipe that West realizes that his television is behaving abnormally. Sitting down in his office, he places a cigarette in his mouth and is about to light it when a solid beam of light shoots from the television screen, lighting it for him. Cinema, then, perhaps represented a higher cultural form that was less susceptible to the corrosive influence of advertising, although this notion has changed somewhat over the years as any modern moviegoer can attest to.) Given the context in which these two authors wrote, it is not overly difficult to connect the dots and see how both of these short stories spoke to advertising being conveyed through media channels as it infected the general population, supplanting natural sentience with manufactured thought (or nothing at all!) in a process that invokes some of the pessimistic views of institutions like the Frankfurt School.After seeing his wife (Janet Warren) off on her trip, Kerry West ( Hans Conried), a philosophy teacher at a small-town college goes inside his home to contemplate his new purchase: a television set. (Interestingly, there also seems to be a stratification of media with the telephone being suspect while Westerfield finds a bit of sanctuary under the marquee of a movie theater. In their own ways, both Pohl and Kuttner draw a connection between media and the subjugation of the human mind and/or spirit. ![]() Offerings like Groundhog Dayand Dark City come to mind, although these two offerings contain messages that diverge in interesting ways: while the plot of Groundhog Day focuses on an individual transformation, Dark City also nods to a sort of “cultural amnesia” that plagues the inhabitants of the self-contained city.Īn easy target for this malaise is the spell cast by advertising, with such accusations made in “The Tunnel Under the World.” Written in the middle of the 20th century-a time period that saw increasing emphasis on commercialization and industrialization-it makes sense that Pohl casts the inhabitants of Tlyerton as robots driven by a consciousness that is both duped and dead!Īmnesia and complacency also manifest in Henry Kuttner‘s “The Twonky,” and here we can contrast the amnesia of time-travelling Joe with the induced state of inaction that Kerry Westerfield experiences as a result of his interaction with the Twonky. The last of these manifestations, which we see in Frederik Pohl‘s “The Tunnel Under the World,” invokes memory of myths in which the hero must repeat his trials until he learns a lesson that speaks to some supposedly profound truth. Although one might argue that amnesia has taken on a negative sheen thanks to its popularity in soap operas, the mechanic has been employed in a number of popular contexts that range from retconning (effecting a kind of imperfect amnesia on the audience as cannon asks them to “forget” history), dissociative fugue, and cyclical histories/journeys that continually reset. The prominent theme of amnesia seems of note in this week’s readings, gaining resonance when paired with the larger connective thread of advertising. I Swear I’ve Heard This One Before, Somewhere…
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |