“Vibrant”
is a term of art, as Jimmy Carter’s brother Bill would say, it describes
the “high drive” world of TV execs “sooner than you think”
who train their shows upon a “low drive” audience that is not
vibrant but gray and unattractive. The art, the exacting art, is to deliver a
perfect state of dullness neither irascible nor disaffected,
a test audience is constantly monitored for the effect. Sportsex daily
leads to the jubilee in the title, Artsex harks back to burly-q. “You
cannot do this.”
Reasons pullulate, an inducement of calm after “tensions”
that caused war and riots once, population control gives humanity a chance to
regain equilibrium. The breakthrough came with an understanding of the visual
hold through unobstructed media, but there is another discovery to be made.
The secret of
comedy is discerned to be the joy of escaping another’s misfortune. An Artsex
designer falls to his death while attempting to show his permanent art on the
air, death-like faces open-mouthed as in Munch’s The Scream, the
audience laughs at his evident self-portrait.
The luck of the
Irish is not having a by-blow tested as “low drive” and prone to
banishment, one exec fears the worst and anyway those drawings elicited
thoughts for which there aren’t any words.
The Live-Life
Show is live and new and continuous,
he volunteers for it with his mistress (The Hungry Angry Show) and young
daughter, to dwell on an island and live precariously an unautomated “old
day” existence with cameras everywhere to provide a hilarious moral
lesson to the audience.
No-one on the
island but a surprise local and his wife to habituate the family, and he’s
a psycho who once livened up a broadcast with murder.
Another discovery,
tragedy. Enough to madden a senior exec with the thought, amidst a ratings
jolt, that only his Robinson Crusoe is really alive.
As filmed, the
island scenes are like a remembrance of Flaherty’s Man of Aran and
Nanook of the North. The title theme sung over the end credits is
enchantingly akin to Shea’s The Monitors. The vibrant colors are
lost due to carelessness. “Behind every great man there’s a woman
with a vibrator,” as Hawkeye once said.