Schizophrenic confusion

In chapters six and seven of Thomas Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium, calmness and anxiety seem to be key opponents to Cold War television. In what sounds like a cross between Flavor of Love and Judge Judy, Kefauver's televised hearings showed the chaos of organized crime. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI is portrayed as calm and collected, in opposition to the bumbling cops of local offices. Bishop Sheen serves in direct contrast to earlier hot-headed and caustic Catholic priests in media (159). And McCarthy also will be shown to be an enraged and irrational beast by Howard Murrows. In analyzing I Led 3 Lives, Doherty posits that "book and telefim" both "[express] the psychic turmoil of the multitasking 1950s male" (142). Using another spy's own term for his double-agenting, Doherty later terms this Philbrick's "controlled schizophrenia" (148, 149). This internal struggle is heightened for the double agent, but according to the reference on page 142, this was a common psychological battle for 1950s men. Where does this idea come from and where does it go?

There is much to say about postwar anxiety, particularly for men in the 1950s, but Doherty doesn't say it, so it's not clear what "multitasking" he means. Also missing from this undercurrent of order/chaos is its connection to communist/capitalist ideologies. Order is necessary to combat the chaos of figures such as corrupt cops, fire-and-brimstone priests, and loony McCarthyites. But as we discussed earlier in the course, order is also the source of suburban anxiety and a counterimaginary. Order is national unity and just progress, but it is also conformity and communal thinking. Individuality is chaos, not calm. Making this paradox of what is seen as "good" on TV further exacerbated, all of these calm figures stem from large institutions: Kefauver is federal and sweeping the nation; Hoover is federal and part of an expanding bureaucracy; Sheen is part of the enormous Catholic Church and endorses religion, a conformed and nonindividualist religion as promoted by Eisenhower (149-150). Murrows is perhaps the only figure who appears as calm reason without a lot of institutional/bureaucratic association. Doherty ignores this paradox between order as good and orderly as communist.

Doherty is very convincing in his explanation of the trumping of spectacle within a spectacular medium, but he seems to ignore the "how" of it. I imagine that the line of thinking runs thus: people are anxious, therefore calm figures are necessary (if not necessarily always popular in ratings, then in ideology). But the counterpoint to these television appearances are the variety shows, surely a form of schizophrenia on stage, which ultimately triumphed for financial reasons if not also for interest. There is (as of yet) no reference in Doherty's argument to how these two forms of entertainment play out on an ideological level and why one wins in service television and the other in entertainment television. Murrows "slays" McCarthy, so the tide does finally fully turn against pro-America fascism, but I'm not sure how to read the differences in popular and service shows, because Doherty combines them into a seamless set of national television programming, even while admitting that they are not.