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some years the American cinema produces pictures that are heavy denunciations
of the evils of the television. I cannot mention all of them, but I think
it's right to pause upon two of them at least. The first picture is dated
1994, and the title is “Quiz Show” in the Italian edition too, directed
by the actor- director Robert Redford, featured by John Turturro. It tells
about a real story, happened in 1958, when the audience of a quiz show
starts to decline and the programme sponsor imposes to get out of the scene
a Jewish proletarian who was the star to give his place to a beautiful
well-educated young, a Pulitzer award's son.
The other one is the picture of last year, “ The Second American Civil War” directed by Joe Dante. Here we go into a future quite next. On the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War (1861-'65), and then nearby 2015, since a paradoxical historical recurrence, eleven States of the Union choose once more the armed secession way. I want to introduce the real topic of this month “Lunario”: topic that is related to a picture too, presented hors concours at the Venice Cinema Exhibition last September, praised unanimously by the critic (event, this one, absolutely out of common, even toward already appreciated masterpieces of the past). The picture is “The Truman Show” (the same title in the Italian edition) of Peter Weir, featured by Jim Carrey and Ed Harris as the main protagonists. It should be useful to briefly resume the script. Turammo Burbank is a child abandoned at birth and employed as a cavy in the major television experiment of all time. For eleven thousands days, corresponding to the first thirty years of his life, Truman's existence has gone on, on five thousand telecameras. What he believes reality is only an uninterrupted “soap opera” where he is the unaware star”. His parents, her wife, his friends, his schoolmates, his colleagues are actors engaged to play such rôles. The success of this programme (unwitting for the protagonist) is enormous and get billionaire profits to the sponsors. |
A
really brilliant script. Nobody remembered the experiment carried out 1971
in America and, this case, not committed, as for “The Truman Show”, to
the lively imagination of a scripter and a director.
At Santa Barbara in California, the Loud family accepted to be the cavy for a “test” nobody has thought at before. Father, mother and the five sons, within twenty and twelve years old, lived for seven months under the lens of the telecameras, displayed in the several rooms of the house, at the swimming pool edges and in the garden. The result of the experiment was, to say the least, disastrous. The Loud sensed to the utmost the consequences of that magic reality rounded them, those electronic eyes that were prying them and take them off from the humdrum anonymity where they have always lived till then. And the consequence was that they found themselves impersonating unconsciously other stories, living in an unprejudiced way as they were cinema and television stars. At this point, it seems to me right to remember what wrote the Poet Eugenio Montale after visiting the B.B.C. studios in England. It was 1948 and in Italy television was a mere future plan. In the same England they were still at an experimental phase. Without any help of sociological surveys and only with the lively intuitions of his wideness, Montale asserted that the television “will allow to pry without any limit the citizen's privacy” and it will become “ the major attack to one of the most great individual liberty: the freedom to not know or to not see”. I repeat it: it was 1948. All is already fulfilled: in the dramatic case of the Loud family, which belongs to the reality, in the brilliant invention of the “The Truman Show” that belongs instead to the high parody of reality. But the two cases we are interested to in this “Lunario” are only a very little contribution to a universal phenomenon that shows itself every day, under any sky and at any latitude. It's the world we have searched or the one they made us meet, making us submitting to the three traffic lights, to a zebra crossing on the asphalt, to a telephone that now is pocket-sized, or to a little coloured screen that fills up our evenings with stories that are not ours but that, step by step, become ours.  |
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