Pictures at 11 by Norman Spinrad: Media manipulation in a pre-internet era

KLAX Action News team taken hostage! Eco-terrorists demand halt to construction of nuclear desalination plants off the coast of Los Angeles! Pictures at 11!

Norman Spinrad is arguably best known in cyberpunk circles for his novel Little Heroes, but his 1994 thriller, Pictures at 11, delves into themes that should whet the literary appetite of fans of the sub-genre. Rather than a foray into cyberpunk futurism, Pictures at 11 is an exploration of media manipulation and the then-current cyberpunk culture and their potential as revolutionary tools. Perhaps more importantly, Pictures at 11 provides a disturbingly accurate prognostication of news and social media trends in the hindsight of the intervening 24 years since its publication.

The story begins on a typically sweltering, smoggy day at the studio of KLAX—the Los Angeles area’s bottom-ranking independent television station. The KLAX Action News Team is just minutes into their six o’ clock report when the station is taken hostage by a group of eco-terrorists calling themselves the Green Army Commandos. Over the following grueling week, the three news personalities and their station manager are forced to call upon reserves of wit, charm, and courage that they didn’t know they had in order to defuse escalating tensions within the Green Army’s own ranks while keeping at bay political and corporate interests that are willing to write them off as “acceptable losses” in order to shut down the terrorists’ message.

The story itself is an engaging thriller with a wry, subtle sense of humor and satire. Spinrad does a wonderful job of conveying the claustrophobia, tension, and fatigue of the hostages, but his superb pacing prevents this atmosphere from ever becoming oppressive for the reader. Instead, he constantly propels the plot forward to the next startling twist or conflict, all the way up until the—very literally—scripted ending.

While Spinrad doesn’t go into great depth with any single character, he does a deft job of balancing personal arcs and providing insights into the characters’ lives and motivations throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, KLAX is a kind of purgatory for the Action News Team. Station manager Eddie Franker is an old newshound in his twilight years who never got to cover the Big Story. Carl Mendoza was a promising young baseball pitcher until he was wounded in Vietnam, and now he languishes in early middle age as the KLAX sportscaster. Anchorman Toby Inman was a big fish in a small pond back at his hometown station, but he finds his career plateauing in the gigantic media ocean of Los Angeles. Even the younger Heather Blake is a struggling actress (but what she really wants is to direct) who finds herself playing the part of the bimbette weather forecaster until her real career takes off—but by the end of the story, the hostage situation has served as a crucible to provide character growth and either a Big Break or a Last Hurrah to most of their careers.

Perhaps the one disappointment was the character of Blake, whose “bombshell with brains” seemed a bit too “Mary Sue” at times to be truly likeable. Her counterparts in the Green Army Commandos were much more compelling female presences, with the young, telegenic Kelly Jordan finding her idealism tested by the reality of direct revolutionary action, and the grim, veteran soldier of older political conflicts, Helga Mueller, ready to kill or die without hesitation.

In fact, the entire ragtag, international cast of the Green Army Commandos is fairly interesting in their personal stories as well as the two competing camps they become divided into. Under Mueller’s banner of  “Soldiers” are a philosophical Palestinian jihadist, an Ainu native reclaiming the tradition of Bushido and the samurai from his Japanese oppressors, and a tribesman of the Brazilian rainforest channeling his anger and skills at street crime into revolutionary goals. In Jordan’s camp of cyberpunk “Media Freaks” are a Slovak film student mourning the death of a united Czechoslovakia, a Silicon Valley techie, and (my favorite) an affable and irreverent pair of actual punk-rockers from the UK. Most of their backgrounds are told in brief, but it’s just enough that even the most unrepentantly violent of them is more complex than just a two-dimensional killer or “typical nerd” and the reader can begin to understand their motivations even if they find their methods deplorable.

Above all, I found the character of Horst Klingerman, Chairperson of the Green Army Commandos, to be the most nuanced and complex and, in many ways, he is the fulcrum upon which much of the plot hinges. Ostensibly part of the “Soldiers” camp within the Green Army, he is still an intellectual who has only recently turned to direct action. At best, he is something of an anti-hero, but even though the novel is told from the viewpoint of the four hostages, their eyes are most frequently on him, and his own internal struggles are readily apparent as the different forces within and without the Green Army battle for the heart and mind of its leader.

While the medium may be out of date, the terrorists’ message is not. Under the buzz-word of “climate change”, environmental issues have arguably come even more into the forefront of the public consciousness. Even the method of terrorism itself is a defining topic of today, and the fact that Spinrad wove these two narratives together two and a half decades ago is one of many ways in which the story was far ahead of its time. The juxtaposition of positive goals with ruthless measures also provides an excellent study in morals, ideals, and pragmatism as the story seems to ask “At what point do we sacrifice our present comfort, the lives of ourselves, or the lives of others so that current life on our planet remains more broadly sustainable?” While the story itself leaves it an open-ended question as to the effectiveness or necessity of direct action, the terrorists themselves provide some compelling rationales for their methods. In particular, Mueller provides an interesting reason for her shift from Socialist revolution to one of eco-terrorism when she asserts that environmental protection is intrinsically linked to a more global view of Socialism and points out Capitalism’s complicity in environmental destruction.

Live television news, satellite uplinks, and polling via telephone hotlines might seem quaint in our present era, but Spinrad’s prescient tale of how media technologies are used, abused, and manipulated could easily be retold by replacing the technological actors with their modern counterparts. Present day terror groups simply upload their manifestos and executions to YouTube rather than taking live news shows hostage, but the principle remains the same and the book’s themes are even more poignant in today’s world where access to such media platforms is so ubiquitous.

By the same token, the chapters where viewers are given the opportunity to call in and ask questions of the Green Army Commandos live on TV is like an echo of the nastiness pervasive in the YouTube comments section. As it turns out, many of the callers are actors and their ad hominem attacks are engineered to get a rise out of the terrorist leader, Klingerman, but the segment still presages how quickly people can cast civility aside when technology acts as a buffer to accountability. Perhaps more accurately, the callers could be compared to fake Yelp reviews and Twitter followers intended to artificially inflate popularity or “dummy” social media accounts used to engineer social chaos like in the most recent U.S. presidential election.

The idea of using technology to gauge popularity is also implemented throughout the book with the concept of “instapolls”—telephone hotlines that a caller can use to deliver a swift vote of approval or disapproval of an issue. At first, the aging station manager, Franker, views the practice with disdain, doubting the ability of such polling to predict actual voting outcomes in the best of cases, or worse, seeing it as a form of “cheating” on the part of the lobbyists and politicians that shift their strategies based on the results. But soon, even Franker is forced to admit to the tool’s utility as he finds himself manipulating public opinion in order to prevent authorities from assaulting the station building. In part of the story’s climax, the instapoll is implemented in real-time—the public’s reaction to an unfolding live hostage negotiation shown in approval percentages crawling across the bottom of the television screen—once again echoing YouTube comments being voted up or down as offers, counter-offers, and speeches are made across the KLAX news desk.

Pictures at 11 is a thoughtful and entertaining rollercoaster ride whose themes and relevance are undimmed by time and the technological obsolescence of the specific media exploited within its pages. Put it on your shelf next to Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, choomba.

Pictures at 11 – 8/10

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