Karen Mooney
Professor Barbara Gleason
English B8109
November 8, 2014
Second Draft
Turn to the Visual
That commencement robe was far too heavy for the heat, its
long, wide sleeves burying my arms, the generous folds of its fabric reaching
down past my calves. Under it I wore one of the shortest dresses I had ever
bought yet for once, neither of my parents complained.
They were there—mom, dad, two of my three brothers, and
grandma, dad taking movies with an 8 millimeter camera, later finding out they
were largely unwatchable. I think my folks were proud, but they seemed as
disoriented as I was.
Pride wasn’t exactly my strongest
emotion that day either. Mostly I was confused, not sure what was next. I
planned to go to graduate school to study English, the area I had settled on in
the end, but I was out of money and out of steam and thought I might drift a
while.
I have absolutely no memory of
sitting with my classmates during the ceremony that day. Where was my seat? Where were my parents? Did
I walk across a stage and pick up my diploma? Did I feel any different when it
was over?
Yet one moment of that exercise changed my life. Margaret
Mead gave the commencement address. The legendary anthropologist, herself a
graduate of the college, was teaching there now, and was occasionally seen
around campus in these last years of her life, wrapped in a cape and navigating
with the help of a tall walking stick. From her groundbreaking studies of
cultures around the world, she was, perhaps, uniquely qualified to speak about the
transitions an adolescent makes in becoming an adult. But she was deeply rooted
in scholarship. What would she have to say about the world outside?
There is no record of Mead’s address. She must have spoken
for some time, possibly giving lots of advice, since that’s what commencement
speakers do. But I remember only one line, and it seemed to have nothing to do
with scholarship. “Don’t ignore television,” she said. “It will shape the lives
of your children and grandchildren.”
I went home for a visit after that day and took her advice—I
watched television, something I hadn’t done much of during college. Grandma was
my viewing companion. She liked soaps, liked talking back at the characters about
their dramatic choices. My dad liked news. My younger brothers watched cartoon
and kid shows. To me, most of these programs seemed superficial, foolish, out
of touch with serious matters, and all of them were hung together with manipulative
commercials. After a week of this I concluded, “I can fix this.” Arrogant?
Optimistic? Maybe I just fell for all those admonitions to change the world that
college graduates get as they’re pushed out into the world.
Back in New York, I rolled up my sleeves. Fixing TV was
going to be a lot of work. Where to start? Here I was, a ‘writer’ who had
authored dozens of crayoned books as a child, disappeared into books as an
adolescent, and then dove headlong into literature in college. Margaret Mead, the
author of many books herself, pointed in a different direction. How could I navigate the world without being
focused on the word? And how could I learn to make TV so I could fix it?
Global Village was the answer. It was one of a handful of
non-profit organizations experimenting with new, small-format video equipment,
on the leading edge of what the founders hoped would be a revolution in
communications. The name was, of course, a nod to Marshall McLuhan, who
envisioned the world’s people drawn closely together by technology. I happened
to find Global Village mentioned in a book about the “counter-culture.”
I was looking to volunteer when I knocked on their door in a
grungy building in Soho one afternoon. The
harried woman who clambered down the rickety wooden steps to answer, took my
number and said maybe someone would call me. She never smiled and I didn’t
expect much.
The phone was practically ringing as I opened the door back
home. Linda, the group’s overworked office manager asked me when I could start.
At first, I did the usual office work—answer phones, type letters, run errands.
But soon I was trading my writing skills for the opportunity to learn. Global
Village taught classes in video production and editing through the New School,
and they were always looking for money to produce documentaries. In exchange
for sitting in on those classes and going on shoots, I wrote grant applications
and press releases. So while I was plying my skill with words, I learned to frame
shots, shoot video, and tell stories by connecting one shot to another. It was
a crash course in the visual--Global Village favored the cinéma vérité style, their documentaries told
in pictures with no narration.
Five years later, I felt I had learned everything I could there;
it was time to move on. So I ventured into the belly of the beast: I got a
summer job in commercial television, ABC TV. I had applied for one in editing, which
I was experienced at, but was offered one in electronic graphics instead. All I
knew of that was that it involved keyboard-driven computers used mainly to type
words over video images. When I found that an acquaintance of mine, a guy, who
had actually operated those machines,
was offered an editing job instead, I was angry. In fact, I learned, nearly
every one of the people hired to do video graphics that summer was female. And
I was sure it had to do with the stereotype of a woman at a typewriter
So I marched into the personnel office and asked to speak
with someone. The receptionist ushered me into an office, where I met a blowsy
woman in a fuzzy leopard skin dress and high-heeled boots.
“What can I help you with,” she asked with complete
indifference.
I plunged right in. “I’ve been hired for the summer to
operate electronic graphics machines which I have no experience at, rather than
to edit which I do have experience
at. And I notice that most everyone hired for graphics is a woman. I think
you’ve offered me this job because I’m female.”
Leopard skin lady remained indifferent. “It’s not true,” she
said. And paused. “Do you still want the job?”
I’m not sure what I expected. Did I really think she’d admit
to such a thing? Well, I had said my piece, and now answered, “Yes, I still
want the job.” In hindsight, I can’t believe she didn’t withdraw the offer
right there.
Many women at the dawn of computers got a leg up because of
this unfortunate connection between being a girl and being able to type. For them,
as for me, it worked in my favor. As the machines became more sophisticated-- becoming
able to move not just words but images around on the screen--so did our skills.
But these were still the first generation of digital machines, and the
processing was so slow that we routinely worked 15-hour shifts creating and
animating those very primitive images.
One day I was assigned to create a sequence of falling
leaves that would cascade over video of “Wide World of Sports” as the show went
to the commercial, a bumper, as it’s called. I used the machine’s camera to capture
images of leaves of varying shapes, and then shaded them from a palate of a
handful of colors. For hours, I used the keyboard commands to add one leaf over
the other, moving them around as if windblown across the screen, making the
moves look random. The day turned to night and to day again, and I was still
there with the machines, in the tiny, dark cubicle, with that monitor glowing
with multi-hued pictures. The production assistant who had given me the
assignment showed up after a full night’s sleep, astonished that I was still
there. My eyes may have looked glazed, but they were on fire. Seeing had entered
my life in a new way that long day; color had ignited my brain. When I finally
went home, it was with a profound new recognition of image.
Producing came next, through a series of jobs that required the
use of my writing skills again. Researching
stories, pitching them to bosses, sending convincing requests to interview
subjects, and writing scripts. For the first time, I was learning when the
picture should lead and when the words had to. But there was still more to
learn about those images.
For an assignment on the education beat one day, I set up a
shoot with a mother who complained that her son’s school wasn’t cooperating with
his asthma treatment. The cameraman and I came back with lots of video—of the
family in their home, of the mother and son leaving school, an interview with
the school principal. I handed over the logs to the reporter who would be
writing the piece this time. He looked them over.
“Where’s the money shot?” he asked.
“The what?”
“The money shot. The kid with his asthma treatment,” the
reporter answered.
I didn’t have it. It was a painful lesson learned: No word
count could replace the ONE shot that tells the story, the snapshot.
But the words need to be carefully chosen as well. TV words
are meant for the ear, and they work best when they don’t get in the way of the
picture, or when they are linked to the image directly. It’s still always a
deliberate dance, but after many years communicating this way, using words
alone rarely seems enough anymore.
I am not alone. The world at
large—maybe even the entire Global Village—increasingly shares a language that
is as much image as word. British semiotics scholar Gunter Kress calls it society’s
“turn to the visual.” He and others argue that literacy is no longer just a
matter of reading and writing words. For the first time in traditional
scholarship, some are even suggesting that tools other than language might be
used to define a body of knowledge, to make arguments, and to interpret the
world. There is abundant evidence in everyday life that this is so—from
emoticons in emails, to textbooks that seem to have more images than words, to
highly graphic internet pages, to international symbols in public places, and
yes, to our very busy television screens.
Today, I can say with confidence, that I have not fixed television, though I may have
influenced it subtly. Women like me, just by being there, have shaped some of
what is reported, and spoken up for the women in our audiences. We came into
the workplace as new technologies and new ways of communicating were emerging,
and we grew up with them. Margaret Mead saw it coming—television and the visual
drift has shaped my life, the life of
my children, and doubtless one day, the lives of my grandchildren as well.
