One of those listless evenings, a Saturday evening it was when, after a morning at school, Mother decided against us taking the early afternoon coach back to Thessaloniki, I had my very first experience with a major technological achievement of the last century. It would be destined to dominate our lives, as a causality of evolution, and occupy and subjugate a big chunk of the leisure time of the masses: television. It appeared with the time lag typical of major inventions reaching the so-called ‘developing countries’ (euphemistically as they never seem to progress from this stage), in the margins of the advanced western world; a time lag that is usually proportional to the geographical distance and the technological from the metropoles of the ‘know-how’, but inversely proportional to the pace of globalization, which in 1968 had not gathered the speed of today.
Television
broadcasting began in Greece not long before the establishment in power of the Colonel’s
junta, and had been gradually adopted as the main source of information and means of
entertainment by the wealthier
strata of Greek society initially, before later becoming broader affordable by
the populace. It was a technology that offered low-cost entertainment and continuous
stream of news (then methodically filtered by the regime from any dissenting
messages), and obtained rapidly a universal audience, of young and old, of poor
and rich, with sometimes dilapidating effects on other established forms of
information and entertainment and even of traditional social interaction. It was
duly exploited by the ruling political and economic classes and faced only a few
obstacles in establishing its pervasive influence, and those were weak ones. Initial
hurdles imposed by the low average national income would soon be overcome by the
imperative of capitalist expansion and a rapidly increasing productivity, and TV
broadcasting was set on course to dominate the political, information, cultural and
entertainment fields – everywhere! Until other technological revolutions swept
it aside a few decades later.
I don't know if it says
anything about the relative prosperity of Mr. George's and Mrs. Meli's household
and maybe a few others in the Cold Trough, but their spacious living
room featured a ‘magic box’ or a ‘devil’s box’, as grandmother used to called
it, a couple of years before it also became a permanent accessory of our own
petty-bourgeois flat in the big city. Black and white images pulsated every evening
in different shades of gray, and could be seen through their living-room windows.
The lights of the room were deliberately turned off behind the drawn-out
curtains to increase the contrast, darkness was succeeded by a faint light,
sometimes of prolonged duration, before the room, along with the outlines of the
statuesque members of the family seated on semicircle around the ad hoc,
central to the room, majestic television stand, plunged again into darkness.
The enchanted family was experiencing the allure of a kinetic succession of
black and white pictures. It was the attraction of the novel and the unknown,
the spectacular and the unexpected, the lure of the transmission of real-time
like images from a distant, dramatic reality (fictitious or not did not really
matter) and the witnessing of adventures of virtual heroes from far aways, yet seeming
close by, in the peaceful realm of one’s room.
And, yes! At last, I
was invited that Saturday evening by these well-meaning landlords of ours to
their living room to be initiated into and awed by the enchantment of
television broadcasting: the mysterious motions of beings and matter behind a
luminescent screen, through the projection of black and white images before our
eyes. An unfortunate man (or it might have been a woman) had been chained up by
some thugs across the tracks of a railway line, amid a Far-West desert, and
abandoned there, his clothes torn to pieces and his body bruised from desperate
attempts to free himself from his bondage. Agony and terror contorted his face,
because of an approaching horrible death as the increasingly louder train honk
foretold. It was the only image, perhaps distorted by later dreams or fantasies
of childhood, that survived decades in the depths of memory from that ‘box’.
The unfortunate man eventually
managed to free himself with the help of an unexpected hero who appeared in the
scene out of nowhere, seconds before the train could have torn his body to
pieces. Happy ending after the climax of suspense was the inviolable norm in
Hollywood films of the time, but none of us could have foreseen or guessed it,
as an ending like that would have defied the odds of a rescue, which the
director, with skilfully projected tricks, made them appear negligible. The
impression of horror that the prolonged, agonizing and seemingly inevitable onslaught
of Death behind the screen, as enhanced with sound and visual effects, coming
to seize the sympathetic sufferer, without eventually revealing Himself, always
provokes and upsets and it was imprinted in childhood imagination more
intensely than the peripheral plot of that film. The happy ending brought that
night a relief, contentment, and lead to a sweet slumber.
x
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