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Vivre la cinéma français

May 26, 2019
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Finally! One of the great films of all times has become available. For years I have waited for a good copy of Marcel Pagnol’s La femme du boulanger (“The Baker’s Wife”) to be transferred to DVD. The only version I have is one I recorded from a Turner Classic Movies broadcast decades ago. The subtitles were horrible and the print none too good. I have treasured it for years and proudly introduced it to friends whenever I could. 

But now, Criterion will be offering a new, cleaned up, re-titled version. It is one of the greatest films ever. After watching it, Orson Welles claimed that its star, Raimu, was “the greatest actor in the world.” He called the move “perfect.” 

Raimu etches a perfect line between the comic and the tragic, playing a French village baker whose wife runs away with a younger man and who, heartbroken, refuses to bake another loaf until she returns. The villagers, despairing of ever again getting a good baguette, go all out to retrieve her. All the fine details of pre-war village life are drawn with subtle precision. As novelist Graham Greene said of the film, “the human actors are only part of the general setting — the well and the olive trees and the crude, crowded church and the Cercle Republicain (tavern) with the tin advertisements, and the hunter going out in the dawn with his dog and his gun while the baker sleeps in his (dough) trough beside the oven.”

It is a closely observed and beautifully seen world. 

(It is hardly the only great film too long unavailable: Abel Gance’s famous 6-hour silent film, Napoleon, has been restored, but is unavailable in the U.S. for ridiculous legal reasons — blame Francis Ford Coppola — but is available on a Region 2 disc from Amazon. All-region DVD players are common and inexpensive and worth the small investment.)

The popular conception of “foreign films” has changed over the years. Where once the term meant Bergman, Fellini and French films, it has now gone on to mean Pedro Almodovar, Johnnie To and Oscar-winning Mexican directors. A foreign language film is more likely to be in Cantonese than in Swedish. 

But I was born in the earlier era, and for me, the great movies are French. Yes, I have almost all of Bergman’s films on DVD, and most of Tarkovsky, but the great majority of the discs on my shelves are in French. I once catalogued them and counted well over 200 of them. 

Most people, when they think of French movies, think of the New Wave — that handful of directors in the late 1950s and into the 1960s who brought new techniques and new energy to the industry, along with an appreciation of Hollywood’s best work. 

But French cinema is much more. There were great movies before Truffaut ever came along. And great directors. Pagnol, Becker, Duvivier, Vigo, Clair, and above all, Jean Renoir. 

And there have been great directors since the wave hit the shore: Patrice Leconte, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Agnes Jaoui, Catherine Breillat, Jamel Debbouze.  

I am going to suggest a few of their movies, all (at least when I bought them) available on disc. Many are also available on streaming video. 

I have listed no more than a single film from any one director, to ensure a variety and a wide scope. I have tried to avoid the obvious choices, because you may already be familiar with them: Rules of the Game, Grand Illusion, Breathless, Jules and Jim, Wages of Fear. And, I have not included any Renoir films, mostly because they are self-recommending and any real movie lover should already be familiar with them. 

The earliest of these films is Pepe Le Moko, which was remade (and sentimentalized) in the Hollywood remake with Charles Boyer, Algiers. The French original is much better, in large part because Jean Gabin is so much greater an actor than Boyer. Julien Duvivier was a great standard of French directors in the 1930s. 

I am including also a peculiar film, The Story of a Cheat by Sacha Guitry. Guitry is one of the great French comics, who wrote many stage comedies, was as famous a performer in his day as, say, Richard Pryor was in his. This film is unusual in that it is presented almost entirely as voice-over narration. It is excellently clever. 

Mainstream French films of the ‘40s and ‘50s include many wonderful genre films, almost all better plotted and with more interesting characters than their Hollywood cousins. 

Touchez pas au Grisbi, by Jacques Becker, is one of Gabin’s greatest roles. And that is saying a lot. (The title translates, roughly, as “Hands off the loot.”) 

Les Diaboliques, by Henri-George Clouzot is the greatest suspense movie of all time, outdoing Hitchcock by a large margin. It was remade in Hollywood  in 1996 with Sharon Stone. Oy. 

A third crime drama from the 1950s is Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, which has a great soundtrack by Miles Davis. It marks a shift in French film. Malle’s early work is not generally considered part of the New Wave, yet, there were several directors working at the time who prefigured the New Wave, giving us very personal films and often using locations rather than sets, and a more naturalistic style of acting.

Among those directors is Jean-Pierre Melville. Most of his work comprises heist dramas or crime stories. But I didn’t want to overweight this series of films with gritty thugs and grittier cops. And Army of Shadows tells an almost autobiographical story of the French underground in World War II. It has plenty of suspense and drama. 

Now we come to the New Wave itself. There were a handful of directors working in this new style, more free and improvisational, using location shooting rather than studio sets, and breaking up the normal beginning-middle-end narrative structure. 

The two gods of Nouvelle Vague couldn’t be more different. Jean-Luc Godard is anarchic, innovative and indefatigably political. He wants to destroy the status quo. He probably never made a completely successful film, but moments in every one of the astound with brilliance. He does things no one ever thought to do: drop out the soundtrack, edit arbitrarily, shoot dialog from behind the heads of the actors, shift from color to black and white and back, point the camera away from the actors. Godard freed up filmmaking for the next 40 years. Band of Outsiders is one of his most famous films, and includes the race through the Louvre that is quoted in several other films.

Francois Truffaut, on the other hand, is a dyed-in-the-wool humanist, and he finds the humanity in pretty much everything he films. As warm as Godard is cold, he is everyone’s favorite New Waver. So many of his films are so well known, I’ve tried to find one for you that you probably haven’t seen, The Woman Next Door. It’s a late film and features Gerard Depardieu before he became a joke. He was then a great actor. 

Claude Chabrol was the most prolific New Wave director, with nearly 60 films under his belt. He was also the most conventional of the New Wave directors, turning his talents primarily to suspense and crime films, but seen in the fresh style of the New Wave. Le Boucher is probably his most characteristic film. 

Eric Rohmer may be an acquired taste. They are talky, and were made in series, one group called “Moral Tales,” and another called “Comedies and Proverbs.” Summer (in French Le Rayon Vert: “The Green Ray”)  is one of the Comedies and Proverbs. 

Jacques Rivette is another New Waver, and he is notable for the length of his films, and his patience. It can try the patience of his viewers, but not if you pay attention. My favorite film, La Belle Noiseuse, is four hours long and spends a lot of that time showing an artist drawing with a crow-quill pen on paper. I’m not letting that out of my house. 

But I’m going to suggest instead, Va Savoir, probably his most accessible film, that has a great part for Jeanne Balibar. Claude Berri has a supporting part as a librarian.

I only mention that because Berri is really a director, and The Two of Us is a great film, and probably the only one in which an anti-Semite comes across as lovable. Michel Simon is a force of nature and I recommend seeing any film he is in. 

Finally, two recent films. French cinema has long ago taken what it could from the New Wave and moved on to more contemporary themes. 

One of my favorite living directors is Patrice Leconte. The Hairdresser’s Husband is quirky and heartbreaking and stars Jean Rochefort. He’s great in everything he does. 

There are several women directors who should be included. My favorite is Agnes Varda, but I’m including here instead Fat Girl by Catherine Breillat. It can be rather brutal, but it is definitely worth seeing. 

Lastly, I’m including a musical. Yes, a musical. It is Francois Ozon’s 8 Women, and it features an “all-star” cast of great French actresses: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier and Firmine Richard. This is like lining up Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Veronica Lake, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe, all in the same movie. It’s a doozy. 

I hope you enjoy all these. There’s plenty more to see, if these whet your appetite for Gallic filmmaking and if any of these directors particularly hits your buzzer, there are another five or ten films by the same maker. 

That’s your first 15 recommendations. But here are 25 or so more (I cheated. Some are trilogies, one is a pair). These are all films I love dearly:

Quai des orfevres by Henri-Georges Clouzot

La bete humaine by Jean Renoir

La ronde by Max Ophuls

Une femme est une femme by Jean-Luc Godard

Bob, le flambeur by Jean-Pierre Melville

Betty by Claude Chabrol

Le quai des brumes by Jacques Prevert

Monsieur Hire by Patrice Leconte

Le Trou by Jacques Becker

Mouchette by Robert Bresson

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 by Jean-Francois Richet

Under the Roofs of Paris by Rene Clair

Man on the Train by Patrice Leconte

The Taste of Others by Agnes Jaoui

Vagabond by Agnes Varda

The Dreamers by Bernardo Bertolucci

The Marseille Trilogy by Marcel Pagnol, three films: Marius; Fanny; and Cesar

The Earrings of Madame de … by Max Ophuls

Trilogy by Lucas Belvaux, including: Cavale on the Run; An Amazing Couple; and After Life

La Vie en Rose by Olivier Dahan

The Widow of St. Pierre by Patrice Laconte

Inspecteur Lavadin and Cop au Vin by Claude Chabrol

Le Samourai by Jean-Pierre Melville

Shoot the Piano Player by Truffaut

Jet Lag – (Decalage Horaire) by Danièle Thompson

Sex is Comedy by Catherine Breillat

Ridicule by Patrice Laconte

I am deeply embarrassed by the films I have left out. If you have a favorite, please add them to the comments.

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Color in black and white

May 23, 2019
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The world is not black and white, but until fairly recently, photography was. For most of its history, the art was an art of silver on paper, spread from inky blacks through velvety grays into pristine whites. 

There had been attempts to add color, either by painting on top of the monochrome image, or by various experimental techniques to capture the color directly. But even after the commercially successful introduction of Kodachrome in 1935, photography as a museum-approved art continued to be primarily in black and white. 

(In cinema, Technicolor predated Kodachrome by about a decade, but that process was essentially three different black and white negatives overlapped through color filters to create the effect. It was an expensive and difficult process and relatively few films, percentage-wise, were made with the process until after the commercial success of Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939.)

I have been a photographer for at least 50 years. I have had shows and my work has been published. But for most of that time, I worked in monochrome. I “saw” in black and white. My photographic heroes worked in B&W, the techniques I mastered were silver techniques. I became an excellent printer. But I seldom used color film. It seemed an unnecessary noise to bring to the purity of the medium. 

I was hardly alone in this. When I was younger, even museums shied away from color photography. It was seen as not “permanent.” It’s images faded over time (I’m sure you all have old family snapshots turned rather magenta with age). The real artist-photographers used silver or platinum and made glorious images. 

Back then, art in general was seen with more precious eyes. We thought of “archival processing,” and even paintings were carefully preserved and curators looked down on some artists — such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko — who used non-archival pigments or unprepared canvases and whose works, therefore, had begun to deteriorate. 

In current times, few artists or galleries worry much about such things. Art can be made on newsprint, or can even purposely self-destruct. Concern for the permanence of an artwork is seen as elitist. After all, no matter how careful you are, the art is going to be gone eventually, even if it lasts till the sun explodes. 

And besides, color is now no more or less permanent than black and white: Now they are both nothing but ones and zeros. Silver is dead; long live digital. 

Yet there is still a difference between color photography and black and white. It is a difference not simply of technique, but of thought. Thinking in color is different from thinking in black and white. 

The part of vision that deals in color is processed in a different area of the brain than the part that concerns itself with darks and lights. (Vision is ridiculously more complicated neurologically than you might think — the information on the retina is broken down into many separate components, processed by differing regions of the brain and then re-coordinated as a gestalt.)

And so, some people pay closer attention to the hue, others to the forms they see. 

The fact is, black-and-white photography and color photography are two different art forms. To be successful in both requires a kind of bilingualism. Most of us have brains that function best either in seeing forms and shades, or in seeing hues. The two photographies emphasize those different talents.

One has only to consider the work of Stephen Shore or William Eggleston. Most of their meaning comes through the color. Take one of Eggleston’s best-known images and suck the color out. What have you got?

He made this photo of a ceiling and light bulb. The red is overwhelming. But imagine it as a black and white image.

He also made a similar image of a brothel ceiling painted blue. Also overwhelming. The two are nearly the same image, but with very different emotional and sensuous meanings.

But if we make them both black and white, they very nearly merge into the same thing. 

Color can by itself separate forms. Here are four squares in four colors; as distinct as can be. But the exact image, unaltered except for the draining of all color from it, leaves a confused mess, barely a separation between grays. 

Black and white photography requires the separation of parts not by hue, but by contrast: Lights agains darks. It’s what makes great silver prints sing. Where color photographs separate forms primarily by hue, black and white shapes form with contrast.

I am not saying a color photograph has to be garish. Far from it. But the color will carry a good deal of the meaning and emotional resonance of the image. Even in a color photo that has hardly any color in it.

Many years ago, I tried an experiment. Like so many others, I loved the waterlily paintings of Claude Monet. But I wondered if they would make as much sense in black and white. Is there a structure holding the pictures together, a design or composition, that didn’t depend solely on the rich color. 

So, I began making photographs in black and white of water lilies. 

The most successful of them clearly relied on bright highlights and strong shadows. The shapes made the picture.

If I tried an overall design, like Monet’s the picture lost its strength. 

I did the same experiment with one of Monet’s paintings, rephotographing it in black and white. 

Did it hold up? It is certainly a very different beast. 

Then I went back to one of my own color photographs of his waterlilies in Giverny, a photograph that imitated Monet’s paintings, with color, sky, reflection, shadow and lily. In color and side-by-side, in black and white. 

What I discovered shouldn’t be a surprise: Monet was much more effective in color. But I also noticed that because my photos were well-focused rather than impressionistically fuzzy, they translated better into black and white: Black and white is meant to clarify shapes. Color identifies “areas” rather than discrete textures. 

And so, while I have spent the majority of my photographic career making monochrome images, along with many others now working in digital media, I switch back and forth between color and B&W. They do, however, require different vocabularies. They are different languages. 

While I have always made visual art, I made my career in writing about art. 

As an art critic, I had the unusual need to be bilingual in an odd sort of way. As a journalist, I needed to be good with words, but in writing about art, especially visual art, I needed to know how to use my eyes.

I discovered very early on how these two talents were seldom granted to the same person. All around me were reporters who knew a gerund from a copulative, but who often seemed almost infantile when discussing pictures. They could name the subject of the image, but not go much further than that. 


A photo editor of my acquaintance once explained photojournalism this way: “I need to know it’s a house; don’t trick it up with ‘art.’” This was image as ID photo. 

But on the other side, so many artists I knew couldn’t explain themselves out of a paper bag. They effused in vague buzzwords, words that changed currency every year or so. I once taught a graduate course in writing about art for art students who needed to prepare so-called “artist statements” for their exhibits. Most of what they wrote before the course was utter blather, obscure and important-sounding without actually meaning anything. 

Words and images: Worlds seldom interpenetrable. I call the talent for riding both sides a form of bilingualism. 

I do not know if the ability to deal in multiple “languages” is something you are born with, or that you learn early on the way you acquire language before the ability to do so closes off in adolescence. But somehow, I managed to do it, at least well enough to write about it without embarrassing myself.

The mental juice necessary to process each seems walled off from the other, except in rare cases. One either runs a literary program, based on sentence and paragraph structure, linear words building a whole out of alphabetic parts; or one comprehends shapes, lines, color, size, texture, and frame as carrying the information required to convey meaning. 

This doesn’t mean that visual people are illiterate, nor that literary people can’t enjoy an art gallery, but that their primary modes of understanding vary. The squishiness of an artist’s gallery talk can drive a writer bonkers; the flatness of a word-person’s understanding of a painting can leave an artsy type scratching her head: “Can’t you see?” 

Nor does it mean that either side can’t learn, although it will remain a second language, without native understanding of idiom and customary usage. A word person can be trained to see shape and form, but it will always remain as I learned Spanish. No one will ever confuse me with a native speaker.

This split between word and image, though is only one of the bisections. Musicians can think in tone the way painters can think in pigment. Yes, there is a language that can describe the music, but for non-musicians, that language is usually impressionistic and often visual — what the music “makes you think of,” or the “pictures in your mind.” 

For the musically trained, there is also language, but it is completely opaque to the civilian: Dominant-seventh, voice-leading, timbre, reed trimming, tenor clef, Dorian mode, ritornello, de capo, circle of fifths. But even these are merely words to describe the non-verbal reality of the music itself, which can convey meaning through sound alone. The words are not the music. 

The ability to think in the terms of each mode is essential to create well in that form, and a mighty help in understanding it for the audience. If you are not in love with words, the rich cream of Gibbons or the organ tones of Milton can leave you cold. If you have no eyes for color, the nuance of Turner or the pears of Cezanne can zip past without notice. If you think of pop tunes as music, the shifting tonal centers of Schubert are inaudible, the orchestration of Mahler merely noise. 

We each have a frequency our sensibilities are tuned to, and can receive it loud and clear; we may think we understand the rest, but too often we are only fooling ourselves. Do you really inhale the contrapuntal movement of a Balanchine chorus? Do you notice the rhythm of editing in a Spielberg film? Each is a language that its practitioners and connoisseurs understand profoundly, but zip past the mass of those sitting in the cheap seats. 

It’s a different language

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Diary of a wasted childhood

May 8, 2019
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I see my granddaughters staring into their phones, watching video of themselves and their friends making goofy faces, or bits of viral kitties on YouTube and, like many of us of a declining generation, worry about the future of the culture. How quick we forget.

The young nowadays hardly watch ordinary television anymore, unless it is streaming video from Netflix. But there was a time when the boob-tube was the primary entertainment for an entire post-war generation. You might even call the damnable thing the “boomer-tube.” We were there at its inception. We watched it try to find its feet. 

I was born the same year Milton Berle made television a necessity in the American home. In a sense, TV and I grew up together and it would be a shame not to admit it.

In my earliest years, we had no TV, but I cannot remember much before the great wooden chunk of furniture with the little oval screen of greenish gray — the DuMont television we had in suburban New Jersey.

It seemed as huge as a furnace and the fire that flickered through the window was the normal hearth of the home. 

Television doesn’t seem to be any miracle if you’ve never known a time without it. It’s an appliance, like the washer or the stove.

In its earliest years, television tried to fill up its empty spaces with recycled product from the movies and radio: Many of its first series were carry-overs from radio, though I didn’t know it. We never listened to radio before television.

I watched Pinky Lee, Miss Frances on Ding Dong School, Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger, Beany and Cecil, the seasick sea-serpent, Bill and Cora Baird and their puppets, including Charlemagne the Lion. With my grandmother, I would watch the Bishop Fulton J. Sheen stand with that long, lined face and tell us that Life is Worth Living. 

There was Howdy Doody and Clarabell the Clown, Princess Summerfall Winterspring and Chief Thunderthud (the original “Kowabunga”). I longed to sit in the peanut gallery. I knew Buffalo Bob many years before I ever heard of Buffalo Bill. 

On Saturday mornings, I’d watch Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and each weekday afternoon, there was Al Hodge (formerly radio’s Green Hornet) as Captain Video, fighting the evil robot, Tobor. (I was proud as a pre-schooler to figure out that “Tobor” was “robot” spelled hindwards.) Later, there was Rocky Jones, another space adventurer.

The broadcast bands were filled with old Westerns, too. Not only Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but a host of older stars, from Hoot Gibson and Ken Maynard to Col. Tim McCoy. I ate up every Three Mesquiteers film ever made, and knew subliminally that Bob Steele as an actor was better with his fists than any other cowboy star.

There was at least one old Western every afternoon, introduced by an aging cowboy, who was actually Lyle Talbot, “B”-movie actor and veteran of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, which we watched a dozen times in a week on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie — my first serious film course. They showed the same movie all day and night over and over. I first knew King Kong there, and Wee Geordie and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It really was a great film course. (And it was only years later I realized that the theme music to Million Dollar Movie was the Tara theme from Gone With the Wind.)

We were lucky in the New York Tri-State Area: In those days when TV channels were few across the nation, we had seven: three networks and four independents  (channels 5, 9, 11 and 13 — which later became the pre-PBS WNET-TV educational television.) 

The kiddie hosts were all over those indies: Officer Joe Bolton, Sonny Fox, Claude  Kirschner, Sandy Becker, Paul Tripp.

Late in the afternoon, Uncle Fred Sayles came on with Junior Frolics (I think it had originally been called Juniortown, or something like), where I became unintentionally conversant with the silent animation of Van Beuren Studios, Max Fleischer and Pat Sullivan. Farmer Gray (originally Farmer Al Falfa) and the Aesop’s Fables of Paul Terry — a billion stick-figure mice running all over the place. (This was also my introduction to jazz, used as background music to the silent cartoons, just as Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers cartoons were my introduction to classical music.) There were also the Ko-ko the Clown features — Out of the Inkwell — and Betty Boop.

In those early years, they were really hurting for things to fill up the airwaves and threw up on screen anything they could scrounge.

Andy Devine hosted Andy’s Gang, with the gremlin, Froggy: “Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!” The show featured a serial of Gunga the East Indian Boy, which was supposed to be set in India, but was shot near Los Angeles. The confusion of jungles was common. Ramar of the Jungle switched between generic Africa and fictitious India. I was a kid, what did I know? Imagine my surprise when years later, on Million Dollar Movie, I saw Ramar (Jon Hall) as a South Seas islander, Terangi, with Dorothy Lamour in The Hurricane from 1937.

I look back now and think what a pioneer I was, eating up the first indigestible offerings the networks and independent channels served up.

I remember I Remember Mama, The Goldbergs, Life with Riley, I Led Three Lives, Mr. Peepers, Bob Cummings, My Little Margie, and the early Postmodern Burns and Allen. There were searchlights that I didn’t understand in the credits of the Lux Mystery Theatre and a horrible vise that trapped a silhouette in Climax.

In the afternoons, in the years before I went to school, I watched Art Linkletter’s House Party and Ernie Kovacs, before his later primetime shows.

There was Arthur Godfrey and his ukelele and Garry Moore and his Durward Kirby, along with singers Ken Carson and Denise Lor. It was on the Moore show I saw my first stand-up comedians, when Wayne and Shuster appeared. The orchestra was led, of course, by Milton DeLugg and his accordion.

Even Morey Amsterdam had a brief afternoon show, where he told jokes between a note or two on his cello.

Television was certainly more populated than my real life: I came to know many of its citizens almost as if they were friends. I don’t know what I would have done without Hopalong Cassidy every day.

The familiarity continued as I grew up. Each age had its phosphoric denizens, and it’s astonishing how many of them were Westerns: Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wagon Train, and Rawhide took the place of Sky King, Annie Oakley and Roy and Dale.

It’s a shame how much square footage in my cranium is taken up with old crates stuffed with meaningless gibberish:

“B, O — N, O — M, O — Bonomo’s” Turkish Taffy.

Hoffman Beverages, Carvel Ice Cream.

“Who’s the first to conquer space?/It’s incontrovertible/ That the first to conquer living space/ Was the Castro Convertible./ Who conquered space with fine design?/ Who saves you money all the time?/ Who’s tops in the convertible line?/ — Castro convertible.”

“Now back to those thrilling days of yesteryear …”

“What a revoltin’ development this is.”

In high school, it was Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible.

I am mortified at how much time I spent in front of the screen, soaking up American TV culture. And none of it seems to have escaped. It’s all still in there. 

“A little travelin’ music, Sammy — And away we go.”

Dave Garroway holding that meaty palm up to the screen, close enough it seemed to leave a grease print on the inside of the screen glass. “Peace,” he said, every single day of my childhood. I don’t know just how large a part of my decision to become a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War that daily intonation was. I suspect it played a larger part than having gone to a Quaker college.

Joe Franklin and Memory Lane; Jack Bailey and Queen for a Day; Jon Gnagy and Learn to Draw. Jack LaLanne and Marty Glickman and Win Elliot and Jack Paar. 

From infancy, plopped in front of the tube, and through grade school, when I remember spending every night spread out on the carpet in front of the console TV with my two brothers, with our parents in the chairs behind us, smoking cigarettes. We’d hit the freezer for a bowl of ice cream or the cookie jar for a handful of Oreos, and nibble and watch, hypnotized by Ed Sullivan or Carol Burnett.

Every culture has its mythology, its stories and foundational personages. For my generation — and those to follow — television and its plots and casts have replaced historical figures (at least those not turned into Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett or Hugh O’Brian’s Wyatt Earp) and the Bible stories that earlier generations grew up with. It was the TV mythology that filled out my inner picture of what the world was and how it functioned. I’m afraid it may have done the same to every generation since. Chester A. Riley gave way to Marcia Brady to Alex P. Keaton to Eric Cartman to Tyrion Lannister. If only the gray matter were stuffed with all of Dickens or Dostoevsky instead of Jerry Mahoney and Captain Video, what a wonder would have been. 

It gives me the creeps now to think about how much of my childhood was wasted utterly. But it’s all in there, the well I draw on.