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A New Commentary Each Wednesday August 6, 2014
EXPLAINING BINGE VIEWING
It all began one Saturday matinee, at the Bijou, The Fox, the Orpheum, or the motion picture theatre near you: the serial.
In the final few seconds of episode one, the maiden was captured outside the candy store and bound to the railroad tracks by a couple of creeps who betrayed their masculinity by wearing mascara - as did the handsome hero, portrayed by the likes of William S. Hart or Tom Mix.
One couldn't hear the approaching locomotive because in the beginning, all of the seven-minute adventures were silent "flickers," and each episode left the viewers guessing as to how Pauline, Tarzan, or Flash Gordon could possibly evade impending doom after the screen faded to black at the end of each episode. When sound came to motion pictures, it did little to change the arc of the standard plot line of each serial chapter.
Selfless individuals set out upon a quest, seeking to do good, and are beset by demons, gangsters, cannibals, every manner of ravenous wild beast and nature's perfect storms - but mostly by bad human beings, particularly the criminally insane. This was before there were action characters who could leap tall buildings with a single bound.
One common theme had to do with cannibals who worship a volcano, disguised as a gigantic stone head — and wouldn't you know it, once our shipwrecked protagonist came ashore, it blew its top, interrupting a perfectly good sacrifice of nubile native girls, dressed in artificial palm fronds.
It must have been about that time that I developed a strong aversion to molten lava, consequently, I have never gone to Hawaii and nothing could persuade me to even fly over Iceland.
My buddies and I soon discerned that the writers had invented various kinds of cliff-hanger situations with little thought as how the principal character was to escape death in the first few seconds of the next chapter—scheduled for the following Saturday. We reviewers poised on the peanut row seats, smack against the screen, soon concluded that many contrivances were completely implausible.
Faithful Rin-tin-tin gnawed the rope in two and dragged the maiden off the tracks, after which he captured both culprits. Every dumb mutt we ever owned would have run away howling as if they had been scalded by the steam engine. Our dogs terrorized squirrels, but couldn't be persuaded to bark at the occasional tramp who called at our back door (Our "convenience" was situated less than 20 feet from the Illinois Central railroad). My mother insisted that some sort of secret code was inscribed on an outbuilding, gate or fence, telling the knights of the road that she was a soft touch.
Plot lines of the serials of my youth were very thin, because the reel for short subjects could not contain more than ten minutes of 35-millimeter film.
The extended serial came into being in the past decade with "The Sopranos"...or perhaps it was that series of a sort that had something to do with whatever it was that brought about distress, real or imagined, among desperate housewives.
The only difference is that we are now permitted to view exactly how the anti-hero dispatches other anti-heroes, whether by garroting, or impacting the heads of their competitors, closest associates and family members with various sorts of blunt instruments.
Has there ever been a more devious character than the lawyer portrayed by Glenn Close in "Damages," by Kevin Spacey's politician in "House of Cards," or Bryan Cranston's chemistry teacher in "Breaking Bad?"
An innovation in the new genre of darker than midnight serials, is character development. We now learn why Tony Soprano turned out to be a greedy sadist (the worst kind), due to having been deprived of something following puberty, such as a new Lincoln Continental; who had moments when he might have felt a slight amount of sympathy while attending the coming out party of his niece - after having off'd her father a few minutes earlier, in some particularly brutal fashion.
No matter how depraved you are, you can savor the fact that these people are far, far, far worse then we could ever imagine we could be, and maybe discover a reason or two to justify some personal character flaw that we've successfully denied for most of our lives.
The real innovation that DVDs brought, was the fact that we can order an entire season's series or several seasons on DVDs and watch two, three or more episodes in one sitting, perhaps an entire season, demanding the delivery of pizzas and KFC for sustenance.
This has been recognized by a branch of sociology and psychiatry as abnormal behavior. You can easily slip into "Binge Viewing," if you're not careful!
One evening you'll find that just one or two different series will not satisfy an insatiable appetite for mayhem, sexual voyeurism and other despicable behavior.
Perhaps you avoided watching "The Good (or Bad) Wife" while the seasons spun by, and now you are compelled to watch one entire season in one sitting.
Don't say that I didn't warn you.
-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller
Sample "Water Dream," an Amazon eBook novel in which al-Qaeda operatives smuggle an atomic bomb into the USA. http://www.al-qaedajihad.com
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