‘Stupid, malicious and vulgar’: How Italian TV in the 1980s poisoned society

In The Ring — Koji Suzuki’s book about a videotape that kills anyone who watches it, sparking not one but two blockbuster movies — terror is a virus that spreads through television. In Televisiva, a book by Stefano De Luigi and Giusi Affronti, the same thing happens. But in this case, however, the terror has nothing to do with the supernatural: it is real and affects every corner of the globe.

“Three decades ago, during Silvio Berlusconi’s unexpected rise to political power, I undertook a project that I considered to be of great relevance. Through my photography I wanted to question the Italian television universe that, with its superficial values and over-saturated color images, was profoundly influencing Italian society,” Stefano De Luigi tells EL PAÍS.

Televisiva is a book of black-and-white photographs that questions what messages were hiding in Italy’s brightly colored TV shows and how the Italian broadcasting industry has negatively influenced society and culture — the pillars of a functioning country.

“My project suggests that, after educating and making a substantial part of the Italian people literate in the 1950s and 1960s, television has been actively contributing to a dangerous cultural decline since the 1980s,” says De Luigi. “It has fostered a less democratic, aggressive and divisive public discourse that now elevates superficiality and hedonism. This change has led to a deficit in critical thinking and a fall in collective responsibility, ultimately shaping a society that often shirks its civic and political duties.”

De Luigi — who works for EL PAÍS from Paris — is clear about the spark that inspired the book: “It is a hypothesis, of course, and like all hypotheses it is subject to verification, but when I observe these television moments, I have the strong feeling that something has filtered into the real world. That part of the poisons of this stupid, malicious and vulgar television — but that’s sold as a real need of a phantasmorgic public — has taken root in the social body,” says the photographer. “There are photos that illustrate well this collision between the society of the spectacle and real society, like Rocco Casalino looking at himself in the mirror in the Big Brother house.”

The endless nighttime sports talk shows; the constant gossip of a (seemingly) harmless program that’s consumed with the same hunger as a bag of chips; the news presenters turned preachers who deliver sermons disguised as news — this can all be traced back to the TV model created by tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, which spread across Europe and then crossed the Atlantic like a radioactive cloud, growing exponentially until everything was contaminated.

“Television, throughout its existence, has also been very effective in a positive way. In Italy, it has helped make part of the population literate,” says the photographer, a four-time winner of the World Press Photo Award. “Unfortunately, after focusing on this mission in the 1950s and 1970s with highly cultural programs and a real mission to serve the public, it also shaped society in the 1980s and 1990s, pushing a vision of the world that was vulgar, violent and clearly less democratic, individualizing the political sphere and magnifying hedonism and appearance as the only currency. In short, it caused a significant cultural deficit, diverting or devaluing any form of thought based on a sense of responsibility and solidarity.”

For De Luigi, the same medium that served to articulate a community model of solidarity has now helped build a society that often rejects sacrifice and civil and political responsibilities. “Modern television thrives on the seeds of populism present in contemporary society and has significantly raised the threshold of tolerance towards anti-democratic attitudes and discourses. It has produced an us-versus-them culture and led to a civic decivilization of the masses.”

The good news is that television has lost much of its enormous influence to social media, which has taken over the social role TV once occupied. “They are the same. A whirlwind of virtual feelings, a vulgar, deafening, desperate circus that contaminates real society with massive doses of messages, misogyny, unbridled egotism, latent violence, and cynical and selfish disenchantment,” says De Luigi.

In Televisiva, there is no text, everything is told through images that will be familiar to those who were hooked on TV shows in the 1990s.

“What I demand of myself and of the photos I see, whether they are classified as artistic or documentary, is that they surprise me. That they stimulate me, and above all, that they do not bore me with rhetoric or conformism or sterile formalism, or worse still, mannerism,” adds De Luigi. “Good photos have a dimension that goes beyond two-dimensional content, they are those that have several readings and can be interpreted with a complexity that turns them into almost mysterious objects, as if they were loaded with hidden meanings.”

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