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“characters” at
     all: it’s not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it’s Larry Linville of Ojai, California,
     actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs berating him
     for being a putz from Indiana. And then (5) it’s ultimately of course not even actors we’re espying, not even people: it’s
     EM-propelled analog waves and ion streams and rear-screen chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not
     much more lifelike than Seurat’s own Impressionist commentaries on perceptual illusion. Good Lord and (6) the dots are coming
     out of our
furniture
, all we’re really spying on is our own
furniture
, and our very own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at our gaze’s frame as we contemplate “Korea” or
     are taken “live to Jerusalem” or regard the plusher chairs and classier spines of the Huxtable “home” as illusory cues that
     this is some domestic interior whose membrane we have (slyly, unnoticed) violated—(7) and (8) and illusions ad inf.
    Not that these realities about actors and phosphenes and furniture are unknown to us. We choose to ignore them. They are part
     of the disbelief we suspend. But it’s an awfully heavy load to hoist aloft for six hours a day; illusions of voyeurism and
     privileged access require serious complicity from the viewer. How can we be made so willingly to acquiesce to the delusion
     that the people on the TV don’t know they’re being watched, to the fantasy that we’re somehow transcending privacy and feeding
     on unself-conscious human activity? There might be lots of reasons why these unrealities are so swallowable, but a big one
     is that the performers behind the glass are—varying degrees of thespian talent notwithstanding—absolute
geniuses
at seeming unwatched. Make no mistake—seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is an art. Take a look at how non-professionals
     act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they often spaz out, or else they go all stiff, frozen with self-consciousness. Even
     PR people and politicians are, in terms of being on camera, rank amateurs. And we love to laugh at how stiff and fake non-pros
     appear on television. How unnatural.
    But if you’ve ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how paralyzingly self-conscious
     it makes you feel. A harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to “act natural” as your face begins to leap around
     on your skull, struggling for a seeming-unwatched expression that feels so impossible because “seeming unwatched” is, like
     “acting natural,” oxymoronic. Try hitting a golf ball right after someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing,
     or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a green rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you’ll get some idea
     of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for a David Duchovny or Don Johnson to act unwatched
     as he’s watched by a lens that’s an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called “the gaze of millions.” 2
    For Emerson, only a certain very rare species of person is fit to stand this gaze of millions. It is not your normal, hardworking,
     quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent
     semihuman who, in Emerson’s phrase, “carries the holiday in his eye.” The Emersonian holiday that television actors’ eyes
     carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy
     to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, for you have to be just
     abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear unwatched before cameras and lenses and men with clipboards. This