by Forest Lewis
I grew up in the far north woods of Minnesota and television access was limited. We had no cable, nor any satellite dish. Instead there was an eighteen-foot tall aerial antenna composed of a twelve-foot boom with some few dozen radiating aluminum tines. It stood atop our roof ridge and could be turned via a motor controlled by a knob from inside. TV reception was spotty but with some tuning of the antenna’s direction we could catch the signal beamed from Duluth. Ducktails and Tailspin were the manic highlights of my childhood afternoons.
As the years went on the antenna worked less and less well. Soon the antennae motor broke and in order to locate a clear signal you had to climb on the roof and adjust the direction by hand. Signals could be had from Duluth, Minnesota or from Thunder Bay, Ontario but none of them were ever consistent as there was always interference of some kind, solar flares or blizzards or just bad luck. I would run outside in my socks and up the ladder to the roof to turn the pole that held aloft the massive aluminum tines pointing through the winter dark woods to catch the transmissions from civilization while my sister would call from below to let me know when the picture was clear. If Duluth didn’t work then we’d point the antenna at Canada. This was less than ideal for Canadian TV was weird and some of it in French.
But even Thunder Bay, though closer than Duluth, proved spotty, and the French melodramas would fade in and out. So TV, as I became familiar with it, was always fragmented, inconstant and strange. I remember my sister calling my dad and I to the television once. It was Madonna’s new video “Like a Prayer”. “Look at this!” Josie exclaimed “She’s using religion to sing about sex!” I was eight and didn’t get it but watched bewitched while Madonna brought to life a wooden statue of a saint, then came down with stigmata, and sang with a black choir, all of it subdued under grainy TV static. It was like a getting a profound message from a different galaxy.
The best memory I have from those days was learning to play chess with my dad while he watched fuzzy live coverage of the first Iraq war; Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather giving play by play of the invasion while I figured out how a knight moved and what to do with pawns. The live footage from a missile’s perspective as it flew into a munitions factory was like nothing we had ever seen. I was not at the time aware of the power of those images but to my mind now they tower over anything the movies can do: live immediate coverage of imperial history.
But the functionality of the antenna would soon deteriorate. I was desperately trying to get reception one evening and, not having my sister’s help, had to run from basement to the roof tweaking the antenna little by little, running back down after each adjustment to see if the picture had improved. Because of an imminent storm approaching from the west there was little hope. I don’t remember what I meant to watch but what I recall was watching, or trying to watch, in a state of panicked melancholy the static-garbled trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze. Friends of mine in Minneapolis had already seen this movie in the theater but these barely visible images of the preview without any sound, were as close as I would get until it was available to rent. This was unbearable, and I became familiar with a despair that I had not known before. This was mostly the loneliness of an 11 year old growing up in the woods, but it was also a new kind of anxiety: estrangement from the culture.
This melancholy estrangement reached a crescendo with the last gasp of the antenna in 1998 when I attempted, desperately, to watch the final episode of Seinfeld. Again the sound barely worked and the picture would fade in and out but if I leaned in close I could just make out figures in the storm and sometimes I could even hear dialogue. I followed that they had been arrested and were now in court and then the laugh track would sound through the garbled static, the audience laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear or see and it seemed as if they were laughing at me. Slowly the dumb futility of my situation became apparent to me and I gave up any and all attempts to watch TV at home. Shortly thereafter we took the antenna down.
The result of this upbringing is that I am now TV crazy.
Any TV anywhere will command my attention. When I am in a hotel room I watch TV in a trance for hours late into the night. I cannot turn away. Nor can I watch anything for long but surf from channel to channel in a constant search. Even the commercials are exciting and I will watch bewitched, ads for cars, credit cards, soap. The stream of content is beautiful and baffling. Composed of random associations it is the true surrealist mode: Law and Order, Antique Roadshow, Seinfeld, Family Guy, John Wayne, As Seen On TV, Murder She Wrote, supermodels, A Rebel Without a Cause, reality cooking show, tennis, Gilligan’s Island, Lethal Weapon 3, Jimmy Fallon, footage of Chicago cops murdering black teens, shampoo, football, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Walker Texas Ranger, an alligator killing a gazelle, Martha Stewart, Hitler, Beyonce. This manic parade of culture is as entertaining as it is anxiety inducing: I could watch anything at all but that there always might be something better on the next channel. I’d watch indefinitely if I didn’t fall asleep. Cable TV is very nearly the Infinite Jest murder tape from David Foster Wallace’s Novel of the same name. To watch is to die.
This is even more the case with Netflix streaming. The ability to watch anything at any moment does not necessarily mean that I will watch anything good. Too many nights I’ve watched the first fifteen minutes of a dozen movies and not remembered any of them.
Because the content is limitless I will necessarily doubt whatever decision I end up making. This amounts to a state of constant distraction; the dissolution of attention. I will trick myself into being bored as an excuse to watch Netflix; it’s boredom self-induced.
The solution to this is simple and effective: don’t have a subscription to Netflix streaming. When I do not have streaming content available then I do not get bored. It’s like a magic trick.
So I have access to neither cable TV nor streaming content, mainly for my own sanity. A curious problem, however, has arisen from this self-imposed exile from TV land: how am I going to watch Master of None? Or Jessica Jones? Or the next display of imperial power? I haven’t quite figured this out yet…
Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs
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