Do Not Adjust Your Set

The television winks on. A teenage girl romps in slow motion across a suburban frontyard. She wrestles with friends, kisses a parakeet, mugs for the camera. Now her parents fill the screen, talking softly about their daughter’s kindness and pluck. A hand-held camera takes the audience down a hallway to the girl’s bedroom. It moves from a rock poster on the wall to a bookcase, where a teddy bear sits. The camera holds tight on the bear.

Yes, they’ve gone up close and personal again. But why?

Who is this fresh-faced stranger?

Another American Olympian? One more victim of Flight 800? At last the camera pulls back from the bear. Magically, it no longer sits in the bedroom. Instead, the mother is squeezing the teddy for luck as she watches her daughter from the Atlanta grandstands. Only now does it become certain. The girl was not a member of the Montoursville High French club. She is an American breast-stroker. This comes as relief; for a moment, it seemingly could have gone either way. . . .

For a full week now, citizens of the Television Nation have been bounced from Atlanta to East Moriches, N.Y. First they meet a field hockey captain, captured in 45 seconds of glossy biography. Then they meet, posthumously, a student from Pennsylvania, presented in pretty much the same style. Commentators whisper gravely from a memorial service. Then they whisper gravely from poolside where a swimmer has failed to win gold. Home movie footage of a young ballplayer opens a news segment on Flight 800’s victims. Canned shots from Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center illustrate a report on Olympic security, filling dead time between rounds of a boxing match.

*

As the rhetoric and images and emotional strums all bleed together, a sort of small-screen vertigo sets in. No longer is it clear at all whether this is a case of a sporting event being covered like an airplane crash, or an airline crash being covered like sports. Nor does it seem to matter. After awhile, it’s all simply television.

Now it is late night Monday. A U.S. official stands before a press conference, almost beaming. It has been, he announces, “a very good day for us. Everybody is on a real upper.” A viewer freshly arrived via remote from another channel anticipates an updated medal count. It is not to be. This official works for the National Transportation Safety Board. He has come to report that divers located a large piece of the TWA wreckage, along with several bodies.

The station heads into a commercial, but first there is footage from an oceanside service. A mother stands barefoot in the shallow surf, holding a child’s teddy bear. . . .

“It was a good day for everybody involved,” the NTSB man says. He’s back again, staying on a message of progress. Tomorrow, he says hopefully, should be “another great day.” No, a field reporter intones, one click of the remote away, “tomorrow will be a day of reckoning.” She speaks not of the undersea struggle to dredge up corpses. She speaks of MARTA, the embattled Atlanta transportation system. If the terrorists don’t get Atlanta, her report implies, the lousy bus system will.

Back to the Atlanta studio, where the anchor reports grimly that Janet Evans did not have a good day, is not upbeat. Janet Evans has failed to make the finals in a swim race. The anchor tells how the swimmer is struggling to cope with this tragedy--the network’s word--and then breaks for a commercial: And there is Janet Evans in a pool, demonstrating (we are told by a deep-voiced narrator) the harnessed aggression and determination and style that make her so much like a Cadillac.

*

Over now to poolside, where a Russian swimmer stands with his chest puffed out. They call him “the Russian Rocket.” He has just beaten his American rival. He is a reminder of the good old days of the Olympics--the days when the Soviet juggernaut provided enough hint of menace to transform a mere sporting event into epic television. The Soviets, without hurting anybody, made it seem almost like war. Flight 800 has done the same for the Atlanta Games, but at a tragically higher cost.

Before the race, they had asked the Russian Rocket which American actor he most admired. This was an attempt to move in up close and personal on the star swimmer. Specifically, it was an invitation to compare himself with Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic champion--and subsequent Tarzan--whose record the Russian was about to equal. The Russian, the anchor relates, didn’t bite.

“That is an American question,” he is said to have responded. “Actors should dream about being me. I am reality. They are not.”

The Russian had it exactly wrong.

This is television.

Television devours reality.