Addicted to the Tube

The Tube, a new documentary film by Peter Entell, raises significant issues about the physiological dangers of TV and computer screen viewing. It gives its evidence in a roundabout, self-contradictory way, showing hints of paranoid hysteria in the journalistic search for a scientific answer. Yet, it thus indicates psychological as well as physical reasons for the many hours we spend each day glued to TV and computer screens.

Initially, The Tube presents the Swiss TV journalist, Luc Mariot, becoming concerned when his 4-year-old daughter stares obsessively at the TV screen at home and throws a temper tantrum when he decides to turn it off. Our intrepid hero then insists on creating a documentary about the problem, despite the cautions of colleagues at work that he might discover something that would undermine their own medium.

Despite such a dramatic beginning, The Tube meanders as it follows Luc's internet research, discussions with colleagues, and interviews with businessmen and professors, mixed with shots of people staring at their TV screens. For example, the documentary shows Luc putting an ad in the paper to find people willing to videotape themselves watching TV, and then shows the setting up of the video camera in one such home, just to get various shots of people staring at the screen, like his daughter. Occasionally, however, significant moments arise.

Luc investigates the 1997 incident of a Pokemon (“pocket monster”) TV cartoon in Japan that sent 618 children to the hospital with seizures when they watched a five-second sequence of the lovable pet, Pikachu, with his eyes flashing wildly onscreen. Luc interviews a physician in Japan who discovered that the children were “hypersensitive to light.” Watching TV produced “abnormal brainwaves” in them. “One in 4,000” people have this condition, the doctor says. For them, watching the flickering light of TV always entails some risk.

This idea of the TV (and computer) screen being dangerous to