It can be hard to remember what the television interview used to be like, before it came loaded with heavy doses of charisma, slick editing, archival footage and an unstated demand that it not last longer than seven minutes. Between the sensational water-cooler chats of cable news debates and the self-promoting softball gabfests of nightly talk shows and tabloid TV, the thoughtful TV interview looks increasingly like an endangered species in America, confined to the quiet refuges of PBS and C-Span.But half a century ago, the broadcast tete-a-tete held a primetime spot on television thanks to "The Mike Wallace Interview." Wallace, who died last Saturday, will be remembered for his uncompromising 60 Minutes stories. But his junkyard dog style (he walked "the fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity," he once said) first made waves in 1957, when, after a year interviewing newsmakers on a local New York TV station, he graduated to his own national show.During its two year run on ABC, the "The Mike Wallace Interview" consisted of little more than an undecorated 30-minute face-to-face between Wallace – often smoking a Parliament, per an early sponsorship deal – and a parade of Serious Thinkers: Salvador Dali, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Sanger, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ayn Rand all sat in the hot seat for aggressive lines of questioning that spanned the cultural-political map of mid-century America.And sometimes, beyond. When Wallace interviewed Aldous Huxley in 1958, the mystic philosopher behind "Brave New World" offered a vision of the present and the future that sounds eerily familiar. Here’s how Huxley describes television:Well, at the present the television, I think, is being used quite harmlessly; it’s being used, I think, I would feel, it’s being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the same things the whole time; it’s always driving along…To Huxley, the tools of dictatorships weren’t far removed from a growing regime of mind-control emerging from the brains of Madison Avenue's mad men."…what these people are doing, I mean what both, for their particular purposes, for selling goods and the dictatorial propagandists are for doing, is to try to bypass the rational side of man and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surfaces so that you are, in a way, making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice on rational ground."In the age of the unrelenting 24-hour news cycle, Huxley’s warning makes the unadorned interview look that much more quaint but all the more refreshing. Wallace wastes no time with chit-chat; he goes right for the philosophical jugular:"He’s just finished a series of essays called 'Enemies of Freedom,' in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States; and Mr. Huxley, right of the bat, let me ask you this: as you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?"Huxley's reply:"I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom. And I also think there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, imposing control…"Huxley, a famous connaisseur of psychedelic drugs, tells Wallace of a “pharmacological revolution” that promises to improve the mental state of humanity. But the drugs are only a minor salve in the context of industrial development. He points to overpopulation as a cause for worry: resource shortages, and the social unrest that ensues, can only serves to augment state power, threatening the freedom of the individual. Bureaucracies and experts are also concerns, he says, part of a technologically-determined ecosystem that threatens to catch America off guard."We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history, when technology is advanced, this changes social conditions and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation they didn't foresee and doing all sorts of things they didn't really want to do."The interview itself feels like a counterpoint to that future. There's no music, no archival footage, no fancy graphics. Just lights, cigarette smoke, a close-up. The emphasis is on the ideas, not personality. “I mean, personality is important,” Huxley tells Wallace, “but there are certainly people with an extremely amiable personality, particularly on TV, who might not necessarily be very good in political…positions of political trust.”Huxley didn’t live to see just how prescient he would be. He died from cancer in 1963, on the day Kennedy was assassinated, with 100 micrograms of LSD in his mouth, leaving us to take the long, strange trip into the future he imagined.
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