Television Again

As a child, I remember spending hours in front of the television set, waiting for my favorite programs to come on. They were usually cartoons, never news or live action programs. I liked to watch the cartoons because they were more believable in their fantasy. I remember watching live action drama and thinking the adults on those shows were really engaged in their situations, there was no fantasy to get lost in. The idea of watching something on TV that I saw in everyday life (adults and other people) seemed banal and mundane. When I saw people on television, I perceived them and everything they did, to be real. By simply seeing people on television, my mind made a connection between them and the people I really did see in life, henceforth I did reason a separation between the fantasy and the non-fantasy; anything not involving real people on television was more believably fantastic than was the stuff with people.
As I grew older, I remember that my view changed. I started to see how real movies and television actually were, and their fantasy began to grow on me. But there was a panging feeling that complained that it was all too easy for the characters on TV to actually be who they were or do what they did. It was much too perfect for Bruce Willis to tape a gun to his back in that last scene in Die Hard. It distorted my reality of human ability, so much so that for a short time in elementary school I believed I was Kevin Costner playing Elliot Ness in the Brian De Palma release of "The Untouchables". At this point I remember I watched far less television than I did films. I understood that these actors worked very hard to perfect their role. That’s what actors are supposed to do, however I didn’t see how they were perfecting their roles in order to provide the maximum deception possible for the audience to consider that reality. That I see now. Motion picture actors’ realities became much more valuable as a watching experience than did television actors. How strange this was to me!
Television was playing see-saw with my perception of reality, and its projection of it. It boasts that it is not reality, yet the mind cannot separate the isolated incidence of mediation when watching television. Your mind knows at once it is not real but TV only requires your sight and your hearing senses to delve so deeply into a separated, mediated experience.
This is just one of the many reasons why I can't watch TV!