Hemingway, wrote [Edmund] Wilson, was "his own worst-drawn character," by which we must assume that this hunter-bullfighter-war-lo...ving he-man failed to meet the classic specifications of a literary construct; he had no depth, not enough curious contradictions, represented not a concatenation of qualities but a single one played to the hilt. In short, he was what popular novelists (and movies, of course) give us, a type not an individ ual. It was the same way with Monroe. She had taken her basic bimbo's understanding of the world, and her instinct for leveraging it, and played her bimbohood for all it was worth, just as any popular novelist would have, and for the same reason: it represented her full understanding of the character, the best that she could do with it, and we sensed that she was not cheating or talking down to us through it, even though it read easily and did not tax us as it touched us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we get on television is not a headline service but a tabloid service. It takes that old format to its logical extreme, since ...manifestly television is all pictures, for which anchormen and reporters merely provide captions. Some stories, alas, cannot be illustrated. Usually they are the complicated and boring ones--about the economy or foreign policy, let us say. The inherent demand of the medium is to get through this stuff as quickly and painlessly as possible, cut from the talking heads to the crying heads (disaster victims, let us say, or political loonies), or better still, running feet or rapidly moving vehicles--explosions, riots. Like the tabloid journalists before them, the television crew is always on the alert for an emblematic figure and will thrust a moment of fame on anyone who is eyewitness to a disaster.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »