Editorial May 12, 1980 ISSUE

Being there through spiritual sense

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

Imagine a man who since childhood has been isolated in a large house. He has spent his life tending the garden, his knowledge of the outside world almost wholly garnered from television. In middle age he must leave the house. This is the theme of a recent film. It explores the central character's confrontation with a reality different from that to which he has been conditioned, the reality he has absorbed in switching from channel to channel, program to succeeding program, with their exaggerations and oversimplifications.

Circumstances finally force him to leave his small cosmos and its several TV sets. He soon faces a young street tough with a knife. He tries to switch off the situation by pointing at it a TV remote control device he has taken along in his pocket. And so his extraordinary adventures in a "new" world begin to unroll.

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