The Camera Agé: Essays on Television, by Michael J. Arlen (Farrar, 337 pp., $13.95). The New Yorker has hired Michael Arlen, one of the sharpest and most entertaining writers around, to write about television. This is his third collection of essays on the medium. Arlen’s pieces are suffused with a sense of what it’s like to watch TV: “this huge, shared, strangely experienceless experience as it sometimes seems to be.” He is not interested in the reality behind a TV presentation as much as in the presentation itself—what he calls “filmic reality,” a peculiar and at times nauseating blend of cinematographic and psychological contents. News documentaries and entertainment shows are treated as differing mostly in tone. For instance, writing about the obsessive but bland coverage of the hostages in Iran, he observes that no one thought Iran was much of a story, until the news directors saw all those dark beards on film: Iran was photogenic. In his wonderfully funny essay “Smooth Pebbles at Southfork,” the Ewings, the family of Texas oil millionaires on Dallas, are compared to “townspeople
in a Western movie who have temporarily lost track of the moral drift of the situation.” The show is different from traditional soap operas, where people act with a set of reasons and stick to them, for the same reason that it is so astronomically popular: the Ewings are “the foremost pioneers in the new field of behavioral improvisation, though they are no longer alone.” Arlen’s sense of proportion, however, is not as good as his particular insights are, and a superfluous, PBS type of studied-morality inflection creeps in here and there. He rates Walter Cronkite’s performance in the CBS newsroom on the night of the Three Mile Island “incident” high. “ ‘Good evening,’ said Cronkite, speaking with unmistakable gravity. ‘The world has never known a day quite like today.’ . . . Cronkite had broken through the barrier and for a tiny moment dared us to see the real horror of the times we live in, through the eyes of a most decent man who could not, and perhaps would not, keep the fear and despair out of his voice in the service of the higher stability.” Where does Michael Arlen live? Next door to the Brady Bunch? But he has also written two very good essays in this same collection, for which it is worth buying. One, “The State of the Art,” is an interview with David Haskell Sawyer, a political media consultant. The other, “The Prosecutor,” is an uncovering of Dan Rather’s “prairiegate” fabrication of corruption in Wyoming for 60 Minutes. His postscript describing the “thin-skinned and belligerent” response from CBS news executives is worth a thousand pictures.
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