I am a product of the sixties. Mine is a sixties sensibility, reflecting on the media of the millennium from a low to middlebrow point of view. It’s the viewpoint of an artist more than that of a critic, of someone who, like Pollock trying to recreate the body language that produced a Mondrian, needs to feel in his bones where the maker is coming from.

It is the filmmaker’s task to make emotionally moving films, the streamer’s task to provide emotionally moving streams of films, the viewer’s task to seek out films that linger in memory and enrich their life. It’s not enough to watch reality TV and sports, to listen to rap, country or pop, to follow celebrities on Twitter and Instagram, to watch Tik Toks, and to be up on the latest episodes of series like Game of Thrones (2011 - 2019), that spectacular triumph of mise-en-scène over narrative. If you want to get high and immerse yourself in the rich mise-en-scène of Game of Thrones, just do it. But absorb the mise-en-scène and the second unit-directed action. Don’t subject the narrative to a strip search for significance or meaning. For me, Game of Thrones ended with Daenerys Stormborn, The Unburnt, victorious. For one moment, thanks to CGI, she is not like a dragon. She is a dragon. I don’t really remember or care to remember what happened after that.

We have to paddle hard to reach the top of the oncoming swell, before the wave breaks, swamping our little craft.

We're all McLuhanistas now. We take it for granted that the contents of each new medium, the World Wide Web, for example, is other media. In the case of the World Wide Web, it is television, film, photography, music, radio, books and magazines of all kinds that make up most of its contents.

The Web started out where the media that preceded it ended up: as a mass distribution network. The content of the Web, a photograph or a film, for instance, may be transformed by being published in the context of the Web, where it collides, lickety-split, at random, with other data, but the photo or film is not altered on purpose to make it "Webic" in the way books and plays are altered to make them "filmic," by breaking them down and putting them together again as screenplays and films, Frank Nugent’s adaptation of Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers for John Ford’s Western film The Searchers (1956) is as fine an example as any, or for that matter the way film created for television is made "episodic."

There is no art form yet the object of which is the creation of exciting Web collisions, juxtapositions or chains of hyperlinks. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to imagine what the medium that may someday subsume the Web will look like much less what the "art" of that medium might be, unless the medium is an all-seeing artificial intelligence that imagines the ephemeral events of the Web and real life as, essentially, one and the same, and becomes, at the same time, solitary creator and only viewer, muttering to itself.

Generally, art is degraded as it makes its way through the media food chain. Novel to film to streamed television to YouTube snippet, inserted into an article about an article on the Web, is a downhill trip. But only the last stage of that journey, the Web, was designed from the get-go to abstract, distill, decontextualize and repackage without adding value, to transmit, or, when not simply transmitting, to transform, by reducing content to pap. When it is not just moving content from one point to another, the World Wide Web has managed, on purpose, to dumb down its content—print, film, television and the other media—to an extent previously unimagined. Even more than television, the Web is, with a few notable exceptions, a vast graveyard where ideas and creative energy go to die. And now it has an unlimited bandwidth to fill.

The history of television is instructive. Film has been kinder to books than television, the medium the Web resembles most, has been to films. In some ways, television has advanced the art of film. Certainly, the extended length of series like Rome, The Sopranos (1999 - 2007), Lonesome Dove (1989) and Angels in America (2003) has given audiences more time with the characters and mises-en-scène of those films than movie-going audiences ordinarily get. And mise-en-scène, a stage term applied to film by the French critic André Bazin that refers to everything about a film except its script, takes time to appreciate. It's mise-en-scène that makes it necessary to actually see a film before we can talk about it as film. But, at the same time that television gives audiences an extended look at the mises-en-scène of some films, it alters the film experience by degrading a film's mise-en-scène, making it smaller, flatter and more frontal, an effect that favors montage over extended scenes that are blocked and photographed in a way that develops the illusion of depth on the screen and recreates the real world. Sometimes the art of that is subtle, sometimes, as in Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way (1965), it is obvious and in and of itself a pleasure to watch and to study.

Television was not conceived as a distribution medium for films any more than film was conceived as a distribution medium for books. Films may end up, along with made for TV movies, feeding the practically insatiable maw of cable television and streamers, just as novels may end up as films, but television itself was envisioned, like radio before it, as a live medium. That aspect of television is in decline, too.

The fact that television news and opinion has degenerated until even raw video of breaking events is edited, explained and commented on in search of memorable and persuasive phrases designed to lead viewers to preconceived points of view, is not the result of television's intention, so much as it is the result of the corruption of television's original intention to reveal, inform and transport.

The Web, on the other hand, has adhered to its original intention. It remains as it began, a network of people, separated in space, each identified by a unique address on the web, coalescing into temporary communities around points of common interest where data is exchanged. Some of that data is still information. It actually adds to the representation of something. Most of it now is redundant, simply repeating something already known, and a lot of it is noise, data that adds to the representation of nothing. The World Wide Web creates the illusion of connection while it affirms our separation in space.

Apart from the content they pass back and forth, the World Wide Web and the sites on it, are not very interesting. Most sites lack the kind of structure that narrative gives to novels, plays, films and television. Even so-called reality television is structured by formulaic plots that include some element of suspense. Nor does the structure that embeds the mise-en-scène have to be narrative in the sense of a traditional plot with a familiar commercial structure. Films like Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Blow Job (1963) are structured by the nature of the event. The Netflix series The Keepers (2017) is structured by vivid verbal narration reminiscent of Persona.

The Web has not found a way to adapt content, to transform a subject, without copying it on the one hand, or destroying it on the other. Even when sites manage a sort of transient narrative, usually around some great and scandalous event, a favorite ploy of muckraking sites and tabloids, their mises-en-scène are, frankly, a mess and they quickly turn into echo chambers, some of the most boring sites on the Web. But, I might add, some of the most popular and profitable, too. 

Time Travel In The Sixties

Compared to the action-packed super-realism of time travel films like the Terminator series, 12 Monkeys and Planet of the Apes, the black-and-white video technology of The Star Wagon, a 1966 television play, written by Maxwell Anderson and directed by Karl Genus, is archaic. But Genus’ direction and the relaxed and intimate acting of a cast that includes Orson Bean, Joan Lorring, Eileen Brennan and Dustin Hoffman make The Star Wagon one of the most entertaining attempts to use the idea of time travel to dramatize the tension between free will and destiny I’ve seen.

The Star Wagon, produced for WNET and NET Playhouse at the time that National Educational Television was evolving into the Public Broadcasting System, is one of the television plays available from distributors like Broadway Theatre Archive who specialize in early television productions. It’s also available as a rental from Netflix.

Taped mainly on location, The Star Wagon follows Bean, a dreamy inventor, and his earthy sidekick, Hoffman, as they try to reverse their fortunes by turning back time. If the outcome of their journey through time seems sappy and predictable nowadays, that may say more about the cynicism of the 21st Century than it does about the naiveté of television audiences in the Sixties, who were comfortable with Hollywood endings, the triumph of good over evil and the idea that innocence, lost in time, can be restored. And some of Anderson’s themes — that there are no great men, that nothing matters more than freedom, and that the business of business is the fleecing of the unwary – seem, in this age of Ponzi schemes and bailouts, downright timeless.

Television is an intimate medium, suited for low-key performances, and Genus’ cast, led by Bean and Lorring in the role of Bean’s long-suffering wife, deliver the kind of casual intimacy seldom seen in film. Genus uses his performers and the low resolution images of early black-and-white video to create a unique mix of impressionism and naturalism. The high contrast images of Genus’ actors, overexposed to the extent that the actors’ bodies seem to glow, are painterly and impressionistic, but the performances Genus and his actors create are natural and realistic.



Genus’ cast has a remarkable ability to be with one another, to be with Maxwell Anderson’s script, and to demonstrate that good acting is, in fact, reacting. The result is a kind of naturalness that even directors like John Cassavetes, who were completely committed to naturalism and improvisation, never achieved. Cassavetes was able to use improvisation to structure his films by creating realistic situations, but the dialogue his actors improvised seldom matched Anderson’s ear for small talk, flip comments, and the kind of gentle razzing we see in The Star Wagon.

Anderson and Genus deliver poetry, as well. Standing on the star wagon, Hoffman looks like an angel with one good wing. There is a dreamlike, druggy quality to Bean and Hoffman’s laughter as they launch themselves back through time. Bean moves effortlessly from innocence, as he rehearses a hymn, The Holy City, with Lorring, to funny sexuality as Eileen Brennan digs in his front pocket for candy at a picnic; and Bean’s dark and violent rebirth leaves the impression of opera, of voices singing together to reveal the dark underside of Anderson’s comedy before Hoffman yanks Bean from the river to begin life over, half-drowned and miserable, lying in the mud with his head in Brennan’s wet lap.

Technically, these scenes of Bean’s death and rebirth by the river are as advanced as any experimental cinema of the Sixties. Bean’s passage begins with the sound of Hoffman pushing Brennan out to the way and jumping into the river, but we aren’t allowed to see Hoffman pull Bean out of the water until we enter the drowning Bean’s thoughts and contemplate nothing less than the meaning of life.

It is possible to think of life as a long series of paths not taken, doors opened or not opened, decisions made one way instead of another. It is a convention of most time travel films that the journey back through time will either change nothing, or it will change everything. The art of those films is to show why this should be so, to explain in a satisfying way why history had to happen exactly as it did happen. In The Star Wagon, Anderson breaks with that convention. He raises the possibility of changing history by going back in time, and then rejects that possibility as an act of will. Orson Bean’s Stephen returns to the present tense of his life as we found him, not because he has to, but because he wants to. But he is better for having made the journey, even if the world is not, and, watching the film, I felt the sweetness of life in a way I had not felt it since those summer evenings long ago, when I was a boy and I waited nervously at shortstop for our pitcher to deliver his first pitch.

At the end of the play, Stephen tells us his time machine is just a way of remembering the past. Karl Genus’ The Star Wagon is as good a way as any of remembering some of broadcast television’s best years. And that’s something, in my view, upon which it is worth spending some time.