Word: mcluhan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...merchants realize that the floating variety show is the best way to maintain the integrity of the land. The fashionable theorists, particularly McLuhan, speak of the unprecedented-rate-of-apocalyptic-change. Yet after the Beatles, Che Guevara, the Civil Rights Act, and even the moon landing, social conscience may be developed so far beyond the power of people to change anything that the fiery political frustration is being mistaken for the reform. And television may be the cardinal source of this paradoxical feeling of unprecedented turmoil throughout an essentially sullen and unmoving nation. Arlen's most moving pages...
...movie's title refers to McLuhan's theory that television is a cool medium. or one in which the viewer participates with the picture and fills in, on his own, much of what he experiences. This kind of filling-in is supposed to give the viewer a false sense of what really happened at the so-called news event. Therefore television reporting is largely a lie. But because Wexler never goes into the viewer end of media (McLuhan's work). his point isn't particularly profound. We all know that TV newsmen fudge reality to the point where every night...
Ultimately the film is weak because of the very faults of the cool medium that Wexler wants to criticize. Film is supposed to be a hot medium. McLuhan tells us; that is it's a total experience. Medium Cool is less than a total experience: we can really feel the editing, the presence of the director, and the techniques he's using. It's full of dialogue hanging over from a just finished scene or anticipating one to come, and overly arty shots of the boots in the mud of Tent City-all used without much purpose. And, like...
...spoke, there issued forth a sesquipedalian vocabulary, diapasonal sounds like a Hammond organ in dense fog. His performances had a consciously archaic quality about them. He satirized fustian while indulging in it. His senatorial solemnity was a species of burlesque. He belonged in a Chautauqua rather than a McLuhan age, although he became a master of television performing. His manner, leavened by an exquisite sense of self-parody, conjured up Americana, suggestions of snake-oil peddlers, backwoods Shakespeareans, the gentle rapscallionry of Penrod Schofield's or Pudd'nhead Wilson's world. Before he died of a pulmonary...
...Dark Age. Are we (as Marshall McLuhan threatens or promises) on the verge of a nonverbal age, when Samuel Johnson, Coleridge and the rest will be no more intelligible than hippopotamus snorting and snuffling in jungle muck? Are we on the verge of a new Dark Age of universal literacy in which the mind, and the longing for the pleasures of literature, will drown in a plethora of print? Gross quotes the new attitude as described by a Kingsley Amis character: "If there was one thing which Roger never felt like, it was a good read." Have science...