The context of the episode(which is ironic) is a girl TV actress, Allison, starring in a very poor satire of the Exorcist revolving around some kind of zombie cat. The girl is, of course, a drama queen who knows bounds, and leaves the set to study her lines. She runs over an eerily similarly mutilated cat, named Rip, that belongs to a family who doesn't own a television because "they lie," and so they live in a very pre-television era setting and have no idea who Allison is. The cat then proceeds to haunt the girl actress and everyone thinks she's going crazy and she sorta is....then the episode ends, what the hell?
The episode after is conveniently the next part, I have to watch it...I am sucked into the flow of children's programming...
While watching, the commercial and societal structures implemented into the flow are so amazingly obvious due to its targeted audience, which makes perfect sense. Catching and retaining the focus of a child is so much more difficult than that of an adult and there is much done to compensate for this.
Within the show the sound advance, a concept which I could not quite grasp at first, was blatant. While I write this I can hear the crescendo and tremolo of synthetic strings which foreshadows a mutilated demon cat under the blanket Allison is reaching for. When the show pauses and resumes there are always goofy shorts to transition back into the show, utilizing familiar cartoon ghosts and xylophone sound bites that serve well to alert me the show is doing something and I should look.
The commercials are colorful and commanding, fluffy creatures saying "ask your parents to buy me today," some involving relevant social contexts, Holloween, Election season, parodies of popular songs, many images of tv within a tv, and action figures, all of which tell me that I am in control of the image, that I can even own the image (and physically touch them in the case of an Iron Man figure which tells me "his power can be mine"). This is almost a direct correlation with Altman's quote:
"we turn towards the screen to complete our sense of the star's presence"(575) or the image, hero athlete, and in this case is Iron Man.
In response to the 9/11 footage which I found to be shockingly brutal even still, I found it annoying that despite the severity and brute trauma of the event, the competition between channels was still quite evident. Each station seemed frantic to interview the most important people they could find, quantity of interviews over quality, the captions were all the same but the banner graphics and transitions were still colorful and distracting. At one point the Rhode Island news station ran a banner which at the end asked viewers to "stay tuned for complete coverage!", overtly competitive. The voices of the internal audience, the anchors, still sounded monotonous and directed which really pointed a cold, mechanical feel in the people whom are supposed to be warm and human like. However, I did notice that the coverage was completely soundless/musicless at times which really added reality impact to the footage which says something about how the absence of sound is just as powerful as sound weapons themselves.
Question: Has the modern television era with its overabundance of sound turned silence into a powerful symbol of reality and sound into an emblem of professional superficiality?
I guess its more of an opinion than a question.
So now my blog is tremendous but the end of the story is ridiculous. Get this...Allison begins turning into a cat because Rip is apparently stealing her life force and they go back to Rip's owners to find a solution to the problem. Turns out that Rip is actually the product of a failed genetic experiment and this mother who has become half of a cat person, its nasty. Allison is expected to suffer the same fate in which the magnificent line is shared "its not so bad...you get used to it." blah blah blah, Rip is killed, the effects are reversed and the event is turned into a TV show. The show ends with Allison being a good person and her best friend randomly eats a mouse revealing an incredibly annoying second cliff hanger ending.
Double aperture...I change the channel only to find futurama...the flow never stops
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