Monday, January 08, 2007

Quote, Unquote

(Recently picked up the Criterion Collection edition of Videodrome. This is from one of the essays included in its booklet. Here Gary Indiana comtrasts Cronenberg's conceit of a video signal that causes permanent hallucinations and the reality of television.)

"'Television makes people stupid,' German writer Hans Magnus Enzenberger declared in an essay. One could qualify this by comparing TV to the Videodrome signal: the more exposure a person gets, the more protracted and ultimately permanent the state of hallucination becomes. The average U.S. television viewer spends eight to twelve hours a day staring into the image-display window of a home appliance. If he or she happens to work on a computer, almost all waking hours are spent looking at a screen and living vicariously in two-dimensional space."
-Gary Indiana

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