By Tevis Eurythmic
Cinema hates television. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs posits that there are true novels and fake novels—books labeled “a novel” that are really just narratives created to move mass units of recycled stereotypes and tired tropes. Visual depictions of small screens inside cinematic worlds in the 1970s and 1980s suggest cinema felt the same about television: that the “idiot box” is a fraudulent, socially corrosive form of visual storytelling—a cheap, fake version of cinema.