[CaptHayfever]

Clever. Except somebody beat you to the pun, but with the opposite intent:

Well-Done Medium Not Rare
Opinion by >> [Al Hayfever]

“Theatre is life; film is art; television is furniture.” I have no idea who said that, but it’s wrong. That’s tantamount to if I said something idiotic like, “Photography is life; painting is art; sculpture is furniture.” Here’s the truth: Television is miniature film; film is prerecorded theatre; theatre is art.

"But, [Al],” and I sigh with frustration as hypothetical-elitist-snob-reader chimes in, “how can you find any value in television? It has commercials/reality shows/dumb sitcoms/shallow dramas/countless ripoffs/biased news/edited movies and/or is numbing our children’s minds/desensitizing society to violence/insert another repetitive straw man argument here!”

I’m not going to argue against such claims, because to be perfectly honest, the claims are true. Such claims are also true for film and for theatre…and for photography, painting, & sculpture…and for poetry, books, magazines, newspapers, music, dance, video games, the Internet, & any other medium you can or can’t think of. As stated by Sturgeon’s Law, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” The biggest difference between TV and the others is ease of distribution. It’s a farther walk to the morning paper than it is to the telly, and once you turn on the set, there’s anywhere from 5 to 500 stations all instantly accessible and chock full of nuts. No one knew about Manos: the Hands of Fate because no one went looking for it; The Swan, on the other hand, came looking for us. Still, avoiding the drek is as simple as flipping the channel to something better (Before you ask, there’s ALWAYS something on better than The Swan).

What’s more, the artistic landscape always looks bleakest in the moment. I guarantee that 30 years from now, no one will remember The Moment of Truth, just like they won’t remember White Chicks or any new play that closes on opening night. The only reason they’ll remember Survivor is that it will still be running. The works that last are the ones that are phenomenally good, phenomenally successful, or just inherently phenomenal; the cream rises to the top of our collective cultural memory. That’s why people remember the “golden days” of Hollywood or Broadway as better than they are, because they’ve long forgotten all the terrible films and plays. The same holds true for television; we ultimately remember only shows worth remembering.

The thing that’s really ticking me off, though, is that the hypo-snob-reader got all worked up over my correctly identifying TV as a legitimate medium for art, causing said reader to completely miss the part about theatre. We who live lives of the stage do often have a hard time remembering that there’s life beyond it, but that’s not what “theatre is life” means. It’s also not a Shakespeare “all the world’s a stage” reference. Playwrights & directors, critics & historians, they all credit drama as being inherently more real than other media. Stuff and nonsense. Theatre is an art, and art reflects life, just as life reflects art. Each is necessary for the other; I will defend that belief to my grave, but they are not identical. Theatre is art; film is art; television is art. Good night, Gracie; tomorrow is another day, and Robin shall restore amends.

~The Monitor Volume 14, Issue 1, 4/11/08
Originally written in Spring 2007. An earlier draft appears in my "Essays" thread in the Art/Lit/Writing forum.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"