Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Neal Gabler
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0375706534
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"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 hardly a new phenomenon, but the movies, and now the new information technologies, have so accelerated it that it is now the reigning popular art form. How this came to pass, and just what it means for our culture and our personal lives, is the subject of this witty, concerned, and sometimes eye-opening book.
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after decades of public-relations contrivances and media hype, and after decades more of steady pounding by an array of social forces that have alerted each of us personally to the power of performance, life has become art, so that the two are now indistinguishable from each other. Or, to rework an aphorism of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the world doesn’t exist to end in a book; when life is a medium, books and every other imaginative form exist to end in a world. One need look no further than
pp. 257–58. 49. Thirty-five major riots. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 5. 50. “great contest between …” Edward P. Gaines to Andrew Jackson (1826), Jackson Papers, quoted in Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Penguin, 1988), pp. 159–60. 51. “John Quincy Adams who can write …” Ibid., p. 159. 52. Balance of cultural power. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Ages of Jackson,” New York
besides the obvious ones that film was cheap and that it satisfied the hankerings of the masses for fun. But the answers were all there in the film experience. No other entertainment could provide the same immediacy, the same vast scale, the same phenomenological impact as the movies. In a society that loved sensationalism, they were sensationalisms apotheosis. The Harvard psychology professor Hugo Munsterberg, writing of this almost mesmerizing effect, cited reports that “sensory hallucinations
about the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s about the failure of affirmative action policies. Regardless of the intrinsic quality of these ideas, which ranged from highly questionable to clearly serious and important, what they all had in common is what this paragraph demonstrates: However complex they may have been in their full formulation, the media could conveniently reduce them to condensed sound-bite versions. It was Marshall McLuhan who
finding themselves, which really meant that they were always lost. “I had been divorced by success from any intimate sense of my identity and had a hard time getting half-way back” was how novelist Norman Mailer described it. O. J. Simpson, in his farewell letter before attempting to escape in his Ford Bronco, expressed it more poignantly. “Please think of the real O.J.,” he wrote, “and not this lost person.” For these celebrities there had been some kind of disconnect, a fragmentation, an