Even with an infinitely expanding amount of channels today, its getting harder to justify our very expensive monthly cable bill. Just think, only a few years ago there were only five hundred channels to choose from, and when I was a kid, only three, well four if you could get UHF on the rabbit ears. (We used a combination of tin foil, a colander, and my sister’s head slightly turned to the east in summer, north in winter)
To say TV is formulaic is an insult to formulas. Every cop show begins with a dead woman in a garbage can, and everything else takes us either behind the scenes, or up close and personal. If you ask me, TV has become as much a recreational drug as weed, and the combination is deadly. See TMZ. Have our own lives become so shallow, and mundane that we need to wallow in everyone else’s misery to make us feel better? That’s a rhetorical question.
I was sitting with the Kids flipping through the crap-fest that is Monday nights TV line up, when I discovered the lyric opera version of Hansel and Gretel, by Engelbert Humperdink, (no, not that one, I checked). Anyway, I figured this was probably the closest we would ever get to experiencing opera so I tuned in.
The show began with a gown-clad host who combined the contrived hipness of Ryan Seacrest, with the ironic sensibility of James Lipton. (I know, weird huh?) She was positioned in camera so that just off her shoulder we could see several stagehands sipping coffee, adjusting their enormous bellies inside their impossibly small pants. She went on to explain that this night would be special because it would take us, you guessed it, inside the exciting action going on backstage at the Met! (Et tu PBS?)
This version of the Brothers Grimm tale was decidedly dark, filled with ghastly ghouls, an unexpected appearance by the Sandman, who looked more like Freddy Krueger than the benevolent sleepy-eyed gentlemen I remembered from childhood, and featured an all alto-soprano cast that settled the question once and for all what the love child of a fax machine and Bon Iver might sound like?
And as we watched the plot unfold I was stunned how awful this story is. A suicidal mother, and deadbeat father cast out their two starving and severely neglected children into a dark forest fully aware that a witch with a taste for human flesh will capture and eat them. Problem solved.
I began to think about other children stories and it occurred to me that it might be time for some kind of parental guide. Sure, some of these stories are just plain silly fun, but many are down right disturbing. Take Jack and the Beanstalk. A teenager disobeys his mother, trades the family’s cow for magic beans. Mom is furious, throws the beans out. Next morning a giant beanstalk appears. Mom forbids Jack from climbing the beanstalk. Jack ignores her, climbs the beanstalk, breaks into the giants castle, steals his golden goose, kills him as he escapes, gets off Scott free, then lives happily ever after. What the hell kind of message does that send to our kids.
If you ask me, Marshall McLuhan had it backwards. It’s not the medium, its the message. These stories existed long before the ubiquity of television, the Internet, motion pictures and video games. And while these platforms have contributed to the desensitization of violence, they’re not the source, to find that, all you need to do is look in the mirror.