Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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Now would you make the effort, please, to erase these TV people from your mind? Make them go away. Erase Johnny Carson or Henry Kissinger. Can you do that? If so, you are a most unusual person. Once television places an image inside your head, it is yours forever.

Suppression of Imagination

Try to remember a time when you first read a book or heard a radio show and then later saw a film or a television program of the same work.

If you read, say, Gone With the Wind, Roots, Marjorje Morningstar or From Here to Eternity, or heard any radio show such as "The Lone Ranger" first, you created your own internal image of the events described while you read or listened. You imagined the characters, the events and the ambience. You made pictures in your mind. These pictures were yours. Of course they were influenced by the author-what he or she told you-but the creation of the actual image was up to you.

Marjorie Morningstar was an image in your mind before you saw the film. Then you saw the film with Natalie Wood playing Marjorie. Once you had seen Natalie Wood in the role, could you recover the image you had made up?

Marjorie became Natalie Wood from that point on. So we can say that when your self-produced image was made concrete for you, your own image disappeared.

When you listened to the Lone Ranger on radio, you created a picture of him and Tonto. When you saw them later on television, could you retain your new image, or did you get stuck with the actors? It was almost certainly the latter. If you then heard the radio program again, what image of the characters were you left with?

In any competition between an internally generated image and one that is later solidified for you via moving-image media, your own image is superseded. Moses is Charlton Heston. The Sundance Kid is Robert Redford. Isis is a Saturday morning cartoon. Woodward and Bernstein are Redford and Hoffman. Buffalo Bill is Paul Newman. McMurphy is Jack Nicholson. (When Carlos Castaneda was offered an enormous sum of money to sell the screen rights to the Don Juan series, he refused saying, "I don't want to see Don Juan turn into Anthony Quinn.")

Let me ask the question in reverse. If you saw the movie version of Gone With the Wind before you read the book, could you develop your own image of Rhett Butler? Or did he remain Clark Gable? Did you see Natalie Wood in the part before you read Marjorie Morningstar? If so, could you erase Natalie and come up with your own Marjorie? I doubt it very much. Once the concrete image is in you, it stays.

The power that television images have to replace imaginary images that you created yourself operates in all realms of external-image information. All of our minds are filled with images of places and times and people and stories with which we've never had personal contact. In fact, when you receive information from any source that does not have pictures attached to it, you make up pictures to go with it. They are your images. You create the movie to go with the story. You hear the word "Africa" and a picture comes to mind.

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