TV is Bad (part 1)

I love tv and movies. And you probably do too. I love the medium, the technology, the technique, the stories. I'm a content creator and consumer.  So this isn't an anti-tv scree. I'm not going to tell you to boycott anything or try to convince you that good Christians don't go to movies. But we can't afford to be ignorant of the far reaching power of the medium.

The "talking pictures" are the most sophisticated form of storytelling to date. Storytelling is essential to human culture. Knowing they affect us so powerfully, most of what Jesus taught was in the form of stories.  Stories are powerful because they fit the way our brains work.  They use the same capabilities that are critical for maintaining relationships. Verbal and written storytelling (the earlier forms) require the participation of the imagination by co-opting the audience to be co-creators. But as performance art has progressed from stage play to feature film the audience becomes a passive consumer.

Once upon a time your Minas Tirith looked very different from my Minas Tirith but now they both look the same (despite this I still love the LotR movies btw). Characters no longer exist in the imagination but inhabit the pixels they have been captured on with no curtain call to shatter the illusion.  The imperfections of reality are swept away and now everyone is perfectly lit with a flowing soundtrack in the background to put you in the right emotional state. But the most imagination-destroying part of modern storytelling is cinematography.  Even in a stage play you control what you see but when every frame is a Rembrandt even that simple act of volition is replaced with blissful passive perfection.

The result is a brain subdued, unable to imagine beyond the limits of the frame, dependent on the steady pattern of stimulation provided by the three act structure. Ever watch a tv marathon? You know that zombie feeling afterward?  The problem isn't just intellectual--it's emotional.

Tv compresses our emotions replacing the real thing with a zero-risk substitute while occupying limited relationship space in our brains in part 2 and teaches us functional and dysfunctional behavior while shaping culture in part 3.