The Black, and The White By Bill Vaughn
Did Teedle have a stroke, or was he trying to tell us something?

[from the beginning] Day turned into night and back into day. Our TV—we call it Teedle—showed no signs of recovering from its stroke. To us, this was no small matter. Teedle commands a dominant place in our shop, where we design websites and advertising. We don’t only watch the occasional thought-provoking foreign film on the Sundance Channel or educational documentaries on PBS, we watch everything, from morning till night. We watch the Big Joe Polka Show on RFDTV, the Weather Channel, the Food Channel, C-Span, Mexican soap operas, bull-riding, shows about dwarves, fat people, cake-makers, house-flippers, fat dwarves who flip houses, brides who are bitches. Like Winston Smith’s television in 1984, Teedle is always on.

Although we knew Teedle must be tired, and maybe terminally ill, we couldn’t bring ourselves to retire it. Call it cheap, or sentimental, we rarely part with anything. We still drive a 1980 Ford Bronco. One of our mares is 31 years old. We wear hoodies till they fall from our bodies in shreds. Manufactured by Magnavox, Latin for “great voice,” we bought Teedle in 1993 after Kitty drove a hard bargain with the salesman, finally paying a mere $300 for it because it was a demo that had already logged two months on the showroom floor. Plus, Teedle was made in America, at a Philips Consumer Electronics plant in Greeneville, Tennesse, presumably by Americans. During an era when most things in our Big Box stores, from dog food to drywall, come from China, we decided that the karmic benefits of keeping this relic outweighed the benefits of experiencing infomercials in high def.

A month after the Superbowl we were watching Jeopardy when all the life suddenly drained from Alex Trebek’s face. Was he going to vomit? But when the camera shifted back to the contestants we saw that they were ashen, as well. For a moment we hoped Teedle had miraculously recovered its health, and some fiddling with the remote would restore it to its former state. This was not to be. Teedle had decided to broadcast strictly in black and white. Not only that, all the DVDs we rented from Netflix would henceforth look like they came from the MGM library before Ted Turner got his hands on it.

While Teedle’s shimmering day-glo rainbows had frightened us, this somber new geography was relentlessly bleak, like winter in North Korea. By going monochromatic Teedle was also depriving us of critical information. One day on What Not to Wear Stacey and Clinton were trying to convince a dumpy girl with bed head to swap her sweatpants for a skirt. When Stacey gushed “This color is so you!” we didn’t have any more of a clue than the dumpy girl did. As the credits rolled at the end of Rachel Getting Married “four ladies in red” were listed, but we didn’t know, of course, that we had watched ladies in red, or any other color. We stopped going to home improvement shows altogether—that happy chatter about this paint or that made us feel stupid. Ditto cooking shows—all the food looked rotten.  

But we adjusted, and moved on, like people whose brains somehow compensate for the loss of sight in one eye. After all, we both grew up bathed in exactly the kind of wan gray light that now streamed from Teedle. One night as Don Draper was telling Betts another whopper on Mad Men we noticed that we’d rolled our rolling chairs closer to the set. While we’re big fans of the show, this episode wasn’t more or less compelling than the others.

We wondered if our heightened attention had something to do with the fact that Mad Men was set in the early Sixties before color broadcasting became the network norm, and now, for us, had the exact right look. That was only part of it. By withholding its color Teedle demanded that we use our imaginations to fill in the blanks. The extra effort didn’t make us feel more alive—it was still television, after all—but it did make us feel more engaged.

But that’s not to say this ebony and ivory world was anything but a lite version of black-and-white classics like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, or Sunset Boulevard, whose directors used lighting, set design, makeup and costumes to produce a palette of lush gray-tones as velvety as chocolate pudding. For one thing the shadows cast by people and objects in most television, especially the daytime variety, are minimized so they don’t distract viewers from the business of inserting product placement and advertising into our under-challenged brains. In Psycho, on the other hand, shadows are as important as the plot, and as creepy as Norman Bates (although produced in 1960 when it easily could have been shot in Technicolor, Alfred Hitchcock chose black and white because he feared audiences would find the film otherwise too gory).

On July 14 Teedle startled us with something new. During a Seinfeld rerun Elaine barged into Jerry’s apartment. The only thing unusual about this was her jacket. It was the color of cabernet sauvignon. Everything else in the scene was gray, as usual. Then, when she pushed Jerry and said “Shut up!” her coat reverted to charcoal. Colors began appearing several times a day, but only two colors: red and blue, and never at the same time. Plus, the colors were being applied to only one thing: garments. Because we’re only two generations removed from Ireland we’re superstitious—for luck in health and wealth we’ve adorned our hawthorn trees with dollar bills and ribbons and trinkets our great-grandfathers brought with them from County Waterford. So naturally we began looking for messages that might work to our benefit.

Could the red and blue have a political meaning? There are a dozen tight U.S. Senate races coming up in November of 2010 we could make money from by gambling online if only we had the right inside dope. We started keeping a journal with entries like this: “8:23 p.m., May 20, Paula Abdul’s blouse is shape of Illinois (note large bulge), turns red, stays red five scenes.” Could this be a prediction that the Republican candidate will upset the Dem in this traditional blue state?

In September Teedle decided to stop coloring garments exclusively and began painting other objects, as well—cars, computers, sunglasses, the talking lizard in the Geico ads. Could this be information about stocks we should buy? We’d never know. After we failed to see any definite patterns from two months of recording red and blue incidents Teedle suddenly switched back to black and white.

The day the World Series began I was buying limes and beer at Costo in preparation. I happened to walk into the electronics section and was shocked to find myself under a wall of enormous digital televisions broadcasting a cop show. The images of the cops were bigger than me. And the color! It was so sharp and intense I felt like the Slap Chop guy was mincing my brain. I stared, open-mouthed, until a clerk came over and asked if I needed help. Please switch it off, I said, pointing at the screens. No can do, the clerk said. No, not the picture, I said. The color. He turned his head to look at me the way a bird would. Then he fished a remote from his apron, aimed it at the largest set, and clicked through the menu options. In a moment the world was drab again, a happy place.


Copyright © 2010 By Bill Vaughn