Microcosm

Tonight I saw the show at LCI, like I had meant to last Wednesday, before forces outside my control intervened.

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The show is housed in Boulogne, the suburb to the west of Paris. Like most of the suburbs of Paris, the buildings are comparatively more modern. Across the Seine from the TF1 building—behind which the LCI (La Chaîne d’Info; translate that to: The News Channel) building stands—a crane ferried trash from construction into a garbage barge. A half-completed glass-covered bridge stretched forlornly over the Seine.

The sidewalks were narrow and the streets deserted, save for the occasional car driving past. The only people out were security guards, bored out of their minds guarding the front of the news networks. Craning the neck upwards, I could see solitary figures pacing and smoking. It seemed an American office park translated to France.

The buildings of TF1 and LCI were all sharp vistas of glass, with a curved tower rising above all the rest; the twilight fell upon it beautifully, reflecting a soft tranquility across the glass, a canvas for nature’s art. These buildings were resolutely modern in comparison to the center city’s insistent classicism. Both work, to be honest, in their ways, but it is difficult to see these new monoliths, however beautiful they are, encouraging street life or mixing outside of them. That isn’t really intended for the office park specifically, I can sense, but at the same time, they dominate over the landscape of the quarter, imposing its vision on the rest of the quarter, the tranquility of its reflected twilight falling on the entire ‘burb.

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The tranquility reflected did not reflect inwards also. Stepping inside was stepping inside a microcosm, an ecosystem devoted to the production of news. I found myself sitting in the lobby on a blue leather coach, staring at two features that would remain constant: the digital clock, and the bank of televisions.

The clock is indeed everywhere in LCI, understandably so. Besides operating in the journalism business, which is all about scoops and time-sensitivity, the channel operates in the television division of journalism, which pays fealty to the minute, or else advertisers won’t pay. It’s also probably understandable that televisions are present everywhere, almost invariably (with two amusing exceptions, which will be spoken of later) tuned into LCI. It’s addicting to be able to see the products of your own work as they are completed, up to the minute, as well as being practical on some level.

These, however, were only the most obvious manifestations of the particular microcosm. Those brilliant glass facades of the building reflect light but do not provide a great view, enclosing the entire building. The screensavers featured a view of the Seine around Boulogne, with the LCI building magnified.

The organization of the workers creates further environments within the ecosystem. Each group of reporters sits in a pod, sharing space and conversation. As I wandered behind the producer, named Germain Dagnonet, for the Michel Field show Le 18/20, I saw that the organization aided community-building, even outside of one’s own pod. People routinely wandered outside of their pod, like bees carrying out tasks.

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If there was a queen bee, it was the presenter of the show, Michel Field.

Once you see a person in real life who you’ve seen before on TV, you immediately compare the person’s real-life personality to that person’s TV personality, and it dominates your thinking of that person for a long period of time upon meeting that person. The comparison was neither negative nor positive for Michel Field, but it was still the primary locus of my thoughts.

You see, on TV, M. Field plays the large jolly man (who is smart) role, with a large grin and plenty of jokes, whereas in person, M. Field wore a stoic, detached, almost grumpy expression for the majority of the night. His entrance into my awareness was in the production room, where he said a quiet hello to the room and assumed his seat in the corner of the room at his computer. He reacted to all news and questions with equanimity. Clearly, everyone was eternally aware of his large presence and heavy, plodding walk when in the room even if they did not react.

Seen later, watching LCI in a TV outside the studio, he had mastered the trick of balancing a can of Diet Coke on his knee while performing a kind of introverted meditation while consulting his cell phone and TV simultaneously. It was a kind of game face, I thought at the time, and when the time came to do an interview “Oui/Non” with a French student leader (of which more will be spoken of later), he began to banter with her while standing opposite her on podiums.

Before the interview, I watched from inside the production room, and each started stiff, contained, but each warmed up while joking with each other and moving around. The girl, the French student, alternated between swaying and allowing her hands to fall against her sides after raising them. As M. Fields told his jokes, he paced in a circle without turning his torso. Eventually, as the interview drew closer, they settled into their positions and assumed their TV personalities with bright smiles and animated expressions.

Listen, it’s no secret that TV causes the watched as well as the watcher to behave differently; that personalities are changed under the heat of the lights and cameras (when the girl exited the studio, she wiped her face as if she had just finished a nice sauna session). It’s one thing to note it intellectually, and another to observe it yourself. And, still, further, yet another to wonder (although this too is not a particularly groundbreaking point): we have not made the realization that those who animate television do not animate real life as well; hence we assume that our M. Fields, television personalities, with their effervescence, will illuminate rooms, while M. Fields, otherwise, may not fill the room in quite the same way. The force of this realization has not quite penetrated the subconscious; we see politicians, particularly, but actors and entertainers also, and assume their television skills are just as commanding in other contexts.

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In the preceding paragraph, I tried to avoid the “real life”/”television” distinction. This is common to many critics of television. This implies that television is fake life. It is not, no more than writing or painting or other representations are fake life. No, it is seeing real life through muddied glass just like those others, only its verisimilitude fools us sometimes that we seeing the real thing, making our disappointment all the more potent when we realize it is not, leading us to toss around calumnies like “fake life.” Which is not true and we should have known it all along.

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The vending machines, in a rebuke to the rest of France, sell huge, US-movie-theater-sized bags of M&Ms and sandwiches and the rest of the cheap fuel for the demanding lifestyle.

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Now is as good a time as any to mention the non-LCI shows that were being played. In the production room, which is the Mr. Potato Head of TV (each graphic can be added and subtracted with the flick of a button), two of the guys were watching amusing non-LCI related programming. One was YouTube hijinks. The other was a traffic cop stopping onrushing cars and pedestrians from a variety of angles with music video style moves. They glanced furtively at these things, but they did so. Heck, I can understand—who wants to watch The News Channel all day?

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The stories that the show covered had a typically American balance of subjects: two deaths, a big business deal, and a ukulele player’s CD.

Is it any wonder that people in the US perceive the media as so negative? The negative, feel-bad stories—a murder in the RER and an fatal motorbike accident leading to riots—were so immediate, so visceral, so real in their consequences that only a dullard could fail to grasp their importance. On the other hand, in what realm other than the abstract can someone rejoice over Airbus’ big deal with China? I’m sure the PDG (CEO), the stockholders and the workers felt a thrill, but other than those people, who else really felt energized by that? I approve in the abstract, I suppose, but it’s hard for me to get my emotions involved. Which is how a lot of media works in the US too. Why is this? Is there merely such a great creative variety of the evils that we can do to each other that the various manifestations will always provoke interest? Are only the grand good deeds mold-breaking enough to be interesting? Is it merely the case that a person’s tranquil happiness is not interesting to us? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a combination of all of those factors.

Particularly interesting was the motorbike death. The RER murder (on the D; I live on the B—no need to be nervous, I guess) is the typical monstrosity of murder-sexual assault which has become familiar to viewers of CSI and Law & Order: SVU. The motorbike death, however, is one of those stories which reveals something of the society underneath.

What is not in dispute is that two teenage motorcyclists crashed into a French police patrol car. The government claims that the motorcycle (two people were sharing the same one) was going above the speed limit; apparently “witnesses” (the vague term has been used with all reports) back that assertion up. But nevertheless, the community erupted, and a protest was organized, along with Molotov cocktails being thrown at the police station in Sarcelles, a Parisian suburb.

This is what happens when a conflict becomes, in the minds of participants, between one group and another, between ‘the police’ and ‘the immigrants.’ Any incident is liable to escalate. And why not? Once the logic of mutual group antagonism is accepted, it only seems as if each provocation is within that logic, even if it is a mere accident. This is the genius of the republican social contract system: it promises to treat each case as an individual case, not a case of groups warring amongst each other. It requires trust, on both sides: perhaps the immigrants would do well to integrate; the politicians would do better to stop muttering darkly about the immigrant threat. If we want to succeed in defusing the Middle East, we must succeed in convincing Muslims that we bear them no antagonism against them as a group. And we fail just a little bit more every time any Republican (pick ‘em) opens his dumb mouth.

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I saw a man getting on the metro with a bag from a lingerie store in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other. He had a rigid set to his jaw, as if he were clamping down on a mouthguard. I thought, good luck but it’s probably not going to work out.

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Last week I saw a performer on the metro. In between songs he spoke of his politics. He hated Sarkozy; referred to his immigrant policies as racist and fascist. Sometimes it’s tough to disagree, especially when you hear about the camps in the north of France where they send immigrants to be deported.

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Two guys were in front of me in the ATM line. One was trying to engage his friend on every subject under the sun—Sarkozy, soccer, women, all the rest—and his friend was not effusive, speaking in tones that indicated even “Oui” was an effort for him.

“Hey, did you see my new phone?” The first guy said, as if, I know what will work.

“No, I didn’t.” His friends’ tone was more interested now.

The first guy practically tore off his front jean pocket getting his phone out. It had a huge screen. It was pretty cool, and they chattered about its 3G capabilities throughout the rest of the transaction. It seems like everyone everywhere loves their gadgets.