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Blogs by James R Musgrave
TV Publishing's Evil Twin 5/29/2006 3:25:39 PM
This is my take on the recent dovetailing of television shows and mass market publishing. Specifically, the LOST TV series on ABC has branched out into the book publishing business. BAD TWIN, by Gary Troup, is a concocted novel sold by megapublishing house Hyperion, owned by Disney, one of the five conglomorates that controls most of what we see, hear and read in the United States. Are novels written by ghost writers that are employed by megacorporate owners considered true art? I doubt it. It's simply another "formula" by these companies to hook consumers into buying their sub-par literary products.
Think about it this way: television never wants viewers to "finish" viewing. In other words, there is no holistic or literary ambition when one creates a TV series. These corporations simply want the viewer to "stay tuned." Thus, programs have no literary merit at all, and they never have a conclusion or what literature classes teach you to experience as the denoument (resolution), which gives the deeper levels of meaning to the entire work. Therefore, books such as BAD TWIN (currently #23 on Amazon.com) are bastardizations of real novels, and they are just one more way corporate America is taking over our consciousness. These books have no sociopolitical importance outside "entertainment for entertainment's sake." LOST, for example, has the usual shadowy "organization" behind its machinations, but the Dharma Initiative and the company that owns it will never be completely explained or resolved to the viewers' satisfaction because all the corporation wants viewers to do is to "guess" what the possibilities are in order to "stay tuned" each week. It is the same with every "popular" TV series one can name. There is never a complete resolution (like the Iraq war, perhaps?), so the public is conditioned to experience a perpetual state of asking "what's next?" No real or adequate resolution (God fobid a literary resolution that resonates with thematic perfection) will ever be provided because it would mean the corporation would have to reflect on its own existence and its reason for being. And, as we all know, it exists only to entertain and never to give us any inner or insightful meaning.
Let's get back to real novels written by artists who have total control over the medium (independent artists who also, conincidentally, collect most of the price of the book or film). Indies are our only hope to escape from these "beasts of LOST rip-offs and spin-offs, ad infinitum."
