Television: The Soul at Risk
PART 3
This is the third installment of a series on television. It was originally published as a book by Clovis in France (Clovis is the publishing house of the French district of the SSPX). The series will continue every month in The Angelus.
Television and Truth
In the hypothesis that people watch television programming to stay informed, does television give us access to truth? We all can remember direct lies that were broadcast by the media. But there is also a more subtle form of lying–the indirect lie.
Direct Lies
Do independent television chains exist, whether public or private? Even viewer-supported television channels seem to have a very noticeable “religiously correct” position.
Falsehood or disinformation exists everywhere, in every domain: the news, documentaries, fiction, and in the hybrid category called “docufiction.” According to the dictionary, docufiction is a dramatized television movie that reconstructs real events mixed with fictionalized elements, scenes played by actors, or authentic documents. In fact, in a docufiction, everything can be invented. There can be no real facts; the mendacious prefix “docu” merely serves to deceive the viewer about the merchandise.
Disinformation: a classic example is the production of Timisoara [about the Romanian revolt against Communist rule in 1989], which was acknowledged to be such by the management of the television station.
Another way to lie consists, for example, in denigrating Catholics faithful to Tradition as “Lefebvrists” or in designating illegal aliens under the fallacious label “undocumented workers.”
Lies can be mixed with works of fiction: it is very easy in a movie to assign the role of a bad guy to a Catholic, a military man, or a father of a large family.
Docufiction consists in mixing documentary (for the form) and fiction (for the story), which amounts to passing off fiction under the serious appearance of documentary.
Space Odyssey, a television series on evolutionary prehistory, belongs to the genre of docufiction. But how many viewers were able to comprehend that it really involved pure science fiction and not historical reconstitution? The viewers who were already informed about the question of evolution judged it severely: It’s stupid, lame, and idiotic; they really take people for morons! Other viewers, teachers, compromising Catholics, were seduced by this faux-documentary.
Lastly, whether it involves documentary, news, fiction, or docufiction, it is very difficult to know whether what is being said is true or not. Bad books also convey lies, but “the relationship with a book is more rational than the relationship with images.”1 At first, Darwin’s Origin of Species only seduced the ambitious; men of science and the Christians perceived the weaknesses of Darwin’s argumentation. It took the required teaching of Darwin’s doctrine in the schools and the absence of a reaction from the Church for this lie to sink into people’s minds. With a movie or docufiction, lies are spread more easily. Moreover, as we shall see later, a book is not conceived of or realized like a film or newscast.
Indirect Lies
In the hypothesis that a broadcast had been conceived without any ulterior political or ideological motives, one might suppose that lies would not occur. Television and movies cannot broadcast lies uninterruptedly. Except for flagrant lies, the rest should be an exact reflection of reality. But things are not so simple. There is what can be called “the model effect”: reality is not shown, but rather a model of reality, an appearance of reality. We are used to watching the world not as it is, but through the prism of the media, regardless of the film crew’s good will.
The presence of the media stands between the world and us in various ways. What’s interesting is the spectacular: add the constraints of staging and human selection, more or less innocent, more or less rational, and you will understand that the image we see cannot be raw reality.
I shall use a personal experience to illustrate the “model effect” in four stages: a TV crew came to our house to film a report on homeschooling.
We ourselves had thought about the setting: what would we show? What were we going to hide? For our family, the stakes were high because we had had some real trouble with the government. A physician, a staunch defender of allopathic medicine and president of the local parish leadership committee, was making an issue about our preference for homeschooling, homeopathy, and, undoubtedly, for Tradition. We sorted out what we could say and what had better be left unsaid. We decided not to bring up questions about religion or medicine; not to criticize academic programs; not to criticize the students or teachers of neighborhood schools; to give the positive reasons for our choice of homeschooling; to show the children participating in outside activities; to convince the inspector of their good socialization; to put out of sight books, images, and publications deemed “politically, religiously, or scientifically incorrect.”
We reflected upon what to wear, and we tidied up the house. We might even have prepared and reviewed the lessons for the news, but we didn’t: all our children had whooping cough, two of them had just been hospitalized, and we had been taking turns at their bedsides for a month. Yet, for the day of the shoot, we pretended that it was an ordinary school day. In short, we had done a bit of staging ourselves.
For technical reasons, the film crew proposed a few limits, a few modifications of reality: assemble the children in the same room to spare the camera man and sound man from having to move about (one of the children was filmed kneeling on a sofa while normally he would be sitting at a table in another room); assemble the children for other activities to make the scene livelier (gathering eggs in the chicken coop, for example); modify our daily schedule to facilitate the maximum number of shots during the few hours the journalists were present. The viewer would also be unaware that several apparently spontaneous scenes had been repeated for incidental or even trivial reasons: a bothersome object in the field of vision, a coughing spell, etc.
The production crew that filmed our family for nearly seven hours kept only a montage of seven and a half minutes for the televised broadcast. The journalist in charge of the broadcast gave top priority to the unusual sequences and those showing the children moving about. Ultimately, you see very little of the children working; you see them playing outside, playing with the dog, fetching eggs from the coop, playing soccer, whispering during a piano lesson. Of course, it is scarcely exciting to show a child doing a dictation, but we could perceive the journalist’s deliberate intention to minimize the children’s school work.
The Interpretation
The film was first shown to a group of people invited to give their opinions before it was broadcast on the TV channel a few weeks later. The guests often expressed peremptory opinions and made commentaries based on these few images as if they were sufficient to get a sound grasp of the situation. For example: the inspector of National Education declared that I had exceptional authorization to follow the course of the CNED because my children had never been sent to school. But his perception was erroneous: I use a private school curriculum, and I do not know why the inspector kept silent about the existence of private correspondence courses for homeschoolers. Out of ignorance, perhaps?
Another participant at the screening, a mother of a family and a “top model” in the public eye, noticed one of my children by himself on the soccer field and inferred that he was alone and had no friends. Yet her perception was inexact: he had been assigned to a different soccer team that day for the sake of the filming; the soccer coach had told the children to spread out for their exercises; my son, sick with whooping cough, had been advised not to get near the others.
Did this news report on homeschooling serve any purpose? Did it inform the television viewers? For us, it was very useful: thanks to the prestige (!) of being on television, no one bothered us any more. Those who watched the broadcast–relatives, parents, or friends–remained in the dark; they were disappointed not to learn anything about the children’s academic level, the only thing that interested them. We received two telephone calls from interested strangers who had watched the program: a mother of a family, who had been wishing to remove her children from public school for a long time in order to protect them from the meanness, violence, and daily “racket” in their school; and a father of a family, who had already created a web site on homeschooling and wished to add a few things to his site.
Conclusion: the only people really interested in the broadcast had in fact already thought a great deal about the subject and were already well informed.
To give another example: the film crew of The Lord’s Day came to film Sunday Mass at our parish. There, too, even though we watched the proceedings from afar, we could observe quite a few things.
To swell the attendance, the anticipated Mass of Saturday evening was cancelled as well as one generally well-attended Sunday Mass. (A few years ago, we saw the same thing while passing through the Rue du Bac and the Lazarists’ chapel. A sign announced that all the Masses in the neighborhood were cancelled because of the presence of a film crew at the Rue du Bac the following Sunday and that Sunday Mass would only be held in the Chapel of the Apparitions.) An unknown priest, brought by the film crew, came that day to preach. The faithful flocked to Mass that Sunday because of the cancelled Masses or out of simple curiosity. Many communions were received that day (according to the account in the local bulletin), even by people who do not practice the Faith regularly and who “felt called” to approach the communion table. Apparently there was no warning from the pulpit or call for discretion.
Multiple parish meetings were held weeks ahead in order to prepare for the broadcast. The church was cleaned; the furniture and ornaments were refurbished for the occasion. In other words, it was not a matter of an impromptu filming, but of a carefully prepared and practiced celebration–which is perhaps normal for filming but which does not reflect current practice. Beneath the guise of a news report, it’s pure cinema.
We observed that the choice of our parish for filming The Lord’s Day was not innocent; we could perceive an intention to put a certain face on the Church in France. They chose a young, sympathetic, likable pastor even though the average age of parish priests is quite high. They chose a priest who never uses the Roman Canon, nor wears a cassock or clerical attire or Roman collar. They chose a parish whose organizers do not use Gregorian chant, but accept the most whimsical kyriales and allow only the most resolutely modern “canticles.”
From these two examples, we can define a few elements of the “model effect” in indirect lying.
Omission
In a news report, it is impossible to put to use the miles of footage shot: it would be too long and boring. They cut what they prefer not to show for various reasons, which are not always innocent. For instance, in a broadcast of Knowledge of the World about India, we saw no dirt, no misery, and no violence. No Christians were filmed. They presented us a wonderful country in which the inhabitants dwell in peace and beauty, make merry, and pray or work a little.
In a fictitious film, bothersome scenes can be suppressed for perfectly honorable reasons: in the film Quo Vadis, the carnage in the coliseum is not shown, only suggested. Until the sixties, erotic scenes were suppressed.
In movies, what is remarkable is that the hero’s life is singularly simplified. Like comic strips, the action dictates that the lives of the characters be simplified. The heroes have a reduced family life or no family life at all: Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Rusty (the hero of Rin Tin Tin), and Zorro, whose father played only a decorative role. The mother of the young heroes of Flipper the Dolphin is dead and the father, very busy with his work, gives his sons a great deal of freedom: it is likely that the presence of a mother would have been troublesome in the scenario.
The heroes never experience the daily worries of the common run of mortals: waiting rooms, administrative forms to fill out, car trouble, a flat tire to repair, scattered papers, the newborn’s crying at night, visits to the orthodontist, sciatica pain, toothache. If this type of scene exists, it is for comic relief or else it is the starting point of the action.
“Easy, boring” works are not of great interest in an action film, but by dint of ignoring it and of living in a world peopled by heroes always ready to go into action, you end up having a false representation of real life.
Literature can also lead to this kind of confusion, but in that domain the critical spirit is more alert. Thus Langlo, a young secret agent, an orphan and unmarried, lives incredible adventures at the age of 18, but a single sentence can suggest other, less glorious activities and link him to a duller, more routine reality.
Distortion
Whether it concerns movies, documentaries, or news, they show what is spectacular or sensational: war, violence, sordid affairs, corruption of morals. They also feature what may serve the political or ideological causes favored by the station directors or by those who pay them. They will show footage of people demonstrating for the right to housing, but they will leave out a much more sizable demonstration of farmers.
In documentaries and other “windows to reality,” certain personages are shown in preference to others: provocative priests or bishops, rather than others; police or military blunders, rather than successes due to hard work or laborious investigations; politically favored unions and NGOs, rather than others. For the French, the expert on ecology and agriculture is José Bové, even though he is far from being universally approved by the farmers and even in his own movement. On questions of science and faith, the primary spokesman on television is Hubert Reeves. It becomes very difficult to explain that the model imposed by the media is not ours, nor the best, nor the most serious.
Exaggeration
Whatever the movie or television program, we always see extraordinary things (even if it seems that we have moved on from the era of the television spectacular to reality TV). Of course there are the special effects, stunts, and decor. But subtly, even without resorting to any kind of trickery, they arrange reality so that it is always more beautiful, more viewable, more sensational.
In a news report, schooling at home or The Lord’s Day, the subjects are playing a role before the camera. Things are disposed so that everything will go well that day: the children work hard, they are ready on time, they don’t argue with each other; the house is pleasant and attractive. No one is short-tempered, no one is tired. The telephone is turned off. In short, everything happens for the best. The children are calm, the baby doesn’t cry, the meal is ready on time without rushing… In reality, things go differently, but it is not reality that is being shown; it is a touched up image of reality.
In the news report on The Lord’s Day, there could not be any false notes, mistakes in the readings–everything had been so minutely prepared! Moreover, the film crew had arrived the day before to install their equipment and test everything. But in reality, the songs are sung badly, the readers stumble, and the attendance is sparse.
In the movies, the heroes are extraordinary: they give and receive blows without being hurt; the children are beautiful, “super intelligent,” resourceful, clever. In the film Home Alone, a child accomplishing all sorts of unbelievable technical and intellectual exploits is idolized. It isn’t science fiction, there aren’t really any special effects, but one is very far from reality and the real abilities of a child that age.
The same excesses can be found in comic books: the Gaulois fight and receive blows on the head without suffering any brain injury; the Lone Ranger never misses a shot. One might imagine that such things exist in children’s literature, but images are able to convey the irrational while in a book there has to be rationality: one does not so readily accept the unlikely.
(To be continued.)
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