Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
“A thoughtful, in places chilling, account of the way entertainment values have hollowed out American life.” –The New York Times Book Review
From one of America’s most original cultural critics and the author of Winchell, the story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, glamour, and melodrama has turned everything of importance-from news and politics to religion and high culture-into one vast public entertainment.
Neal Gabler calls them “lifies,” those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton. Real Life as Entertainment is har
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Scratches the Surface,
Neal Gabler merely scratches the surface as he describes the integration of media and entertainment into 20th Century culture, particularly 20th Century American culture. Gabler concedes at the outset that the book is diagnostic rather than prescriptive and he leaves few suggestions and little hope for a cure. The most disturbing part of the book is the final chapter, entitled The Mediated Self, in which he illustrates the degree to which many people have come to define their lives in terms of entertainment value.
Parts of the book are priceless. One should read it with a highlighter or a pencil and capture the more descriptive gems for future attribution. As an example, describing the propensity of ’80′s and `90′s middle class Americans to videotape family events:
“Weddings, baby showers, bar mitzvahs . . . even surgeries, all of which had traditionally been undramatic, if occasionally unruly, affairs, were now frequently reconfigured as shows for the video camera complete with narratives and entertaining set pieces throughout. Sometimes a hastily edited version of the tape, complete with musical soundtrack and effects added to boost its entertainment value higher still, would be shown at the climax of the occasion as if the entire purpose of the celebration had really been to tape it.”
One senses that Gabler, taking leads from Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Richard Schickel . . . even Andy Warhol, is on to something very big, if not overarching. Gabler deals with the subject in a mere 244 easily read pages, but I was left wanting more and feeling that the subject had been dealt with somewhat superficially. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who can stand to add to their level of cynicism.
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|“When I Crashed the Car It Was Just Like a Movie!”,
A good, often acid analysis of “entertainment state,” Gabler’s main thesis is that under the influence of the movies and the concomitant rise of the consumptionism, we have created an entertainment state where everyone is constantly considering how their performance is going — which amounts to a new kind of discipline as Foucauldians might say. Further, these “roles” require props (material goods), which in turn supports the consumer society and the entertainment state at the expense of nearly everything else. To lay the basis for his theorectical claim, he cites the early 1960s thinking on the phenomenon of celebrity and the changes it has wrought in the American psyche. Here cites Boorstin’s “The Image,” and Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd.” But he’s not averse to cites postmodernists to serve his thesis, Umberto Eco, and Baudrillard come in for brief insights, too.
Some might say Gabler overstates his case. Have we really become so infused with “lifies” projected at us on a billion screens that we no longer know where we begin and where we end? Compared to the post-mods who can’t resist hyperbole and grand gestures, though, he grounds his case historically, culturally and economically. Moving from a quick periodization of the rise of mass entertainment in the U.S. in conjunction with Jacksonian era during which elitist amusements were challanged and overthrown — in 1849 29 b’hoys in NYC were killed during a riot where protested the English actor MacCready’s reading of Shakepeare as a disparagement of the American style of Edwin Forrest — he shows how entertainment has always been contested terrain. He also suggests that popular entertainment and diversion are as American as apple pie with supporting examples of the popularity of the political speech, the Great Awakenings, the Lyceum and Chatauqua.
Most chilling is his description of the two Americas: those who live behind the glass (TV) and those who don’t, and how those who don’t know that because they don’t live behind the glass are lesser citizens. That people fight to obtain some type of stardom, or at the minor forms of celebrity, that CEOs now bestride the world like Hollywood stars of old, that brands now have personalities, are cited as evidence of celebritization of the world. The section of the dark side of celebrity-seeking — e.g. Mark David Chapman, the Unabomber, and Arthur Bremer — is effective in showing how these individuals’ quest for celebrity was rewarded by the media in wall to wall coverage. The slippage of mainstream media into the gutter once occupied by the tabliods is also of related interest, though it cites the usual examples: e.g. Gary Hart, Monica, O.J.
Gabler’s larger point is that all these “lifies” take up space in our collective consciousness, that they distract us, circumscribe our lives by setting norms, casting us in roles, and both limit and expand whom we might be and how we might behave: the affable talk show host, the news anchor, the family man, etc. These norms and role models now live behind the screen, he says. There is no “backstage” where we think our private thoughts and a “frontstage” where we interact with the world. It’s all “frontstage.” Observe an average Californian for awhile, he suggests. Steeped in movie and entertainment culture, they have no “backstage.”
Gabler cites evidence that those who have ability to positively delude themselves, to “act” as if they are the center of our own postively scripted, headed- toward-a-happy-ending movie, do better in their lives and occupations. He notes that Prozac’s popularity may be connected with this phenomenon. All in all a good, solid, and dare it be said, “entertaining” book.
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|Read it and you’ll never see things the same way again!,
This book is simply incredible. A more stimulating book I couldn’t imagine! It’s not that it told me so much I didn’t know intuitively, but seeing it written so distinctly in black and white really hit home. This is one to read if you really want to get a sense of just how dramatically the world has changed. Neal Gabler, tells it like he sees it and has a lot of research to back up his views. I love that he doesn’t make judgements or try to press an opinion on the reader. It’s left up to you to decide how you feel about it all. I find myself thinking of points he brought up throught the day and seeing just what he meant by experiencing it in “real” life. The only reason I didn’t give it a 5 is because I wish it was a bit MORE in-depth. It’s so engaging that I can imagine an entire college course being made from this book. It is a book that’s as entertaining as it is informative, and that’s the whole point.
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