Jack Gordon: If you can see everything, you'll watch anything

As God is my witness, I thought I would record movies.

This TiVo thing you keep hearing about? TiVo is just one brand name among a larger category of devices called digital video recorders, or DVRs. Like heroin is a species within the genus "opiate." And like opiates, these infernal machines will rot your soul.

Before you quite understand what's happening, you will find yourself on a weekend watching seven straight hours of "America's Next Top Model."

True, your personal destruction might take a different form. "Dog the Bounty Hunter," maybe. But here is what you will not do: You will not spend more time with Bogart and Bacall, or Alfred Hitchcock, or even Arnold Schwarzenegger, and less time with "Deal or No Deal." As if guided by its own demonic intelligence, your DVR will seek out the lowest common denominator in the vast, fetid swamp of "reality" television. And that's what you'll watch.

Not you? You have too much taste? Too much self-discipline? Yeah. Me, too.

When I got a DVR in February, I imagined, in my innocence, that I would set it to grab great old films from Turner Classic Movies at 2 a.m., then watch them at my leisure. And I would capture the handful of TV shows I don't like to miss. "Boston Legal." "House." Like that.

Since the DVR made it possible to watch only programs I liked, when I liked, and since I could fast-forward through commercials, I would spend fewer hours in front of the idiot box. Thus, technology actually would make me smarter -- for real this time, not like when the Internet was going to make us all smarter by bringing libraries full of knowledge to our fingertips. That is to say, back in the 1990s. Before we elected George W. Bush as our president. Twice.

A casual observer would see no insidious menace in this program. It is standard reality-TV fare, a hybrid of "The Real World" and "American Idol." Ex-supermodel Tyra Banks gathers young wannabe fashion models and makes them live together in a big apartment (cat fights!) while they compete at various tasks. These mostly involve walking ("fiercely"), having your picture taken ("fiercely"), and kissing Tyra's backside, though some challenges are trickier: walking in high heels that are a size too small; reading. Each week Tyra kicks out a contestant. The last girl standing wins a modeling contract.

Yes, it's swill. Don't you think I know that? In a rational universe, one without DVRs, a person would watch no more than five minutes of this show, just long enough to register the thought: So, "Zoolander" was not parody at all but a straight documentary of the fashion-modeling world?

But here is the horror. Ever since I got the recorder, MTV has been padding its nonprime air time with "Top Model" rerun marathons. An entire cycle of the show will run from, say, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a Monday. Another cycle might air on Wednesday. Another on Saturday. My DVR faithfully captures every episode.

The time has long passed when I could pretend I was humoring my wife, who (naturally) is to blame for putting this monkey on my back. She is as much a victim as I am, both of us sitting haunted and hollow-eyed on the couch, powerless to turn off the tube or even to switch over to "live" TV. To see what? "Dancing With the Stars?"

I can name seven past winners of "America's Next Top Model." Can you imagine how creepy that feels? Picture having your brain surgically removed and replaced with three pounds of wet sand.

Yes, but where degradation is concerned, one can never be certain that one has truly hit bottom. Who's to say that the next marathon won't involve somebody like Tila Tequila, the bisexual bachelorette? I wish I could believe that I would have the backbone to refrain from pressing "record all programs." But that illusion is dead. Tyra Banks killed it.

I have looked into the abyss. Better never to have put the cursed machine on top of the television set. And that is the warning I bring you.