The Human Psyche and the TV, Essay Example

Technology has changed the way in which we see and experience the world.  TV and movies allow us to explore mountains, discover lost cities, and meet people and cultures from every part of the earth without ever leaving the comfort of our living rooms.  However, there is a dark side to technology as well.  Often times it creates an unrealistic set of expectations for people.  Everything is exciting and new.  Women are always beautiful, men are always dashing and suave, and everyone is always happy.  The hero always saves the day.  This can lead to a feeling of inadequacy in one’s own life when life does not live up to the expectations as seen on TV.  In The TV, Ben Loory chilling describes the descent into madness that occurs within the human psyche because the images from media technology such as TV portray a reality that is actually very unlike the real world, leading people to believe that the real world they exist in is actually inferior to the one they experience on TV.

The story is about a man who is nameless.  Loory pointedly leaves the man nameless to indicate that the story could be about anyone.  The man represents anyone who sits in front of a TV.  In the opening of the story he states, “The man doesn’t usually have time to watch television, so it takes him a while to find a show he’s interested in, but when he eventually does fine one he sits rapt, his cereal forgotten, for a very, very, very long time.”  The repetitive use of the word “very” is important, because it allows the reader to imagine that the man is hypnotized somehow by the TV.  The man has forgotten the world around him and has become lost in the world in the box.   This is the first stage of his descent into madness.

The next stage of the descent is in the identification that the man has with the characters he see’s on TV.  The man begins to project himself into the shows, as he becomes the star of every show.  At first, it is just him in his daily life.  He watches himself at his office, doing his daily routines.  Then, he becomes a high finance Wall Street player, a surgeon, a lover and a hero.   Ben Loory sums up this stage of madness when he says the man “runs rampant across the world, helping and killing and saving and selling, buying and raping and stealing and feeling and making love and running away and laughing and crying and dying and being born and dying and being born and dying and being born and dying and being born.”  The repetitive use of being born and dying describes his constant identification with different characters.  He has become lost in the TV world, forgotten his own identity and projects himself into the hero of the show he is watching on the screen.

In the final stage of madness, a choice appears.  A moment of clarity comes to the man.  He realizes that the TV has a hold on his mind, “his mind is like a fist, wrapped tightly around a single thought.”  The man realizes that he has been asleep, and when he awakes, he finds that he has turned off the TV.  His moment of clarity and his re-entry into the real world only happens when he turns off the TV.  The TV, then, is the reason for the madness that has descended on the man.  The man realizes that he has become overpowered by the TV and decides to save his sanity by throwing the TV way, but somehow his subconscious keeps bringing the TV back into his home.  He is addicted, and despite the fact that he knows it is making him insane, he cannot break his identity away from it.

Media technology such as television and movies has had an incredible impact on human society and on the individual psyche. The far reaching effects of this are just now beginning to be understood.  In The TV, Loory relates a scenario that is the worst case scenario of what can happen to a man who descends into madness through the TV.  On a lesser scale, everyone is affected by the images on the TV, but their psyches are affected to differing degrees.   However, Loory does offer a solution, though it is not a popular one.  You see, the madness cannot affect you if you do not have a TV.

References

Loory, Ben. (2010, April 12)  The TV.   The New Yorker.