Twenty Minutes into the Future

1984 is three years past, and the Brave New World is just 20 minutes into the future. That's where the computer-run and video-tranced world of ABC-TV's "Max Headroom" is located. For the uninitiated, the premise of the "Headroom" show is easy to summarize and almost impossible to explain.

Let's say it's a classic buddy picture, like Butch and Sundance. The buddies are a youngish TV reporter (Edison Carter) and his computer-generated, artificially intelligent clone (the titular hero). But the two-dimensional Max has more wit, personality, and life than his flesh-and-blood prototype, Edison Carter. Max Headroom, a literal talking head, has evolved from "a system to a personality."

Max resides in the computer system of TV Network 23 in a world where television sets no longer have "off switches and ratings are taken every two minutes. All the TV screens are two-way. Those who control "the system" can "access" everyone, and the masses of people have no access at all. It's a world controlled by a tiny handful of mega-corporations with "more power than any single government."

It's a post-industrial world dominated by a soaring and sanitized city of office and apartment towers, for those with access to the information economy. Down below lies a South Bronx-type moonscape littered with TV screens, where the disinformed huddle like street people around barrel fires. It's our world, exaggerated by 20 minutes or so.
The "Max Headroom" show's 60 minutes, including commercials, tell you more about the aesthetic politics and political aesthetics of television than anything to come along since Marshall McLuhan's book The Medium Is the Message. Like McLuhan's foundational work, "Headroom" is not about the content of television, or "what" we watch. It's mostly about "how" we watch and how the fact of watching shapes the rest of our lives.

Stylistically, "Headroom" communicates by putting the experience of watching television on television. Its abrupt fast-cuts, weird angles, and punctuating use of aural and visual static (a.k.a. white noise and snow) mirror the environmental remote-control zapping in most American living rooms. It's as dense with sounds and images as that little 80-channel piece of furniture we all know and love/hate. The "Headroom" show comes loosely wrapped in ancient adventure-narrative conventions. But a visitor from 1945 would find it indecipherable.

Some TV critics, including ace watcher Tom Shales of the Washington Post, have discussed "Headroom" solely in terms of its style. And that's understandable. My own first reaction to the show was that it might be the first genuinely new entertainment television since "I Love Lucy." And the look of the thing is what you'll see in a half-dozen diluted copies by next year.

But the premise of "Headroom"--the ultimate TV personality--and its story lines also comprise a weekly exercise in sophisticated cultural criticism of a distinctly populist stripe. It gives us McLuhan's electronic global village come to life, with all its unprecedented potential for totalitarianism, and democracy.

Message-wise, Headroom, with the aid of his whiz-kid programmer and his humdrum arms and legs, is a sort of class-struggle hero for the post-industrial era. The fight is less for control of the means of production than for access to information. That's what makes the world go 'round when money is only data on a screen. So Max wanders around in computerland unearthing the secrets and foiling the schemes of various corporate criminals and friendly fascists.

THE ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITICS of the show are surprisingly sharp. In the first episode, an ultra-high-tech, subliminal advertising trick turns out to have the unfortunate side effect of causing some constant TV watchers to explode. But, a corporate mogul notes, "No one is that inactive except the sick, the unemployed, and the pensioners. And who cares about them?" Another episode opened with a commercial saying, "In today's world you have a right to consumer credit, personal security, and unlimited TV," with the real kicker coming from the fact that the "ad" appeared at first viewing to be a real-life 1987 bank commercial.

"Headroom" has also featured periodic visits to that 20-minutes-away institution, the body bank, where a thriving business is done in spare parts from fresh corpses, or near-corpses. It's the ultimate metaphor for a scavenger service economy that exists only to sell things to itself with ever-increasing desperation.

But if the abiding verities of art are form, content, and context, then, at least in popular art, the greatest of these may be context. And context-wise it matters considerably that Max Headroom first came to the United States as a Coca-Cola sales image.

The Headroom phenomenon started in Thatcher's Britain as part of a general post-punk cultural rebellion that, for all its innovation, has so far resulted not in broad public resistance to anti-democratic outrages, but in hip cynicism and smug alienation. With the Reaganaut bubble bursting, and the promise of harder times ahead, it may be that images of alienation and rebellion are now considered good marketing on this side of the Atlantic as well. We certainly shouldn't sell ABC and Coca-Cola short in that department.

Danny Duncan-Collum is a contributing editor to Sojourners.