"Television, they say, will permit a person to be entertained at home, without the effort of going to a picture house, without the trouble of booking seats, without the presence of other people"
About this Quote
Novello’s line lands with the lightness of a showman and the unease of a working artist watching the ground shift under his feet. The phrasing is key: “they say” frames television as a rumor, a sales pitch, a modern promise being whispered by technologists and boosters rather than lived, tested reality. He’s not impressed by the convenience; he’s suspicious of what convenience is being used to smuggle in.
The sentence builds a staircase of diminishing “effort”: no trip to the picture house, no booking seats, then the real tell - “without the presence of other people.” That last clause sharpens the joke into critique. Novello, a composer-performer steeped in live audiences and the social ritual of entertainment, is pointing at the hidden cost: removing friction also removes communion. The cinema outing isn’t just content delivery; it’s a public act, a shared mood, a small civic experience. Television offers not simply ease but insulation.
Context matters. Novello’s career sits across the rise of mass entertainment and the tightening circuitry between art and industry. By the late 1930s and 1940s, TV was an approaching force (interrupted by war, then roaring back), threatening theaters, cinemas, and the ecosystem around them. His intent reads less like technophobia than a canny defense of liveness: he’s warning that “entertained at home” can become “contained at home,” trading the messiness of other people for the clean solitude of a screen.
The sentence builds a staircase of diminishing “effort”: no trip to the picture house, no booking seats, then the real tell - “without the presence of other people.” That last clause sharpens the joke into critique. Novello, a composer-performer steeped in live audiences and the social ritual of entertainment, is pointing at the hidden cost: removing friction also removes communion. The cinema outing isn’t just content delivery; it’s a public act, a shared mood, a small civic experience. Television offers not simply ease but insulation.
Context matters. Novello’s career sits across the rise of mass entertainment and the tightening circuitry between art and industry. By the late 1930s and 1940s, TV was an approaching force (interrupted by war, then roaring back), threatening theaters, cinemas, and the ecosystem around them. His intent reads less like technophobia than a canny defense of liveness: he’s warning that “entertained at home” can become “contained at home,” trading the messiness of other people for the clean solitude of a screen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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