Television - A Sort of Reverie

I usually like nature programs, but the one on our local PBS station the other day had its anthropomorphism on too high.  “The busy beaver hard at work”—that sort of thing.  The beaver probably doesn’t even think about one day or the next, let alone worry about some man-made idea like “work.”  On another channel I found the first Terminator movie.  It’s arguably one of the earliest blockbusters to deal with time-travel, all that going back in time from the future to the present—in this case, the yet-to-be born son of Sarah Connor sending back the man that would become his father.  

Then I moved over to check out bits and pieces of a 60 Minutes special on its own history, a show doing a show on itself, minus the irony.  One segment involved a modern day ghost town—totally empty except for the reporter and the cameraman wandering around, obviously.  All you could hear was music blaring from loudspeakers mounted throughout the city, so the few workers there don’t go bonkers from such isolation.  Where they were, exactly, remains a mystery, as I turned over to Superman.  By this time it’s 1130pm on Sunday night—PBS usually has the World at War on, unless they’re doing a pledge drive—but there’s Vietnam footage instead.  Interesting, though it took some getting used to—my preference is black and white images from World War II.  I watched that through and got a bit sad there wasn’t any more, the announcer speaking as if history compels attention only as destruction and slaughter and, sadly, the war ended—more or less.  

 
Almost desperate for more of that, I flipped the channel to Aliens.  I’d been thinking about it, earlier, as I watched Terminator, how Sarah Connor’s personality changed in Terminator 2.  She wore a dress in the first film but in the second she’s a die-hard-core-warrior-mother-bitch.  This is certainly due to Sigourney Weaver’s  Ripley in Aliens.  You’d be hard pressed to find a warrior-mother like Ripley before 1986.  After Ripley and Connor they’re all clones—cheap television knockoffs.  It was already pretty late but I had to watch the whole film, commercials and all, for the sixth—seventh—time.  

 
Fortunately, toggling between Aliens and a made-for-television movie on another channel, about a guy who kills his wife and almost gets away with it, spared me most consumer-oriented recommendations.  It was one of those “real” story shows with the dramatized enactments they do, as if the real were only a pretext for the movie.  It even had a happy ending, what with the killer in jail.  He’s working on a law degree and has written a mystery novel.  

 
Meanwhile, Sigourney—Ripley—is taking it to those aliens, blasting the eggs, rescuing Newt, knocking the big mother alien into space and going to bed like Sleeping Beauty—but not before another commercial!  

 
When I finally went to bed my mind felt like a screen, images flashing at hyper-speed, switching back and forth, channel to channel without cease.  Suddenly a Volkswagen stopped outside my window and the movement went black.  Someone got out of the car and walked toward the house.  I listened more carefully and—thunk!  Oh, geez, it’s only my newspaper.  Usually I go out and get it if I’m awake.  I was but I didn’t.  I just left it there on the porch because it’s Monday now.  Mondays are notoriously bad news days.  The channels started flipping again, and I followed where ever they went without complaint.

       
Later in the morning, when I walked all the way down the stairs in my bath robe to get the New York Times, which is delivered seven days a week and probably wakes up everyone in my neighborhood, I wasn’t surprised.  It was a Monday, after all, and the paper was stoked with banal terror, like the “No, sorry” you might give the homeless guy asking for change.  In the evening I turned the television back on.  Arnold Schwarzenegger was fighting the predator from outer space.  I wonder why he hasn’t worked with Sigourney yet.