The VCR Ate My Brain

President Reagan was at his ranch, sitting at a desk outdoors in the morning fog. He had just signed a tax-cut bill, and he was the soul of amiability as he fielded questions from the press. It was August, and everyone was delighted to be in Santa Barbara instead of Washington. The President's dog strolled over.

Three thousand miles away, in my Manhattan apartment, I watched this scene on my 17-inch Sony as I unpacked my new video-cassette recorder---a JVC Vidstar---and removed it from its Styrofoam cocoon.

For a long time, I'd been telling myself that I didn't need a VCR. I was a moviegoer, a rock-'n'-roll fan, a reader of newspapers, magazines and books. Except for baseball games and the odd assassination, I wasn't much of a TV viewer. I'd never seen M*A*S*H or All in the Family. I couldn't have cared less who shot J.R. I felt my blood pressure rise at the mere mention of Fred Silverman. What would I do with a machine designed to retrieve and store that which was created to be utterly disposable?

Still, I wanted one. Friends who owned them boasted of watching ten straight hours of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, of renting such movies as Dr. Strangelove and Annie Hall, of fast-forwarding at triple speed through (continued on page 144)VCR Ate My Brain(continued from page 121) John Houseman's Smith Barney commercials. I came to see the VCR as an electronic Robin Hood, taking power from the big, bad TV networks and giving it to the lowly viewers. Having defined it as an instrument of cultural revolution, I felt obligated to get one.

I plugged in the machine and hooked it up to the television as the President leaned back in his chair, laughing, and demonstrated to the assembled reporters that he didn't tuck his pants into his boots. I studied the VCR instruction booklet, then called the phone company and set the quartz timer clock to the exact second. I peeled the shrink wrap off the cassette, slid the tape into the machine and started to record just as Mrs. Reagan, smiling insincerely, joined the gathering. A journalist asked the President his dog's name.

A few minutes later, I stopped recording and rewound the tape. Did it work? I pressed the playback key. There on my TV screen was Mrs. Reagan again, smiling insincerely. A journalist asked the President his dog's name. "Lassie," he said, beaming, and then he stopped beaming and said, "Millie! Millie's her name."

The leader of the free world had just forgotten his own dog's name. I rewound the tape and watched him forget it again. And again. Yes, the machine worked.

•

In the beginning, there was something vaguely naughty about using the VCR. Did NBC idiotically broadcast SCTV, the best show in the history of television, in the wee hours of Saturday morning? I watched it on Sunday afternoons. Was I usually out during the evening news? Dan Rather's intense glare illuminated my TV screen at midnight. My enjoyment of "time shifting"---the networks' name for watching things at the wrong times---was enhanced by this illicit thrill. I could speed things up, slow them down or stop them entirely if I felt like taking a break. I was giddy with power. This was how TV was meant to be experienced, and all previous interaction with the medium seemed obsolete.

Before long, I was watching a lot of television, turning on the set automatically as soon as I got home. There was something oddly comforting about resuming an activity I'd written off as moronic when I was 14, and my resistance continued to crumble. I came to admire Johnny Carson's ability to get laughs out of failed material. I found Larry Hagman's portrayal of J. R. Ewing a work of comic genius, and missing an episode of Dallas soon became unthinkable. In time, I found a warm spot in my heart for Jane Pauley.

The VCR was reconnecting me with the mainstream roots I'd renounced in the Sixties, easing my sense of alienation, welcoming me back into the fold. I began keeping its remote-control unit within arm's reach as I moved around my apartment, a compulsion that did not go unnoticed by friends.

•

A few months later, A Clockwork Orange---my favorite movie---turned up on Cinemax the day after my building was wired for cable. I taped it, of course, and after taping Mean Streets and Sullivan's Travels a few days later, I decided to build a modest film library. I'd heard horror stories about seemingly normal people who bought VCRs and abandoned their former lives, focusing all their energies on increasingly indiscriminate frenzies of taping. I wasn't worried. With the price of blank tapes hovering between $11 and $14 apiece, that fate seemed unlikely for me.

Once I started collecting, though, it seemed arbitrary to limit myself to movies. One night, I was watching The Honey-mooners and thought, There are only 39 of these; why not tape them? A few weeks later, I started on The Twilight Zone and made a mental note to get all the Monty Python's Flying Circuses next time they were shown. When MTV was added to my cable system, I thought I also ought to be taping rock videos. I knew someone at the station who sent me advance copies of the minute-by-minute play lists telling me when to tune in for the songs I wanted. Within a month, I'd recorded 300 of them.

And all the while, the price of blank tapes kept dropping. One day I found a store that sold TDK T-120s for $8.99, and I heard myself ask for a box of ten.

With 60 hours' worth of recording tape at hand, I set aside one cassette to gather up those random video moments that defied easy categorizing. One day, for instance, I turned on the local news and found Pia Zadora telling the weatherman how much she loved being rich. "I enjoy a kind of a lush lifestyle," Pia said, her pear-shaped face filling the screen as I started recording. "I mean, I drive around in a limousine and I stay at the best hotels. But that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not serious about my work. I'm an achiever. I love to work. I love to create. It's my thing."

A week later, I caught John Belushi's last TV appearance, inside a bloated body bag being carried out of Hollywood's Château Marmont. Another evening, I tuned in just in time to capture Supreme Court Justice Byron White getting socked three times in the head in Utah by a large bearded man who shouted, "That busing and pornography just doesn't go!" One morning over breakfast, I taped footage of a man in Alabama setting himself on fire while a news crew stood by and faithfully recorded the event.

And one night, a visibly excited President Reagan shared the stage of a Vegas Up with America rally with several lounge singers. "Wait till I go home," gushed the President of the United States, "and tell Nancy I played Las Vegas with Wayne Newton and Bob Goulet!"

With stuff like that regularly turning up unannounced, I began keeping a tape loaded in the machine at all times. And I noticed feelings of vague unease whenever my supply of blanks dipped below three.

•

I gradually realized that I was experiencing two kinds of time: Real Time, with all of its well-known imperfections, and Video Time, a new, improved time in which everything lasts only as long as you want it to. As the weeks went by, keeping them separate became increasingly difficult. I watched the world series live on TV and caught myself trying to speed up the commercials, which seemed interminable at their normal 30-second length. Waiting in a bank line, I felt a sudden urge to fast-forward myself up to the teller's window. I was merging with my VCR.

Where I had once prided myself on never reading TV Guide, I was now rushing to the newsstand every Monday morning to pick up the following week's issue. That was another VCR-induced time warp, leaving me desperate to know every detail of not only this week's TV schedule but also next week's. I would go through the program listings with a yellow marking pen, highlighting the things I wanted to tape. Was Albert Brooks going to be on The Tonight Show ? Were there any W. C. Fields movies coming up? Was anybody interviewing Richard Nixon? To avoid even the slightest possibility of forgetting to record something. I began typing up weekly Things to tape lists.

It alarmed me when I found myself thinking about the new TV Guide as early as Saturday evening---a full week before its listings took effect.

•

One Monday morning, I got a wonderful surprise: WNEW-TV was about to rerun Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a true television classic. This was my first commitment to taping something five nights a week, and it required enormous discipline. I knew from sad experience how the VCR mocked even the most conscientious collector. At various times, I'd forgotten to set the timer; I'd set it but neglected to switch it on; I'd provided 90 (continued on page 160)VCR Ate My Brain(continued from page 144) minutes' worth of blank tape for a two-hour show. I'd left outdated programs on the timer. I'd pushed the pause button to avoid taping commercials and failed to unpause it when the show resumed. Despite those potential pitfalls, I managed to tape 109 of the first 110 Mary Hartman episodes. I left an empty half hour on the tape where the missing show---number 92, the victim of a sudden cable outage on my block---would go if I ever got another crack at it.

Then, with no warning, the show disappeared from the schedule, replaced by a talk show called Thicke of the Night. Collectus interruptus! I called the station, angrily demanding, then politely requesting and, finally, abjectly pleading that they broadcast the 20 episodes that would complete the story line through Mary's breakdown on The David Susskind Show. No way, I was told. I checked the TV Guide to see if any Connecticut station was still running the series, thinking that maybe I ought to take a VCR and go stay in a hotel in New Haven for a month, but none was.

Finally, I accepted defeat. The fact that I had yet to watch even one of the 2400 minutes of Mary Hartman I'd recorded was small consolation.

•

It occurred to me one evening to figure out exactly how much material I had on tape that I'd never seen. I counted more than 50 television programs and 100 movies, including such greats as Vertigo, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Sunset Boulevard. This is ridiculous, I thought; instead of actually watching something, I'm making a list of things I haven't watched; but I didn't dwell on that for long, because I suddenly remembered two old shows I wanted to start collecting, neither of which was then being syndicated in New York, which annoyed me quite a bit---what were they waiting for, Armageddon?---and, hey, was my phone broken or something, it seemed like years since anyone had called, and why was I getting all these magazines I never had any time to read, and, shit, I'd forgotten to put a tape in the machine and I was missing Bedtime for Bonzo.

•

After two years, video tapes had marched their way across 11 shelves that had formerly held books and were midway through the take-over of a 12th. By then, I had 418 movies, ranging from the sublime (Citizen Kane, Badlands, Lolita) to the ridiculous (Endless Love, Mommie Dearest, Hardly Working). I had---in addition to the 109 Mary Hartmans---all 39 Honeymooners, all 45 Monty Pythons, 126 episodes of The Twilight Zone, 78 hours of SCTV, 60 hours of Dallas and a 13-hour PBS special about Vietnam that I'd heard was excellent, though I hadn't actually seen any of it. I had 623 rock videos, of which at least 12 or 15 were probably not bad.

I had 1200 hours---50 days---of video tape, every minute of it painstakingly indexed. For all of it, though, the things I cherished were those unexpected and unheralded moments of video surrealism that I'd snatched out of the air: Barbara Walters asking Katharine Hepburn "what kind of tree" she'd be if she were a tree. Tom Snyder chatting with Charlie Manson. John DeLorean burbling to the cops who were about to bust him that the cocaine he was holding was "better than gold." (The VCR had made it possible to have the worst moment in a total stranger's actual life in your personal video file.)

News reports on homeless people were followed by people in clown costumes reviewing movies. Gruesome crimes were recycled within months as TV movies or "docudramas." Nancy Reagan hopped into Mr. T's lap and kissed his huge head, and the President came before the cameras singing the praises of James Bond. As I taped, the boundaries between reality and fantasy were being destroyed on the nation's TV screens, the touchstones of sanity picked off one by one, like the space rocks in Asteroids.

The First Lady appeared as herself on an episode of Diffrent Strokes. The Speaker of the House draped himself over a barstool or two on Cheers. A former President and his Secretary of State---Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger---served themselves up as video wallpaper for the stars of Dynasty. "Hello, Alexis, good to see you," growled Kissinger to Joan Collins, who never stopped shaking his hand as she cooed, "Henry, hello! I haven't seen you since Portofino," and then added lewdly, "It was fun!" (In the episode's closing credits, he was listed as Dr. Henry Kissinger.)

The entire culture was happening on television, an ongoing stream of electronic bits and pieces whose absurdity was obscured by their volume. The VCR made it possible to isolate these moments and, examined individually, their bizarreness was hard to miss. Somebody should be collecting these lunatic epiphanies, I thought, acknowledging that the job was mine as I invented it. It was as if I expected to wake up one morning in a Utopian America and be called on to provide video-taped proof that life here used to be really insane. I realized that what I was searching for was a single piece of incontrovertible evidence, and I knew my VCR was the only place to look.

It dawned on me that I had a serious video habit, and I briefly considered going cold turkey. Instead, I rented a second machine.

•

The new VCR, an RCA VJP900, cost $50 a month. It was a top-of-the-line model, and its up-to-the-millisecond features included a wireless remote control, a three-week timer and a scan that let me view tape forward and backward at up to 12 times normal speed. Not only did it double my recording capacity but it freed me from having to save an entire program for a fabulous four-minute chunk. Now I could dub the part I wanted onto a master cassette and reuse the original. Even with the price of tapes dropping below six dollars, this would save me a lot of money.

The second machine empowered me to make copies of tapes to trade with other collectors---I'd met several at my local video store or, rather, at the one of the eight local video stores that I patronized. It also opened up the possibilities of creative editing. I started a list of tapes I could compile:

Take My Kid, Please. Excerpts from prime-time soaps in which parents of young children are shown interacting with their toddlers during the opening seconds of a scene and then handing them over to the nearest servant.

Details at Eleven. Breathless promos hyping upcoming local news shows: "Soviet troops cross the Polish border, and a report on a Long Island boy who makes hats out of ice cream." "The Pope is dead, but the Red Sox are still alive." "Bad butter in the Bronx."

That Was No Lady. Samples of performances by actresses playing prostitutes in TV movies and miniseries.

Adolf, We Hardly Knew Ye. Samples of performances by actors playing Hitler in TV movies and miniseries.

Neatness Counts. The closing moments of Tom Brokaw's daily newscasts, during which the anchor man straightens his script and fastens it with a paper clip.

The Buss Stops Here. Game-show host Richard Dawson kissing his contestants.

They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wave. President Reagan and his wife waving at the cameras as they get on and off airplanes and helicopters.

In fact, I started none of those collections, preferring to preserve things as haphazardly as I found them. I was a pop-culture prospector scanning for video gold, taping as much as 14 hours of television a day and then speeding through it in search of 20-second-long nuggets like Ringo Starr in Princess Daisy---having his toenails painted in a hot tub and trilling, "If only Mum could see me now"---or Pia Zadora bouncing onto The Merv Griffin Show with a dog wearing a black scarf ("Gucci?" Merv asked. "Of course," said Pia) or the broadcast of a three-year-old video-dating tape made by Christopher Wilder, who was in the midst of a murder spree that had claimed several female victims. "I want to date," Wilder had said. "I want to socially meet and enjoy the company of a number of women."

•

When I started collecting, I'd used a ballpoint pen to write out the identifying labels I stuck on each tape. After a year, I'd found that black felt-tip was easier to read, and I'd relabeled all of them.

Now I took an aesthetic dislike to the way the five-and-a-half-inch-long strips looked on the sides of the seven-and-a-half-inch-long cassettes, and I decided to replace them with the more understated three-and-a-half-inch-long ones. "I redid my labels," I told my girlfriend when she asked what I'd done the previous evening.

"That's the third time," she said; and before too much longer, she wasn't my girlfriend anymore.

•

"Man," said my cable repairman one afternoon, eying the wires connecting the switchers, splitters and power booster to the TV, the two VCRs and the cable box, "every time I come here, you get in this deeper and deeper."

•

The more I fixated on this video blending of reality and fantasy, the more I returned to the first image I'd recorded: President Reagan. I had dozens of hours of him on tape. I had him in the Vatican nodding off during a meeting with the Pope. I had him in Brazil toasting his hosts, "the people of Bolivia." I had him in the Oval Office arm-wrestling with a bodybuilder while his aides in the next room were briefing reporters on the U.S. pull-out from Lebanon. I had him filling sandbags in Louisiana, riding a stagecoach in Montana, hoisting a beer (but not drinking it) in a Boston pub. I had him playing with a computer, driving a tractor, blowing out birthday candles, picking out valentine cards, swinging a hockey stick, tossing a baseball, calling a tax increase a "revenue enhancement" and a nuclear warhead a "peacekeeper." I had him with Jerry Lewis and Merv Griffin and Michael Jackson and Spider-Man, with Barbara Walters and Claudette Colbert and Tammy Wynette and Kate Smith, with dogs and horses and turkeys and pigs. I had him doing everything but actually working at the job of running the country. If I ever found that single piece of video tape that would confirm the merging of truth and fiction in America, it seemed likely to star Ronald Reagan.

To me, "President Reagan" was the ultimate television creation---a character who was also the product, selling himself to a target audience that had spent the past quarter century getting used to people with two or three large emotions and no small ones. His moods were always broadly telegraphed. When he was Friendly, his eyes crinkled and his head bobbed like a toy dog in the rear window of a car. When he was Happy, he threw his head back, mouth agape in laughter. When he was Angry, his lips compressed; when he was Sad, his voice cracked; and when he was Busy, he wore glasses. There were no subtleties, no rough edges. He was unlike any human I'd ever known.

For all its dedication to artifice, television has been unmatched for revealing the truth about those who appear on it. The only rule for playing the TV game is that you have to be willing to risk baring your soul. But Reagan was cheating---instead of opening himself up to the audience, he hid behind his role, playing a part that existed only on camera---and he was getting away with it. When the press called attention to things that contradicted the electronic image, the public ignored or reinterpreted them. His loose grasp of the facts was seen as an endearing idiosyncrasy. His distaste for detail somehow became charming. His oft-repeated one-liners were hailed as wit. People liked this "President Reagan" character, and they didn't want his series canceled.

With hundreds of episodes of The President Reagan Show in my collection, I was still missing the one that answered the question he himself had raised with his autobiography: "Where's the rest of me?" I wanted to see the Wizard behind his video curtain. I wanted to watch the President of the United States without his knowing he was being watched.

•

My search continued. Scanning through Good Morning America one afternoon, I found David Hartman's jail-cell interview with Margie Velma Barfield, who was scheduled to be executed that week in North Carolina after confessing to feeding four people---including her boyfriend and her mother---rat poison. "What's the plan?" Hartman inquired solicitously. "Are you afraid of this coming Friday?...Have you ever said, 'I just can't believe what I did!'?" Barfield seemed subdued.

They both looked like potatoes.

Back in the studio, Joan Lunden was wearing a dress I'd definitely seen her in before. How many outfits does she have, I wondered, and how often does she repeat them? Is there a regular rotation? That information, I realized, was available to me if I chose to make it mine. All I had to do was save a few seconds of each day's show, then go back after a month or two and check out her wardrobe. The VCR, I thought, is the key to otherwise unobtainable knowledge. Of course, I could gather that particular data by just watching the show and taking notes, but the VCR enabled me to sleep till noon and still do it. It occurred to me that no sane person could have had these thoughts.

A few days later, in the early-morning darkness outside the prison, a woman who had witnessed Barfield's execution by lethal injection reported that "during the procedure itself, there was no movement, no jerking, nothing to that effect." Barfield wore pink pajamas, we were told, and her last meal was Cheez Doodles and Coca Cola. Oh, yes, and right after she was killed, her body was rushed to a waiting ambulance, where a donor-transplant team tried to restart her heart in order to save her kidneys.

•

I was taping several hours of news a day. One night, I caught John Bangs of American Cyanamid defending the policies of U.S. corporations in South Africa. "Leadership of the American companies," he explained, "has gone a long way toward helping oppose the bad aspects of apartheid." Bangs did not elaborate on the good aspects of apartheid.

Another night, I taped an update on Richard Nixon's shingles. And the night after that, News 4 New York had an "exclusive" interview with one Irene Weinchoski, a 60ish redhead who had gotten subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz's autograph after serving him lunch at the Mark Twain Diner in Union, New Jersey.

"What did he have to eat?" the NBC reporter asked.

"A turkey sandwich on whole-wheat toast, with lettuce and tomato," said Weinchoski, "and a glass of orange juice."

"What was it that made you want that man's autograph?" the reporter asked.

"Just that I saw him on TV," the waitress said. "That was the only reason."

I thought of driving to New Jersey to get Irene's autograph 'cause I saw her on TV.

•

And then it was over. A friend sent me a cassette with a note saying, "I think you've been looking for this." The tape, my friend explained, had been pirated by someone with a back-yard satellite dish that enabled him to pick up live network feeds that were not broadcast to the general public. It had been recorded during the quarter hour preceding Super Bowl XIX, and it was labeled Let Reagan Be Reagan. I loaded it into the VCR.

President Reagan was in the White House, standing in front of a painting. He was staring to his right at a TV monitor tuned to the pregame activities at the Super Bowl in Stanford. Two men hovering on his left had their hands in his jacket pockets as they hooked up his mike. "Hey," Reagan said, "looks like they're gettin' ready."

The President---who earlier in the day had been sworn in for a second term---was topping off his Inauguration with a guest shot on The Game, flipping the coin to determine whether Miami or San Francisco would receive the opening kick. They'd gotten him down here early, though, so he stood on his mark and waited silently, eying the coin in his right hand. "Let me see how this works," he said nervously, flipping it to the floor. "It is heads," he intoned grandly, testing his delivery. He flipped it again. "It is tails." Now he was ready for anything. Someone in the room showed him which camera would be on when ABC cut to the White House for the coin toss. "Play to that one," Reagan said, nodding. "All right." He resumed his expressionless stare at the TV.

Suddenly, he perked up a bit. "I have to tell ya, Frank Sinatra had a recommendation---instead of tossin' the coin---what woulda been a lot better," he said, making up in body language what he lacked in syntax. "You'd have had me outdoors throwin' out the ball---I would have thrown it---a little artwork, of maybe a ball going across a map; and out there, one of them catching a ball as if it's gone all the way across the United States. How 'bout that?" His attention again returned to the TV. He looked very uneasy, as if he were terrified of blowing his lines, and he held on to the coin with both hands. Someone handed him a page with his script on it and he looked it over, moving his lips as he memorized. America the Beautiful came over the TV, and the President started humming along: "Hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm." Then he stopped. Three minutes had passed since he had entered the room.

Something on the screen amused him, and he laughed quietly to himself, "Heh-heh-heh," and then, "Hee-hee-hee." When the smile left over from those laughs faded, he seemed unsure of what to do with his mouth, and his expression was alternately simian and reptilian until he remembered how it was supposed to go. Then an announcer in the stadium introduced the Super Bowl Children's Choir to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. "Heeeeey," the President said, as if the playing of the national anthem before a sporting event were an unexpected delight. Someone asked him what the temperature in Stanford was. "I don't know," he said, adding, "I do know that the half-time ceremony is an entirely Air Force military-personnel entertainment group." He'd been standing there for seven minutes, not budging from his mark, waiting to go on.

Again he stared at the set, as if he might miss his cue if he took his eyes off the screen. When the sportscaster promised viewers a very unusual coin toss after the next block of commercials, the President made a stupid face and twisted his arm strangely to emphasize the unusual nature of the event. Finally, the referee was introducing him. He checked that coin one last time---yes, it was there---checked the monitor and he was on! Instantly, the whole thing came to life. The smile lit up! The eyes twinkled! The head bobbed! The camera was on! "It's a distinct pleasure and a privilege for me to be a participant," he purred, "although I wish I could be a participant closer at hand. But who makes the call?"

On the field, the Dolphins' captain called heads, and former football great Hugh McElhenny instructed the President to toss the coin. He did, and it took a funny bounce and landed a few feet behind him. After several seconds, he announced, "It is tails." ABC cut to the crowd reaction at the game, and the President deflated as soon as he noticed that he wasn't on. He was reminded that he had an encore coming up, though, so he idled instead of shutting down completely. McElhenny thanked him for his services. "Well, thank you," the President said, on again. "It was a privilege, and all I can say is something that used to be a little prayer of mine when I played football myself: 'May everyone do their best, may there be no injuries, may the best team win and no one have regrets.' " He had been on national television for 42 seconds.

His mike was turned off, so the tense small talk he exchanged with his son Michael while the room emptied out went unrecorded for posterity. Then the President looked around forlornly, offered a little wave to the few remaining audience members and was led out of the room.

I played it through six times, repeating bits of dialog, slowing down sequences, freezing individual frames until I knew every nuance by heart. It was unlike anything else in my collection---an early Andy Warhol movie with a six-foot mannequin instead of a skyscraper, a video black hole sucking the viewer into 15 real-time minutes with a 74-year-old man whose philosophy is "I entertain, therefore I am." When he wasn't playing to an audience, he didn't seem to exist at all.

•

In America, in 1985, it had come to this. A people that spent an average of seven hours a day watching television had chosen a television character as their President. Technology had made it possible for an average citizen with above-average determination and a few thousand dollars to spy on the actor who played the role and to do so from the comfort of his or her own home. And I had in my library a profound historical document---a tape of the most powerful human on the planet standing in one spot for ten minutes, waiting to go on TV and flip a coin. I had set myself the thankless task of proving that fantasy and reality had become indistinguishable, and I had succeeded.

Yes, the machine worked.

"I knew from sad experience how the VCR mocked even the most conscientious collector."

"The things I cherished most were those moments of video surrealism that I'd snatched out of the air."