A friend recently pointed me to the on-line archives of The Mike Wallace Interview. The interviews are pretty fascinating for various reasons, the most immediately noticeable being the amount of smoking that goes on in them.* Part of the requirement of putting on the show, I guess, given that it was sponsored by Philip Morris – but still!
Yet the range of guests and the types of questions discussed – racial problems, religious intolerance, economic injustice, etc. – impresses, and confirms that today’s talk TV, while perhaps (and only perhaps) less tolerant of giving expression to rank stereotype and prejudice, pays a kind of price in terms of increased attention to surface and false unity. The exercise of distilling and discussing controversial ideas and arguments gravitated instead to ‘news,’ taking on the coloration of shock-value and attention-getting, rather than gaining footing in more conversational venues.
Well enough media theory. Of the interviews I’ve watched so far one of my favorites has been the one with Salvador Dali, a bit of which went as follows:
WALLACE: Dali, first of all let me ask you this, you’re a remarkable painter and you’ve dedicated your life to art, in view of this, why do you behave the way that you do? For instance, you have been known to drive in a car filled to the roof with cauliflowers. You lectured, as I mentioned, once with your head enclosed in a diving helmet and you almost suffocated. You issue bizarre statements about your love for rhinoceros horns and so on. You’re a dedicated artist, why do you or why must you do these things?
DALI: Because for this kind of eccentricities correspond with more important and the more tragical part of my life.
WALLACE: The more important and the more tragical part. I don’t understand.
DALI: The more philosophical.
WALLACE: Well, what is philosophical about driving in a car full of cauliflowers or lecturing inside a diving helmet?
DALI: Because discover and make one tremendous speech, a most scientific in the Sorbonne in Paris… of what my discovering of the logarithmic curve of cauliflower.
WALLACE: The what?
DALI: logarithmic curve of cauliflower.
WALLACE : Oh yes, the “logarithmic curve”… yes…
DALI: And if in time the logarithmic curve in the horns of rhinoceros — in this time discover, this is a symbol of chastity, one of the most powerful symbols of modern times.
Wallace flummoxed. I also tried to watch the interview with Rod Serling, only to find that his voice really does have the effect of inducing a trance. I couldn’t remember a thing of what he said:
Anyway, check them out, if you want a bit of a time capsule experience.
====
*I just started watching Mad Men, the cable show about executives in an 1960s advertising firm busy in the business of inventing modern media. Aside from its depiction of rampant racism and sexism, the thing that gives the show its OMG! factor is the fact that no character goes a minute on screen without lighting up.
Thank you, Andrew, for recovering the thoughts of one of television’s great writers. As one who has served television and motion picture writers for over thirty years, Serlings words ring as true today as they did when originally broadcast.
This is also why Web2.0, if many of us act responsibly and admirably, may open the range of creative expression which is so needed.
We try at Burning Shorts to find the Rod Serling and the Paddy Chayefsky [metioned by Wallace in the interview] of original online content.
I cannot recommend highly enough Chayefsky’s Oscar winning screenplay and the Sidney Lumet directed movie “Network” …
I have to admit that I was amazed by the currency and the incisiveness of Serling’s remarks – well worth watching. Good luck with your work at Burning Shorts.