EDtv
With Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Sally Kirkland, Martin Landau, Ellen DeGeneres, Rob Reiner, Dennis Hopper, and Elizabeth Hurley.
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This snobbish double standard has become such an industry staple that we’re encouraged not to notice it, but to my mind it’s central to the various alibis for why studios and distributors offer us so few choices. We’re told, for instance, that we don’t see more subtitled movies because American audiences hate subtitles and that filmmakers can no longer shoot in black and white because American audiences hate black and white–which doesn’t explain why Dances With Wolves and Schindler’s List, both with subtitles and the latter in black and white, didn’t scare off anyone, nor does it account for the frequent use of black and white in music videos. In other words, audiences are always to blame, except when it’s not convenient to blame them. Rarely entertained is the possibility that the decision makers are narrow-minded simpletons who want to cover their own asses–who are interested only in short-term investments and armed mainly with that pseudoscience known as marketing research.
EDtv, which might be regarded in some ways as a populist reformulation of The Truman Show, offers us another 24-hours-a-day TV show devoted to one person’s life. But here the show unfolds in real locations rather than on a set, the person–a good-natured yahoo named Ed (Matthew McConaughey) who works in a video store–knows his life is being broadcast, and all this is happening in the present rather than in some hypothetical future. In “The Truman Show,” commercials are shoehorned into scripted dialogue delivered by actors to the unsuspecting Truman; in “EDtv,” they’re printed in a rectangular box that runs across the bottom of the TV image. Once again, the intrusiveness and vulgarity of the show are treated by the movie as excessive, though this time the mood is much more farcical and the target of the abuse isn’t the dim-wittedness of the audience but the exploitiveness and hypocrisy of the show’s producer (chiefly Rob Reiner; Ellen DeGeneres, who dreams up the show, is treated somewhat more sympathetically). But since the movie also suggests that these producers are right about what the public wants, condemning them for it is made to seem beside the point; it’s only their power to manipulate Ed and the audience that’s at issue.
In other words, it’s a no-win situation, because the set of assumptions ruling telejournalism has us all trapped. We’re a captive audience in a sense, even if we turn off our TV sets. When I attended the funeral of Gene Siskel in Highland Park a few weeks ago, a crowd of camera people was stationed outside the synagogue shooting some of the visitors as they emerged. I had to suppress a strong urge to give them the finger. I thought what they were doing was in bad taste, but had I given them the finger and wound up on the evening news, my taste and not theirs would have been thrown into question. Back in the 60s and early 70s such a rude gesture might have registered more meaningfully, but that was because in those days television was more correctly viewed as only one version of what was going on and was counteracted by a communal grapevine. (EDtv also gives us two versions of what’s going on–the TV show itself and various “offscreen” events. But it also takes pains not to make these two versions seem unduly dialectical or contradictory, at least until the producer’s manipulative power has to be overcome in order to make way for a happy ending.)
