3/28/2023 0 Comments The twonkyInstead of writing a lecture on individual freedom and making independent decisions, the television directs him to lecture on the history of sexual passions. I suppose people thought this about television from the start. Actually, West’s television serves and protects him while mildly controlling his thoughts. Our lives are taken over (we give our lives over) to the tele-visual world and I wanted this to happen to Conried’s character, Professor West. Initially, I was hopeful that The Twonky would unconsciously make its way to Being There’s (1979) ethos whence the television ethos absorbs its viewers. From its approach, I hope to find a consistent perspective from the film on the nature of television, but it will not be easy. There’s little content on Conried’s intrusive television except at the very end we see an American cavalry charge. Stupid commercials (“Ring around the collar”) and shows ( My Mother the Car) are not the problem. Other films, like Being There (1979) and The Truman Show (1999) take the McLuhan approach: “the medium is the message”, that is, television itself regardless of content has deleterious effects on human consciousness and will. Lonesome Rhodes selling Vitajax, as a combination Geritol and Viagra, is one of the great comical pleasures of the film. The movies about television can, like A Face in the Crowd, concentrate on the content. He pours himself vigorously into the poorly written film and man of his co-stars don’t perform badly either. Yet, Conried is one of the best things about The Twonky. Arch Oboler is no Elia Kazan, and Hans Conried, playing the harried Professor West, cannot come close to the scene-chomping Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes. The Twonky predates A Face in the Crowd (1957), the first great film critique of television, by four years. I couldn’t add to them any significant details about the film, but I had recently conducted a film course dealing with Media Movies and seven of the ten films dealt with television. I found two excellently detailed articles on The Twonky: at Scifist, a sci-fi film history in reviews, and the other at Parallax View, which focused on the direct Arch Oboler. The television simply won’t allow him to do things and generally imposes its will on him. By “take over” I don’t mean that his body is snatched. Just by its title, which I saw listed on COMET, channel 253 (Comcast), I was intrigued and then sold by its description: A man’s new television, controlled by a force from the future, starts to take over his life. But I have watched it and will write not to praise it nor bury it. A satire on television, using a slapstick approach. The film, The Twonky (1953), you may not know about but you can easily see what it is. “A twonky is something that you don’t know what it is.” – Coach Trout
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