The Frequency of the Absurd: The Creative Awakening in "TV MAN"

By Richard Caeiro

Scene from the film "TV MAN"

There are works that serve as the DNA of a career, and "TV MAN" is exactly that for Leonardo Valenti. Filmed in 1997, the short is a brave dive into slapstick aesthetics and absurdist comedy, capturing that "make it at any cost" spirit that defined the post-video store generation. The premise is simple and unsettling: Marco, while preparing for the date of his life, is interrupted by a man inhabiting the inside of his television. What follows is a game of reality and hallucination that challenges the protagonist's sanity and the viewer's perception.

It is impossible to analyze "TV MAN" without noting its fervent dialogue with 90s pop culture. Valenti uses the television set not just as a prop, but as a portal to the bizarre—a sign of the media obsession of that era. The art direction, limited by budget but rich in inventiveness, uses S-VHS textures to create an atmosphere that flirts with domestic surrealism. There is something deeply nostalgic and visceral in how the short uses two VCRs and an audio mixer to build its rhythm: it is cinema in its purest, most tactile state.

Scene from the film "TV MAN"

While the synopsis promises a slapstick comedy, Valenti's screenplay already demonstrated the precision that would lead him to write record-breaking series in Italy. The dynamic between Marco and the TV man works as a metaphor for anxiety and the internal voices that sabotage us at decisive moments. The absurdity here is not gratuitous; it serves to expose the protagonist's fragility in the face of social and romantic pressure. It is the "generational comedy" mentioned by Valenti, where humor is born from the discomfort and strangeness of everyday life.

Watching "TV MAN" today is witnessing the birth of a storyteller. Leonardo Valenti, now an established screenwriter of works like Romanzo Criminale, reminds us that cinema begins with the desire to transform a single location and a group of friends into a universe. The short is a tribute to "making cinema with what you have," evoking the same spirit that made us fall in love with Kevin Smith's films: the authorial voice above image resolution.

Scene from the film "TV MAN"

The short flirts with the idea that "reality" is a precarious construction. By placing Marco before a man who makes demands through the glass, Valenti materializes the concept of the "Society of the Spectacle": real life is only validated when it passes through the filter of the screen. The doubt proposed in the synopsis—hallucination or reality?—is, in fact, a false dichotomy. In Valenti's aesthetic, the hallucination is the technical reality. The use of S-VHS, with its characteristic noise, functions as a metaphor for the psyche itself: an image that is never fully clean, always subject to interference and electromagnetic ghosts.

Director Leonardo Valenti

"TV man" is what Lacan would call "the gaze object." He breaks the safety of Marco's voyeurism. At the very moment Marco prepares for a romantic encounter—the peak of the search for the ideal self-image—the TV confronts him with the grotesque. It is guerrilla cinema operating as a magnifying glass for our own digital pathologies, long before social media existed. Valenti already knew, back in 1997, that we are never alone at home; the screen is the uninvited guest who knows all our secrets.