P&PC's New Acquisition: The Poetry of Motorola's TV Trays

The P&PC Office is certainly going to use them to serve hors d'oeuvres and other tasty treats at this weekend's National Poetry Month Black-Tie Benefit, but we wanted to give those of you who won't be on hand a preview of our most recent acquisition: a set of four promotional TV serving trays that were either sold or given away with Motorola televisions, phonographs, and other entertainment devices in the 1950s or 1960s. Each tray is about sixteen inches long with rounded corners, has a wood-grain veneer, features a colorful cartoon scene by commercial illustrator Vernon McKissack, and includes—what else?—a quatrain like the one accompanying the jazz scene pictured here:

Clap your hands and lift your feet
And dance around to that solid beat
This real gone jive that lets you laugh
Sounds groovy too, on a phonograph.

In addition to the simple fact of the poetry printed on 'em, we were initially attracted to these trays for how this particular one incorporates jazz-related slang for commercial purposes and (of course) for that super-spectacular pun on the word "groovy," which is used to describe both an immaterial social vibe as well as the material substance of the vinyl playback format. Listening to jazz is "groovy" in more than one way, ya dig?

While preparing our franks-in-blankets and deviled eggs, though, we've also become increasingly interested in how Motorola is using the trays to stage a media conversation between the phonograph, music, poetry and print, illustration, and even the television itself, as the television is (we think) simulated by the trays' wooden frames. Indeed, the original box pictured here—which has a cut-out television screen window through which one can view the top tray inside—suggests we are intended to read the rounded wooden tray frames as the rounded wooden frames of old televisions. In a sense, then, the "box" of that television ties together word, picture, music, and phonograph—a claim for the power and unique thrill of what was then the newest new medium of the twentieth century.

As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin might describe it in their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, the jazz scene is characterized by what they call "the twin preoccupations of contemporary media": an interplay between the experience of "immediacy" and the experience of "hypermediacy." On the one hand, the tray (and by extension Motorola's phonograph and television) cultivates immediacy by promising to immerse us in the "live" moment of the improvised jazz performance, thus offering us a "transparent presentation of the real." On the other hand, we are (as Bolter and Grusin say) "challenged to appreciate the integration" of media forms—print, music, image, phonograph, and television—and thus enjoy not the representation but the "opacity of media themselves." That is, not entirely unlike the artist whom the poem tells us is looking "through the window" at the musician playing in the flat next door, we become immersed in the moment by looking through one medium or interface at another. But even here, as the poem explains, the enjoyment of immediate experience hinges on, is accompanied by, or is in a sort of inevitable relationship with a corresponding "opacity" suggested (like the pun on "groovy") by yet another pun: the "fidelity" of the poem's last line, which links the "high fidelity" of the audio playback experience with the authentic experience of live listening. Relying on the pun's cultivation of multiple meanings to direct our attention away from the transparent "content" or "message" and toward the pleasure of multiple media interconnections and media interplay, the tray uses the opacity or thickness of language as a medium to trope the opacity of media more generally, focusing our attention not on the "content" or the "message" being conveyed, but on media itself. (Why else use the triple rhyme of "melody" and "fidelity" if not to call attention to language itself?) Here's that poem:

This master piece will have to wait
Maybe until it's quite too late
Cause who can deny that vibrant melody
Coming through the window with such fidelity.

The lack of a question mark at the end of this verse turns query into fact: what comes "through the window"—a phrase that (for us) recalls the cut-out "window" on the box cover and thus also what comes "through the window" of the television screen or the invisible window of the phonograph—has more fidelity to reality (immediacy) than any of the other media taken in isolation. Like the sketches on the studio floor (or so the logic goes), all other media are incomplete or unfinished except for television and phonograph, which have the power to combine previous media in creating the most immediate of immediate experiences.

Based on this interplay between immediacy and hyper- mediacy, Bolter and Grusin argue that "Although each [new] medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium." Such is the case with the phonograph and television and Motorola's TV trays. For despite offering TV and the phonograph as more immediate or authentic experiences than the verbal, pictorial, or painterly, Motorola only simulates the phonograph and TV on the TV trays themselves; TV is only figured by, not actually present in, the box's cut-out window and the frame of cheap wood, and the phonograph is only mentioned by name, not pictured. Thus, we become aware of "the new medium as a medium" because of the difficulty of representing the phonograph or TV in any other media but themeselves. Oddly, by choosing this print-based format to "advertise" television and phonograph, Motorola is unable to actually dramatize the newness of those media, whether it be their immediacy or hypermediacy; we don't experience the media that Motorola wants us to buy but, instead, have to imagine them for ourselves—just like the child in the tray pictured here who has to look up and away from the media limitations of the book to imagine the scene it describes.

And maybe this is the whole point of the TV trays and the dynamic between immediacy and hypermediacy that the poems point us to and help to cultivate—not to replicate television or the phonograph, but to get us, as consumers, to imagine what the television and phonograph can do. If advertising is designed not to sell a product but to cultivate in a consumer the desire for a product, then the desire produced by the inability to experience television or phonograph via the simulation of older media (the cut-out window on the box, the wooden frame around the scenes, the puns on "groovy" and "fidelity") has an easy fulfillment: simply "grab a partner and do-ce-do" out to the store to buy the real thing.

Once More Into the Fray: The Remediation of Poetry in Liam Neeson's The Grey

Anyone notice that—like G.I. Jane (1997) and The Expendables (2010)—the 2011 Liam Neeson flick The Grey ends with a poem? Yup: it's a four line verse titled "The Fray" that main character Ottway (played by Neeson, a trained hunter hired to protect oil workers from wolves in Alaska) remembers hanging in a frame over the desk in his father's den and that runs through his head (and in flashback on the screen) as he prepares to make a last stand against a wolf pack that has been pursuing him and systematically offing the other survivors of a plane crash in Alaska. (Check out the movie's last scene in the first video clip at the end of this posting; for some reason, btw, the scene has been transposed on the youtube clip so that the poem appears as a mirror image of the original and reads backwards [it reads forward in the original]; you'll get the idea nonetheless).

The Grey does G.I. Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster). Indeed, at the beginning of the film—during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide—the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: "I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. And I know that will never be. You left me. And I can’t get you back … I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what can come of it. I know I can’t get you back … I don’t know why this has happened to us. I feel like it’s me. Bad luck. Poison … And I’ve stopped doing this world any real good...," he writes. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, "Once more into the fray—into the last good fight I'll ever know." The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, "Live and die on this day...  Live and die on this day..."

What we don't know at the beginning of the movie— that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den—gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. There, around a campfire, as the wolves surround them in the darkness, and as one of their group is hallucinating in the process of dying from hypoxia, the men start sharing their stories—about sex, faith, family, and whatever source of inspiration keeps them fighting. Ottway, by this point established as the group's Alpha, tells part of his story and, in an extended scene, flashes back to his childhood. Here's what he says:

My dad, uh, my dad was not without love. But a clichéd Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be—drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems—poetry. Readin' 'em, quotin' em. Probably thought it rounded him off. His way of apologizing, I guess. There was one that hung over his desk in the den. It was only when I was a lot older did I realize that he'd written it. It was untitled—four lines. I read it at his funeral: "Once more into the fray / Into the last good fight I'll ever know / Live and die on this day / Live and die on this day."

A clap of thunder sounds. Ottway concludes, "Storm clouds." And the men turn their attention back to the present.

So, by the last scene of the movie, then, we've heard the poem twice, and we've seen it—or at least the paper it's written on—several other times as Ottway has stored the letter in which it's written in his wallet and saved it from the plane's burning wreckage. Ottway is the only one left alive, and he's somehow managed to stumble into the wolves' den, metaphor that it is for all of his unresolved issues. Surrounded by bones, standing in the falling snow, and ringed by the wolf pack, he kneels down, makes a pile of all the wallets that he's been collecting from everyone who's died, and adds his own to the stack. He flashes back to the woman we saw him thinking about and writing to in the film's opening montage, and we realize now, for the first time, that she she didn't leave him but died, perhaps of cancer. Then he tapes a dagger to one hand, breaks a bunch of airplane liquor bottles against a rock so that they become weapons, and tapes them to his other hand. Thus armed for his final stand, he flashes back again to his dad's den where the poem hangs on the wall. (You get get it, don't you? Wolf den=dad's den?) He says, "Once more into the fray."

Then, as you can see for yourself in the backwards video clip below, the camera shows us the poem. But what's remarkable about this scene is that we don't see the typewritten poem clearly at first. Rather, in becoming a metaphor for his life, which has slowly come into focus over the course of the film, the poem is blurry at first and is brought into focus and made readable by the camera, letting the audience experience in miniature Ottway's journey toward clarity. With the poem newly readable, Ottway repeats it a final time:

Once more into the fray...
Into the last good fight I'll ever know...
Live and die on this day...
Live and die on this day...

When the camera takes us away from Ottway's father's den and back to the wolf den, we see Ottway still mouthing the words to the poem. We see him next as a boy sitting on his father's lap. We see the woods. We have a close-up on his eyes. We hear a growl that may come from him or from the wolves. Then Ottway leaps forward toward the viewer, and the camera goes black.

Back when we discussed G.I. Jane, P&PC argued that the last scene of that movie (in which the camera helped us to read and interpret an annotated print version of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Self Pity") positioned the film's director—and, by extension, the medium of film—as a type of literary critic better suited than the pencil, pen, or book to the interpretation of poetry in the age of new media. In the last scene of The Grey we see a similar thing happening all over again, as it's not the emotional content of the poem, per se, or the conclusions we as an audience come to about the significance of the poem via our own reading or someone else's annotations, but, rather, the film's treatment of the poem in its various forms that becomes the most important (or at least the most foregrounded) expressive and interpretive act, heavy handed in its metaphor though it may be.

It is, after all, the camera—a piece of technology whose multimodal capacities add to the emotion, interiority, and clarity of insight typically associated with poetry—that makes the verse readable, literally giving us a focus that we did not have previously. As the external manifestation of Ottway's internal state, the movie thus positions film (not the poem, letter, or typewritten document) as the most complete expression of the human psyche, able to bring together and synthesize Ottway's thinking (the memorized poem), speaking (the recited poem), writing (the letter to his wife), and typewriting (the version of the poem on the wall of Ottway's father's den) as no other medium can. That is, thanks to film, we can see the poem thought, spoken, written, and typewritten all at the same time.

You might be asking yourself, how can poetry compete with this tour-de-force and with all the resources that film has at its disposal? Well, we here at P&PC think that maybe that's the wrong question to be asking. As Henry Jenkins writes in his Introduction to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, "[O]nce a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media....Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies" (14). In other words, maybe The Gray and films like it aren't in the process of disparaging or one-upping poetry (as we've previously argued) so much as they are grounding themselves and their own credibility in poetry and, in the process, opening new possibilities for experiencing poetry. Rather than experiencing the poem solely as a print artifact, for example, The Gray lets us experience it in many media simultaneously.

As a medium, poetry more than just survived the transition from oral culture to written culture (no one today would advocate for going back to a purely oral or spoken poetry). Then it more than just survived the transition from written culture to print culture (no one would advocate for abandoning printed books and going back to only handwritten poetry). Along its long history of remediation, poetry only got more and more complex and more and more aesthetically rich, retaining aspects of its previous media manifestations and mixing those with new ones. As obsessed with the past as Neeson's story in The Gray may be (Ottway's dead father, his dead lover, etc.), the film may nevertheless be pointing us to the future of poetry.