Word: vcr
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Moviegoers, of course, don't pay for the cost of a movie. They are as likely to spurn a megamovie as they are to embrace a pinchpenny picture like Ninja Turtles. But for now, moguls are willing to believe that the VCR revolution has made the movie industry slump-proof; 1990 may not match last summer, but it should still be the second biggest-grossing summer ever. And viewers may dare to hope that amid the bigger bangs for bigger bucks, Hollywood doesn't forget how to make good movies...
...life of well-ordered predictability. They subsist on teak logging and farming, attend church, send their children to school and adhere to a strict penal code (adultery carries the death penalty). Though there is no electricity at Manerplaw headquarters, a generator supplies power for that most prized necessity, a VCR. The leaders tend to be melancholy idealists, sad-eyed dreamers who pass evenings drafting and redrafting a Karen constitution for use in the improbable event that independence will be achieved. Gentle in gesture and speech, the Karens do not seem capable of nurturing hatred. Nor do the guerrillas seem capable...
Before coming to Manerplaw, Ehtablay had never seen television or a movie. He had not even known they existed. At Manerplaw he got his first taste of both. As a special Army Day treat, the recruits are permitted to watch Rambo III on the VCR in the officers' barracks. Ehtablay sits on the floor, hugging his knees, and stares, mouth open, eyes bedazzled, at Sylvester Stallone's leading Afghan freedom fighters in a charge against Soviet tanks...
...screen and accept that ours is a postliterate world. A new generation of children is growing up, they say, with a new, highly visual kind of imagination, and it is our obligation to speak to them in terms they understand. MTV, USA Today, the PC and the VCR -- why, the acronym itself! -- are making the slow motion of words as obsolete as pictographs. The PLAY button's the thing. Writing in the New York Times not long ago, Robert W. Pittman, the developer of MTV, pointed out just how much the media have already adjusted to the music-video aesthetic...
...sass sitcoms, puerile police procedurals and yuppie yammering about the meaning of life? Call it a census of sorts, a time-slot-by-time-slot canvass of the nation's nightly fantasy life, a solitary journey up the lazy river of the collective consciousness armed only with VCR and fast-forward button. The goal was to view television through the eyes of an outsider and to pretend to encounter the Huxtables, Roseanne and, yes, even the Simpsons for the first time. Alas, the results were depressing, not only in the obvious vast-wasteland sense but also more seriously...