TV in the american consciousness evolved into a medium that advanced from and thrived on a cult of celebrity. In the beginning TV was approached as merely a new means of fabricating old forms of narrative: it was no different from its predecessors, radio & cinema, in that it was capable of transmitting closed forms of thought & stimulation; the TV program was initially one to be appreciated, just like a radio show or a cinematic experience, as a work in private contemplation, even amongst a family or crowd. Eventually, once the zeal for capital outweighed the need for a swifter medium of art, the economic function of the TV took over its prior inclinations toward cinematic revelation, and drove it the opposite direction, toward absorption of the radio medium which would terminate ultimately as a substitution: TV was the radio made cinematic. But TV was also more than just the mere telegraphing of marketable, persuasive images: it became an event, and more importantly, a situation in which the individual would confront the world as a graspable object. TV reduced the world to an open-form object in which participation was the crucial element of instigation. Cinema as a result became even more private and closed (for example, newsreels were no longer inserted into the programming; the film itself became the main event, and was to be considered a work of artistic integrity); meanwhile TV was more or less trivialized into a conglomerate of singularly meaningless sensory information in which no one show or presentation predominated: TV was an open forum in which rival interest and spectacle competed for airtime through an endless flurry of imagery. In terms of intensity, cinema demanded more from the viewer as a closed form since it was composed of wellcrafted images akin to hieroglyphs: cinematic images were set, with increasing sophistication & acumen, according to the predetermined order of intelligence which we call art. TV, on the other hand, was compromised by the presence of not only a myriad viewer but also by the scale of investment undertaken by the companies and broadcasting stations who had usurped the technology and assumed control of a medium which like electricity could never end, could never stop, could never at any moment be interrupted. A proper analogy would serve to highlight the essential structural difference between cinema and TV: the cinematic, because it is at its best a closed aesthetic form, resembles the hardness and concrete value of a sculpture (in time), whereas TV is more or less an elemental nonexistence, a current unceasing and yet strangely necessary to our modern collective psychology, as water or electricity is to the erosion & cultivation of the earth.
Paradoxically, TV, despite its ongoing blustre of activity and atemporal time codes, is considered by Marshall McLuhan to be a 'cool' medium (meaning a medium that produces passivity for reason of its low rate of information), while cinema is 'hot' because it transmits highly compacted, intricate images through an advanced pictorial idiom (enriched especially by the already existent photographic language). By reason of its coolness, TV is more adept at controlling and maintaining a low information atmosphere in which viewers can comfortably navigate without having to 'read' the writing on the wall, so to speak; viewers can traverse the inward plane of the television as they would a plaza in a city, and interact at a minimal degree (requiring little to no contemplation) with strangers and celebrities alike. Cinema does not allow such liberty since the viewer is repeatedly enjoined to decipher the textual surface of the film in order to proceed cognitively toward a full disclosure of the filmic secret - rather than comfortably take a stroll through a region of low-wattage plains, the viewer finds himself in a small room placed at the centre of a labyrinth from which he has to find a way of escape. A true film demands the strictest attention, or else its conclusion may be left maddeningly imponderable, the viewer left unsatisfied with his archaeological work on the burial site of the image. TV is no involved and laborious burial site, but an insipid surface, a vast mundane valley, continuously shedding and blossoming only the most superficial, shortlived flora, easily digestible, producing simultaneously recognizable & forgettable features. On such a level topology, there is nothing mysterious, nothing which is mistaken at first sight: those who are seen on TV, being seen, achieve instantaneous sublimation, so that they appear as the extrovert bacchantes in the forest must have appeared in the intensest moments of individuation: mini deities. As such, the TV medium houses the widest array of domestic gods for worship. TV is an arena for instant celebrity: no measure of labor or critical thought can abolish the perfect fact of appearing factually on the television screen: the television image replaces the sensation of the real by announcing, with considerably meagre foresight and very little intentionality, the pure appearance of a thing or a person. We passively engage with the television image because it comes across with a direct sense of familiarity: we may as well pretend to be meeting a close family member when we see someone on TV: we laugh with the celebrity guest on a talk show as she cracks a joke with the host because there is nothing hidden behind the factuality of their presence.
Cinema is a revelation because it veils something on its surface: we do not engage with it (as we would with a stranger or a friend) as much as we experience it as a singular private moment in our consciousness; we seek in it the pattern to its structure, the essential meaning to its order & intimation.
Modern TV culture has since passed into a simulation of celebrity, rather than a retrieval of the genuine article: celebrity as a game in which ordinary citizens mingle with the pagan Lanes by wearing pagan masks. As McLuhan had pointed out in interviews on TV, "TV is not a pictorial medium at all, it is a medium of... tactile resonance." We touch TV as if it were a body (cf. Videodrome) because it has become as continuous and vital as a real living person. We can turn on the TV even more effortlessly than we can visit a relative or a friend, and with greater accessibility, since there is an infinitely reduced chance of tiring the interlocutor out. TV keeps us company as long as we desire, and its conversation is indefatigable. TV has the same levity of thought and communication that a friend from work would have: nothing too serious, nothing too demanding is expected of us. TV induces the comfort of someone intently listening to you: equally it extracts the same comfort from someone who wishes to speak as long as possible.
Scorcese's The King of Comedy is not a film about TV as it is a treatment of a psychology; then again, TV is an exposed and self-effacing psychology. De Niro's characterization of the ridiculously audacious Rupert Pupkin plays up to the secret of the conclusion, in which Pupkin's psychological makeup is 'explained' in a comedy standup routine not unlike a confession of a man's entire history of dementia as a practical joke. Scorcese masterfully reserves the final standup routine as a dual device for motivation: Pupkin's long withheld standup routine divulges the private inner fact of his person using techniques of filmic precision, but its actual core is constituted with the inherent frivolity of the TV medium. We witness Pupkin excoriate his private being in front of a mass audience, with a terrific smile on his face. The film invites us either to doubt or believe the authenticity of Pupkin's lunacy: is he really mad, or is he truly genuine? He is of course both: like TV, he is both a fact and a mask of psychology. TV appears frivolous, yet it produces no other sensation except a conviction of something as real as the 'real': we accept its banquet as complacently as we would accept food offered to us at a table. Television does not factor into mystery but it does play into consumption.
Pupkin is not a martyr of the TV medium (as we will see later on in Network) because he in fact uses it to his advantage: he inverts the procession of TV by channeling its attention to him: he is the viewer triumphant, who at last creates himself anew as a concrete entity (a real living celebrity) within the TV medium. In the supreme effort & fidelity of his worship (& also in the fevered idolatry of its celebrities, i.e. Jerry Lewis' talk show host character) he succeeds in sublimating the TV medium & its particular reality, by compeling TV to sublimate him. Fixating his maniac energy on the figurehead of Jerry Lewis' character (which in this case, following the analogy, would stand for Pupkin's personal household god) Pupkin becomes a genius loci himself - he changes, as the bacchante changes, into the Pan of the TV realm, the impermanent joker.
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