Still, Paglia is a lover of Hollywood cinema and popular culture and I think all she seeks is a return to earlier styles that provide meaning for her.

Her situation may not be everyone's...

A 20 yr old today was born post-Star Wars in 1981. He or she has grown up with a different speed in the mass media than I did, born in 1964. Computers, video games, MTV, etc. have all set the pace.

Not very long ago I was in a media products store and saw a kid, 5 at the oldest, sitting on the floor with a stick in hand, looking up at a TV set, playing a video game at a pace I couldn't begin to match if I tried. Today, the news is a bombardment of moving subtitles and multiple images that I can't completely take in but which may be taken in by those more accoustomed to the accelerated pace of information.

Older boomers have either matched pace with the style or have fallen behind. But whether it's simply that some can't keep up or that the new pace is dangerously shallow, Paglia may represent a larger backlash against current styles. If there is such a movement, you can add Peter Watkins to its list of spokespeople.

Recently, I discovered a website designed by Watkins. Watkins, as some of you may remember, is the Oscar-winning director of the 60s documentary The War Game dealing with the effects England would face from nuclear war. It was commissioned by the BBC who considered it too drastic to air. It won the Oscar which gave Watkins access to backing for a feature film, Privilege. Despite this great start, Watkins' radical leftist vision of things proved too much for most producers and he became, as he says, "marginalized" and increasingly unable to find support for his projects.

His web site includes a long essay of media criticism he wrote recently discussing the form of current mass media and his dissent of it. Going much further than Paglia's criticisms but in a similar direction, Watkins attacks what he calls the monoform, a single style of media presentation that excludes audiences and keeps them from reflecting on events. The monoform is an older development but its current refinement has taken over most media presentations and through high-tech media equipment (satellite technology, etc.) has become the basic standard for global media. This extends to academic approaches to film studies as well which discourage any but this monoform approach to media construction.

Rather than go into a description of the monoform and his specific criticisms of it, I suggest you go to the source and look at Watkins' own statements about it on his site then return here and comment on them.

I tried to provide a link but there seems to be trouble with it. So, if you go onto the Google search engine and put Peter Watkins in as a search subject, the very first site that comes up, peterwatkins.It, is the one I'm referring to.

Do you agree and think things are as he says or do you think otherwise?

I've been sloggin' through the text on Watkins' site (there's a lot of it!!).

Like many of the Left, Watkins decries "greed, exploitation, and the despoilment of the planet" that he associates with "global free-market capitalism." [Quotes his.] For him, mass media does nothing but support this system at humanity's expense.

He blames the mass media for keeping political debate out of the culture; for creating a violent and sexist media that degrades humanity; for continuing the monoform, a one-way form of media communication that helps cocoon people from the true nature of reality. He attacks colleges for becoming vocational centers for people wanting jobs in the mass media, training people to go along with current production practices rather than developing people who will become critical of them.

Some of this criticisms are personal---he's angry that he can't get his own films made with the subjects he wants and at the lengths he wants and that he can't find teaching jobs that allow him to express his views.

He sounds like many intellectuals who feel they should be running society themselves. He says the public isn't allowed access to decision-making in the media. Nor are they allowed choice--you can turn on and off the set, but you can't find alternative or avant-garde programming, that is unavailable to you. Interestingly, he says the public tunes into mass media because there is nothing else, as if they wouldn't do it if they had alternatives. On one hand, he wants public input in the media, but when the public itself chooses to like popular culture and would probably reject the kind of alternative/political/avant-garde media he is talking about, that's only because they are being deluded by the monoform and offered nothing else. He's so sure that his leftist views are correct that all they need is their expression to change society. It never dawns on him that people may not be leftists by actual choice and may consciously reject his stance and programming suggestions on their own.

It's not that he doesn't make valid points and arguments (he does), and it's not that he hasn't things to suggest and even warn us about (and it's true, with 500 satellite channels where's the Commie channel?, there isn't one)---that's why I suggested people look in on his web site to debate this in the first place, it's just that you can see he has a personal and political agenda despite the way he phrases things to suggest it's not there.

I wish someone else out there would look at his web site and chime in on this topic. [Lou shrugs--see, it's not that the public is excluded from debate, it's that the public isn't even interested in discussing it. Reminds me of all the stations that didn't want to televise the Presidential Debates because not enough people were interested in watching them. And good for them too, if the public isn't interested you can't force it on them. Just like Communism.]

Watkins recently made a 6hr film on the Paris Commune of 1871 that used the same technique, having modern TV interviewers questioning 'participants' from 1871. This is one of the techniques he uses to break through the screen to the audience, tearing away at the Monoform, the one-way-we-tell-you-absorb-without-debate direction of current media aesthetics.

At his website, Watkins discusses assignments for his students to come up with alternative ways of doing TV interviews. I thought about being in his class and realized that it's difficult to do.

Imagine if Leno or Letterman came out from behind the desk and sat with his subject on the floor. A.J. Benza had a short-lived talk show on E! set in a NY loft with people milling about like it was a party where he sat next to people on a couch and interviewed them and I think people rejected it because the format was too different. The ladies on The View make a round table work for them. Bill Maher's seating arrangement on Politically Incorrect seems to work for people, and it is somewhat inclusive of the on-set audience just as day time shows like Rickie Lake and Jenny Jones involve their on-set audiences, but all these forms are still within the Monoform--you can't go too off the mark without violating the closed bubble between viewer and program and most people aren't prepared (or don't want?) a media that invites them in, asks them questions, requires them to use brain or that pushes them to become more involved in society.

According to PW, the Monoform reinforces the idea that political action is futile, that it's best to stay home, not get involved, to enjoy crime and jiggle shows and forget about the world outside. But I suggested that it might be the other way around, not that the public is subdued by media forms from on high, but that the public might reject anything that is put to them in a more challenging light. And if this is what the public wants, that's their right. Watkins thinks the public wouldn't reject different forms if they were offered. But it's hard to say. If Watkins and Godard movies showed up prime time on NBC, I wonder how they'd play in Missouri. Hmmm......