We were now only a few feet from each other, I was just about to break into a broad, radiant smile, when suddenly I recognized him. It was Anthony Quinn. Naturally, I had never met him in my life, nor he me. In a thousandth of a second I was able to check myself, and I walked past him, my eyes staring into space.
Afterwards, reflecting on this incident, I realized how totally normal it was. Once before, in a restaurant, I had glimpsed Charlton Heston and had felt an impulse to say hello. These faces inhabit our memory; watching the screen, we spend so many hours with them that they are as familiar to us as our relatives’, even more so. You can be a student of mass communication, debate the effects of reality, or the confusion between the real and the imagined, and expound the way some people fall permanently into this confusion; but still you are not immune to the syndrome. And there is worse.
I have received confidences from people who, appearing fairly frequently on TV, have been subjected to the mass media over a certain period of time. I’m not talking about Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey, but public figures, experts who have participated in panel discussions often enough to become recognizable. All of them complain of the same disagreeable experience. Now, as a rule, when we see someone we don’t know personally, we don’t stare into his or her face at length, we don’t point out the person to the friend at our side, we don’t speak of this person in a loud voice when he or she can overhear. Such behavior would be rude, even—if carried too far—aggressive. But the same people who would never point to a customer at a counter and remark to a friend that the man is wearing a smart tie behave quite differently with famous faces.
My guinea pigs insist that, at a newsstand, in the tobacconist’s, as they are boarding a train or entering a restaurant toilet, they encounter others who, among themselves, say aloud, «Look, there’s X.» «Are you sure?» «Of course I’m sure. It’s X, I tell you.» And they continue their conversation amiably, while X hears them, and they don’t care if he hears them: it’s as if he didn’t exist.
Such people are confused by the fact that a protagonist of the mass media’s imaginary world should abruptly enter real life, but at the same time they behave in the presence of the real person as if he still belonged to the world of images, as if he were on a screen, or in a weekly picture magazine. As if they were speaking in his absence.
I might as well have grabbed Anthony Quinn by the lapel, dragged him to a phone booth, and called a friend to say, «Talk about coincidence! I’ve run into Anthony Quinn. And you know something? He seems real!» (After which I would throw Quinn aside and go on about my business.)
The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until, as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and that everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes.
1989
How to Be a TV Host
Some time ago, I enjoyed a fascinating experience in the Svalbard Islands, when the local Academy of Sciences invited me to spend several years there studying the Bonga nation, a society that flourishes in an area between Terra Incognita and the Isles of the Blest.
The Bongas’ activities are more or less the same as our own, but they have an unusual insistence on the explicit, the declarative. They ignore the art of the implicit, the taken-for-granted.
For example, if we now begin to talk, obviously we use words; but we feel no need to say so. A Bonga, on the contrary, in speaking to another Bonga, begins by saying: «Pay attention. I am now speaking and I will use some words.» We build houses and then (with the exception of the Japanese) we indicate to possible visitors the street, the number, the name of the occupant. The Bongas write «house» on every house, and «door» beside the door. If you ring a Bonga gentleman’s bell, he will open the door, saying, «Now I am opening the door,» and then introduce himself. If he invites you to dinner, he will show you to a chair with the words: «This is the table, and these are the chairs!» Then, in a triumphant tone, he announces, «And now, the maid! Here is Rosina. She will ask you what you want and will serve you your favorite dish!» The procedure is the same in restaurants.
It is strange to observe the Bongas when they go to the theater. As the house lights go down, an actor appears and says, «Here is the curtain!» Then the curtain parts and other actors enter, to perform, say, Hamlet or Le Malade imaginaire. But each actor is introduced to the audience, first with his real first and last names, then with the name of the character he is to play. When an actor has finished speaking, he announces: «Now, a moment of silence!» Some seconds go by, and then the next actor starts speaking. Needless to say, at the end of the first act, one of the players comes to the footlights to inform everyone that «there will now be an intermission.»
What particularly impressed me was the fact that their musical shows consist, as ours do, of spoken skits, songs, duets, and dances. But in our country I was accustomed to the idea that two comedians first do their skit, then one begins to sing a song, then both exit as some pretty girls trip on stage and begin a dance, to give the spectator a bit of relief. Finally, the dance ends, and the actors return. In the Bonga theater, however, first the actors announce that a comic skit will now be seen, then they say they will now sing a duet, indicating that it will be humorous, and finally the last actor on stage announces, «Now the dance!» The thing that most amazed me was not that, during the intermission, some advertising slogans appeared on the curtain—they do this in our theaters—but that, after announcing the intermission, the actor duly added, «And now, commercials!»
For a long time I wondered what drove the Bongas to this obsessive clarification. Perhaps, I said to myself, they are somewhat slow-witted and if a person doesn’t say «I’m going now» they don’t realize that the person is saying goodbye. And to some extent this must have been the case. But there was another reason. The Bongas are performance-worshipers, and therefore they have to transform everything—even the implicit—into performance.
During my stay among the Bongas I also had the opportunity of reconstructing the history of applause. In ancient times, the Bongas applauded for two reasons: either because they were happy with a good performance, or because they wanted to honor some person of great merit. The duration of the applause indicated who was most appreciated and most loved. Again, in the past, wily impresarios, to convince audiences of a production’s worth, stationed in the house some ruffians paid to applaud even when there was no motive. When television shows were first broadcast in Bonga, the producers lured relatives of the organizers into the studio and, thanks to a flashing light (invisible to TV viewers at home), alerted them when they were to applaud.
In no time the viewers discovered the trick, but, while in our country such applause would have immediately been discredited, it was not so for the Bongas. The home audience began to want to join in the applause too, and hordes of Bonga citizens turned up of their own free will in the country’s TV studios, ready to pay for the privilege of clapping. Some of these enthusiasts enrolled in special applause classes. And since at this point everything was in the open, it was the host himself who said, in a loud voice at the appropriate moments, «And now let’s hear a good round of applause.» But soon the studio audience began applauding without any urging from the host. He had simply to question someone in the crowd, asking him, for example, what he did for a living, and when he replied, «I’m in charge of the gas chamber at the city dog pound,» his words were greeted by a resounding ovation. (This used to happen occasionally in the West, as when Bob Hope appeared and, before he could open his mouth to say hello, frenzied applause was already heard in the house. Or a host would say, «Here we are again, folks, like every Thursday,» and the public would not only applaud, but split its sides.)
Applause became so indispensable that even during the commercials, when the salesman would say, «Buy PIP slimming tablets,» oceanic applause would be heard. The viewers knew very well that there
