Living-Room War

Television and Popular Culture

by Michael J. Arlen

"One doesn't have to be a panjandrum of Communications to realize that television does something to us," Michael Arlen (former TV critic of The New Yorker ) writes in the Introduction to Living-Room War. He continues, "Television has a transforming effect on events. It has a transforming effect on the people who watch the transformed events-it's just hard to know what that is." Living-Room Wa r is Arlen's valiant-and entertaining-attempt to figure out exactly what exactly television does to us. This timeless collection of essays provides a poetic look at 1960s television culture, ranging from the Vietnam war to Captain Kangaroo, from the 1968 Democratic convention to televised sports.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Michael J. Arlen is an Anglo-Armenian writer and former television critic of the The New Yorker. The son of the prominent Anglo-Armenian writer, Michael Arlen. He is the author of Exiles and the critically acclaimed Passage to Ararat, both of which are autobiographical narratives of Arlen's Armenian ancestry. He is also the author of Living Room War, a book on the Vietnam War's portrayal and the social culture of America in the media in the USA.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Q. "How do you put an end to the Viet Nam War?"
A. "Put in on ABC and it will be canceled in six months"---Hollywood joke, 1968

Michael Arlen could not have phrased the stunning thesis of his essay collection any better. The Viet Nam War was not a war at all but a television show the United States exhibited from Indochina starting circa 1965 and by 1968 the American public had grown so bored of watching the same footage every night on television it decided the show had to be canceled. This is not a metaphor for Arlen but a literal fact. The Viet Nam War, you know, the one that killed 58,000 Americans and 2-3 million Vietnamese, was hyperreal. The battlefield slaughter came is second and the mediatized version of that war, the one Americans were forced to watch, took center stage. (Notice how this prefigured Braudillard’s book, THE GULF WAR WILL NOT HAPPEN...THE GULF WAR IS NOT HAPPENING...THE GULF WAR DID NOT HAPPEN. The two Persian Gulf wars were not wars at all. They were Republican television commercials.) Here's one big reason America lost "the living room war": If you want to wage a war on television the last person you want for a master of ceremonies is Lyndon Johnson; old, crude, and tasteless. John F. Kennedy would have presented America with a prettier war. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese sensed this was a TV war too. The sapper squad that penetrated the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the Tet offensive of 1968 knew they would die inside the compound, while the image of the American embassy seized by hostiles, on live television, would sear into the American public consciousness. Arlen has some provocative things to say about a war in which forty-percent of all combat troops were Black. On American television this fact was retold as "the Black Badge of Courage" story, not taking Black men off the streets and high schools and into the jungle. Alas, this book will always remain relevant. Governments don't have to lie about war, just make it entertaining and seem far, far away.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an inherent problem with reading this book—written in the late sixties—in a postmillenial (or even post-, say, Reagan—post-OJ, post-Lewinski, post-9/11, etc. etc.) context. Television was young back then, man. It really was. I'd even go as far as to say that the medium is actually flirting with obsolescence now, which doesn't make this critical exploration of TV quite irrelevant, but does make it painfully dated. (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," while nearly twenty years old, still retains a tremendous amount of cultural and critical relevance, for example. (Though, sure, it's twenty-five years more current than Arlen's essays.)) This isn't Arlen's fault, of course, though it's impossible to ignore while reading his collection.

Despite the subtitle ("Writings About Television"), and despite the claims of the back-cover blurbs, this is certainly more a collection of essays on the Vietnam war than it is one about television. Sure, some pieces don't touch on the war at all, though most of them do, and some seem only tangentially related to TV. Which is fine, it just wasn't Vietnam that I wanted to read about here. I've seen Apocalypse Now, I've seen Platoon, I've seen The Deer Hunter, I've seen Full Metal Jacket, I've read plenty of Tim O'Brien. Vietnam isn't my war, and at the risk of sounding callous or flip, it's just not something I'm terribly interested in reading about.

All these particulars aside, Arlen is a brilliant writer. You recognize that glib New Yorker wit immediately, though this becomes a problem about a quarter of the way into the collection, when Arlen's flippant tone becomes off-putting to say the least. Perhaps the essays worked on their own, once a week, but as a collection, the impudence gets a bit much. Things cool down a bit toward the end, but it's a battle to get through all the sneery muck. Which is a real shame, because Arlen's talent is unmistakable. Sure, there are a few recurring crutches—the impudent use of 'yesteryear' appears several times, and the disingenuous and faux-faux-pretentious use of 'one' as a pronoun is everywhere. "One should mention," "one notices," "one points out," etc.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of commentary I took away from the collection was Arlen's argument that television is actually more an audible medium than a visual one. As he claims, it makes much more sense to turn the picture off and listen to the sound than it does to turn the sound off and watch the picture. This view was likely influenced by the then-still-prevalent presence of radio media, and is in direct conflict with the invention of the mute button—I can remember spending hours upon hours as a child in the living room while my father channel surfed with the television on mute and a CSNY CD on the stereo. That said, I know plenty of people who watch—er, listen to—Internet news in the background of their computer while they work, essentially turning the picture off just as Arlen suggested. Anyway, an interesting claim. Television not a visual medium?

It's worth noting the brevity of the articles—some approach the ten-page mark, though many, if not most, are only a few pages long. In the context of information technology, whose ever-increasing speed is purportedly and continually shrinking our collective attention span, I found this interesting, if not incongruous. The articles' pithiness did contribute to that glib tone, though, as if Arlen had no responsibility to keep our attention for long, and could get away with more—much like, ironically enough, a television broadcast can. Again, this likely worked brilliantly in a serialized, weekly format, but as a collection, it gets a bit trying.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brian Williams made me buy this book. Specifically, his tale of combat and the ensuing controversy gave rise to a thoughtful article on Slate referencing Living Room War. The article led me to think that this book was another Context of No Context, another brilliant, insightful essay on the insidious influence of television upon our collective subconscious. Although it did not live up to this promise, the essays here do reach, near the middle of the book, to some insight into the self-deceit practiced by a lazy Vietnam era news media (and a lazy Vietnam era leadership)—an insight which still has relevance today! Most journalists are young (well, younger than me) or dependent on connected sources, and their editors need to put out stories they think people will want to read and that don’t offend key sponsors, and in this context (because of this context) a story about, say, how capitalism in India is destroying many lives as it raises the lives of others (see Capitalism—A Ghost Story) is never told. But, sometimes, perhaps, there will be a young Morley Safer, out of breath and under fire, trying hard to get the story.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ranks with the two collections of Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat as the best contemporary book about television in the 1960s. Arlen was writing a weekly (more or less) column for the New Yorker, which gradually morphed from a very entertaining take on the foibles of network TV and PBS in its early incarnation into a serious engagement with how television distorted perceptions of Vietnam. Absolutely crucial for anyone who wants a sense of "what it (i.e. the Sixties) felt like at the time."