Soft Soap

The other day I was eavesdropping-​via-​weblog on a con­ver­sa­tion between Matt Webb and Dan Hill about back­ground media. Dan noted an inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic - that half of all prime time tele­vi­sion view­ing is back­ground activ­ity, where the telly is not the main focus - and Matt ran with the idea, propos­ing a new slow-​paced format, a sort of plot­ted equiv­a­lent of those inter­minable live feeds that accom­pany Big Brother or The Salon.

The inter­est­ing bit, I thought, was the idea that such slow-​moving, passively-​viewed pro­gram­ming would turn on use of the pathetic fal­lacy, that lit­er­ary device, now rather hack­neyed, that imbues inan­i­mate objects with human emo­tion, or reflects human emo­tion in the environment.

I’ve always been a big fan of the pathetic fal­lacy, unlike Ruskin, who coined the term. In his essay, Of The Pathetic Fal­lacy, Ruskin rails against the loss of con­trol behind the device, seeing it as the mark of the lesser poet, who loses sight of truth in his rush to spread emo­tion lib­er­ally over the land­scape, sub­jec­tively colour­ing the exter­nal world. Great poets, Ruskin says, exhibit clar­ity and restraint, and might use a restricted form of the fal­lacy, one that allows a reader to jack in to the sub­jec­tive emo­tional state of the char­ac­ter the poet is con­cerned with, but does not skew the world along emo­tional lines. This all reads a little oddly to those of us weaned on modern and post-​modern crit­i­cism, queer theory, hard­core Marx­ist or fem­i­nist read­ings and the like, and Ruskin’s essay is a funny one - it is in part a pop at Coleridge’s crit­i­cism, and only really makes sense in the con­text of Ruskin’s views on truth in art - but his cat­e­gori­sa­tion of lit­er­ary fal­lac­ies is fas­ci­nat­ing even if you dis­miss his conclusions.

One reason to dis­miss them is this pas­sage, my number one top of the pathetic fal­lacy pops, the open­ing of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native:

A Sat­ur­day after­noon in Novem­ber was approach­ing the time of twi­light, and the vast tract of unen­closed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.

It looks fairly innocu­ous, but in having the heath embrown itself, Hardy drops a pre­cise clue as to the role of the land­scape in the coming nar­ra­tive, sig­nalling the fact that the it is another char­ac­ter in the novel, that the lives of the char­ac­ters are moulded by their sur­round­ings, that those sur­round­ings are not pas­sive, not one bit. It’s bloody scary, that embrown­ing. There’s plenty more:

The face of the heath by its mere com­plex­ion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, antic­i­pate the frown­ing of storms scarcely gen­er­ated, and inten­sify the opac­ity of a moon­less mid­night to a cause of shak­ing and dread.

Jeep­ers! Ruskin would be froth­ing indig­nantly at the mouth by this point, but this is hard­core pathetic fal­lacy, freebase-​strength stuff, not the glucose-​cut snortable powder of, say, Wordsworth.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, ambi­ent telly. The quo­ta­tions above make me wonder about Matt’s imag­ined slow-​burn Eas­t­en­ders with the pathetic fal­lacy as plot engine. Instead of being a pas­sive format, where stalled cars on the lot alert the audi­ence to an immi­nent crisis in the car salesman’s mar­riage, pro­vok­ing a flurry of activ­ity in the view­ing com­mu­nity in between long drifts of innat­ten­tion, using the pathetic fal­lacy to signal action would turn view­ers into avid, active watch­ers. In the first episode of Slow­sten­ders, you see, Albert Square would have to be seen to embrown itself, and the audi­ence would catch on quick. Where Matt hopes the view­ers would keep half an eye on the screen, only to be shaken up by the occa­sional thun­der­clap, I reckon the format would have the oppo­site effect. In time, we would all accli­ma­tise to the new form, with view­ers turn­ing into seers, with every back­ground event fore­grounded, a ter­ri­ble auger of events to come. That rain­drop hang­ing grimly on to the sign out­side the Queen Vic would be impos­si­ble to ignore, because the audi­ence would know that, were it to drop, Nana Moon would die. A light shower would have the switch­board ablaze with con­cerned audi­ence mem­bers beg­ging the writ­ers to spare Little Mo the ordeal of yet another rape. Nancy Banks-​Smith would be hounded from her post at the Guardian, branded a Cas­san­dra for her faulty inter­pre­ta­tion of a blocked drain! Gareth MacLean would be hailed as a lat­ter­day Oracle for his effort­less exe­ge­sis on the appear­ance of an unex­pected rainbow!

I’ll stop before I imag­ine an imag­i­nary soap format over­turn­ing sec­u­lar soci­ety, but this idea of slow­ness and sub­tlety replac­ing quick fix, pre-​digested enter­tain­ment is an attrac­tive one to me. And if the cur­rent fad for inter­minable, drag­ging tele­vi­sual epics - Pop Idol, the afore­men­tioned real­ity shows - con­tin­ues, it shouldn’t be too long before we see cable chan­nels devoted to pro­gram­ming as dull as our own lives, but with a preter­nat­ural envi­ron­ment seem­ing to con­trol the fate of the characters.

I believe Matt and Dan both work for the BBC. Per­haps they could corner the Direc­tor Gen­eral at the Beeb’s Christ­mas party and pitch Pathetic-​Fallacy-​O-​Vision^™, before a Sky bigwig hap­pens on this post and com­mis­sions a series of 40-hour episodes of Footballer’s Wives.

Posted at 5pm on 12/12/03 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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