Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

Neal Gabler

Life the Movie

Neal Gabler is the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, and Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine. Mr. Gabler holds advanced degrees in film and American culture and has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Freedom Forum Fellowship. He was born in Chicago and lives with his wife and two daughters in Amagansett, New York.

ALSO BY NEAL GABLER

Winchell: Gossip, Power

and the Culture of Celebrity

An Empire of Their Own:

How the Jews Invented Hollywood

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2000

Copyright © 1998 by Neal Gabler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Gabler, Neal.

Life the movie: how entertainment conquered reality / by Neal Gabler.—1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-77325-8

1. Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States.

2. Motion pictures—United States—Influence.

3. Television broadcasting—United States—Influence. I. Title.

PN1995.9.S6G23 1998

302.23′43′0973—dc21 98-36699

www.vintagebooks.com

rh_3.1_148350781_c0_r3

Once again,

for my beloved daughters,

Laurel and Tanne,

And for all those

on the other side of the glass

What if the world is some kind of—of show!… What if we are all only talent assembled by the Great Talent Scout Up Above! The Great Show of Life! Starring Everybody! Suppose entertainment is the Purpose of Life!

—PHILIP ROTH

    On the Air (1970)

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1. The Republic of Entertainment

2. The Two-Dimensional Society

3. The Secondary Effect

4. The Human Entertainment

5. The Mediated Self

Notes

A Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Introduction

THOUGH HE couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, in 1960 the novelist Philip Roth posed what would become one of the central questions of our age: How could fiction possibly compete with the stories authored by real life? As anyone could see from browsing the daily newspapers, life had become so strange, its convolutions so mind-boggling that, Roth lamented, the "American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of every novelist."

At virtually the same time Roth was describing the challenge of reality to fiction, historian Daniel Boorstin, in his pathbreaking study The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, was describing how everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical were driving out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous from life until reality itself had been converted into stagecraft. As Boorstin saw it, Americans increasingly lived in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, and he warned, We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.

Roth was talking about real-life melodrama in America, and Boorstin about the deliberate manipulation of reality in America, but both were addressing what, in hindsight, was the same root phenomenon, one that may very well qualify as the single most important cultural transformation in this country in the twentieth century. What they recognized was that life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show—a show that was, as Roth noted, often far richer, more complex and more compelling than anything conceived for the more conventional media. In short, life was becoming a movie.

To compare life to a movie is not to say, as the cliché has it, that life imitates art, though surely there is truth to that. Nor is it to say that life has devised its own artistic methods and thus reversed the process—art imitates life—though that also is true, as one can see from the number of novels, movies and television programs that have been inspired by real-life events. Rather it is to say that 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 the daily news to realize how true this is now. It does not minimize the media excesses of the penny press, the yellow press and the original tabloids, to recognize that in the nearly forty years since Roth’s essay the news has become a continuous stream of what one might call lifies—movies written in the medium of life, projected on the screen of life and exhibited in the multiplexes of the traditional media which are increasingly dependent upon the life medium. The murder trial of former football star O. J. Simpson, the life and death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the ongoing soap-operatic sagas of Elizabeth Taylor or television talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey, the shooting of Long Island housewife Mary Jo Buttafuoco by her husband’s seventeen-year-old paramour, the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City by right-wing dissidents, the repeated allegations of extramarital dalliances by President Bill Clinton, to name only a handful of literally thousands of episodes life generates—these are the new blockbusters that preoccupy the traditional media and dominate the national conversation for weeks, sometimes months or even years at a time, while ordinary entertainments quickly evanesce.

But however much we may be preoccupied with them, it is not just these lifies that make life a movie. As Boorstin observed, the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience. Acting like a cultural Ebola virus, entertainment has even invaded organisms no one would ever have imagined could provide amusement. Dr. Timothy Leary, onetime proponent of hallucinogens, turned his death into entertainment by using his computer Web page to chronicle his deterioration from prostate cancer, a show which ended with a video of him drinking a toxic cocktail in what he called a visible, interactive suicide. A group of teenage thugs in Washington, D.C., videotaped their depredations, even posing for the camera after beating a victim while an audience of bystanders cheered. And one enterprising entrepreneur converted a former Nazi command post on the eastern front in Poland into a theme resort, while another planned an amusement park outside Berlin with the motif of East Germany under communism.

What traditional entertainment always promised was to transport us from our daily problems, to enable us to escape from the travails of life. Analyzing the mechanism through which this was achieved, literary scholar Michael Wood in his book America in the Movies described our films as a rearrangement of our problems into shapes which tame them, which disperse them to the margins of our attention, where we can forget about them. This is what we really mean when we call entertainment escapist: We escape from life by escaping into the neat narrative formulas in which most entertainments are packaged. Still, with movies there was always the assumption that the escape was temporary. At the end of the film one had to leave the theater and reenter the maelstrom of real life.

When life itself is an entertainment medium, however, this process is obviously altered. Lewis Carroll, commenting on a vogue among nineteenth-century cartographers for ever larger and more detailed maps, once cautioned that the maps might get so large they would interfere with agriculture, and waggishly suggested that the earth be used as a map of itself instead. Carroll’s is an apt analogy for the new relationship between entertainment and life. By conflating the two and converting everything from the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby to the marital misadventures of Elizabeth Taylor into entertainments that transport us from our problems, we need never leave the theater’s comfort. We can remain constantly distracted. Or, put another way, we have finally learned how to escape from life into life.

While there are certainly those who will disapprove, one is almost compelled to admit that turning life into escapist entertainment is a perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of modern existence. Why worry about the seemingly intractable problems of society when you can simply declare It’s morning in America, as President Reagan did in his 1984 reelection campaign, and have yourself a long-running Frank Capra movie right down to the aw-shucks hero? Why fret over the lack of national purpose during the doldrums of the post-Cold War era when you can convert a shooting war into a real-life war movie that reaffirms your destiny, as America did in 1991 with the Gulf War? Movies have always been a form of wish fulfillment. Why not life?

The conversion of life into an entertainment medium could never have succeeded, however, if those who attend the life movie hadn’t discovered what the early movie producers had discovered years before: that audiences need some point of identification if the show is really to engross them. For the movies the solution was stars. For the life movie it is celebrity. Though stardom in any form automatically confers celebrity, it is just as likely now to be granted to diet gurus, fashion designers and their so-called supermodels, lawyers, political pundits, hairdressers, intellectuals, businessmen, journalists, criminals—anyone who happens to appear, however fleetingly, on the radar of the traditional media and is thus sprung from the anonymous mass. The only prerequisite is publicity.

Celebrity is by now old news, but it says a great deal about modern America that no society has ever had as many celebrities as ours or has revered them as intensely. Not only are celebrities the protagonists of our news, the subjects of our daily discourse and the repositories of our values, but they have also embedded themselves so deeply in our consciousness that many individuals profess feeling closer to, and more passionate about, them than about their own primary relationships: Witness the torrents of grief unleashed by the sudden death of Princess Diana in 1997, or the mourners who told television interviewers that her funeral was the saddest day of their lives. As Diana confirmed, celebrity is the modern state of grace—the condition in the life movie to which nearly everyone aspires. Once we sat in movie theaters dreaming of stardom. Now we live in a movie dreaming of celebrity.

Yet this is not nearly as passive as it may sound. While the general public is an audience for the life movie, it is also an active participant in it. An ever-growing segment of the American economy is now devoted to designing, building and then dressing the sets in which we live, work, shop and play; to creating our costumes; to making our hair shine and our faces glow; to slenderizing our bodies; to supplying our props—all so that we can appropriate the trappings of celebrity, if not the actuality of it, for the life movie. We even have celebrities—for example, lifestyle adviser Martha Stewart—who are essentially drama coaches in the life movie, instructing us in how to make our own lives more closely approximate the movie in our mind’s eye.

Of course, not everyone is mesmerized. Many have deplored the effects of entertainment and celebrity on America, and there is certainly much to deplore. While an entertainment-driven, celebrity-oriented society is not necessarily one that destroys all moral value, as some would have it, it is one in which the standard of value is whether or not something can grab and then hold the public’s attention. It is a society in which those things that do not conform—for example, serious literature, serious political debate, serious ideas, serious anything—are more likely to be compromised or marginalized than ever before. It is a society in which celebrities become paragons because they are the ones who have learned how to steal the spotlight, no matter what they have done to steal it. And at the most personal level, it is a society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever role the occasion demands and to perform their lives rather than just live them. The result is that Homo sapiens is rapidly becoming Homo scaenicus—man the entertainer.

As the culture submits to the tyranny of entertainment, as life becomes a movie, critics complain that America has devolved into a carnival culture or trash culture, where everything is coarsened, vulgarized and trivialized, where the meretricious is more likely to be rewarded than the truly deserving and where bonds of community that were once forged by shared moral values and traditions are now forged by tabloid headlines, gossip and media. We had fed the heart on fantasies, wrote William Butler Yeats. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

No doubt Americans who hold this view of modern culture will want a program of action that will help us disenchant ourselves and restore our reality and our values. One can certainly sympathize with them. But to pretend that one can provide a remedy would be not only naive but duplicitous, since it would necessarily indulge the same sort of fantasy that got us here in the first place: that problems, like crises in movies, are susceptible to simple narrative solutions. You simply present a monster in the first reel and then have the hero vanquish it in the last.

Anyone looking for heroes, solutions or even high dudgeon will not find them here. While this book is not without an attitude, particularly toward some of the absurdities to which entertainment has driven us, readers are here forewarned that it is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, an investigation rather than a screed. Its object is to provide a new context for something so gargantuan that it has slid beyond the borders of context and frequently beyond our powers of analysis. That context is entertainment.

There is obviously no such thing as a unified field theory of American culture, but if there were, one could do worse than to lay much of what has happened in late-twentieth-century America to the corrosive effects of entertainment rather than to the effects of politics or economics, the usual suspects. Indeed, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter both seem to have been wrong. It is not any ism but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time—a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.

As a tool of analysis, entertainment may just be what undergirds and unites ideas as disparate as Boorstin’s theory of manufactured reality, Marshall McLuhan’s doctrine of media determinism, the deconstructionist notion that culture is actually a collectively scripted text, and so much of the general perspective we call postmodernism. If so, understanding how and why entertainment permeates life as it does may enable us to comprehend the brave and strange new world in which we live—the world of postreality.

What Daniel Boorstin said of The Image may also be true of this volume: This is a large subject for a small book. Yet it is too large for a big book. It is a vast territory we tread, nothing less than life itself, and no one could possibly chart it all. Every day the life medium generates new episodes. Every day someone finds more inventive applications for its use. The profusion is so bewildering that the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, acknowledging the voraciousness of the mass media to devour everything, believed we could ease our minds around the issue only by taking a whole new cognitive approach to our reality. We have to start again from the beginning, Eco wrote, asking one another what’s going on.

This book is an attempt to start again and ask what’s going on: to understand why entertainment became the primary value of American life, to examine what the implications have been for our public culture and to analyze how it has changed and continues to change our lives.

Chapter One

The Republic of Entertainment

I

WHAT Is ENTERTAINMENT?

ALMOST FROM the beginning, something was wrong with America. When Mrs. Frances Trollope, a very proper Englishwoman and the mother of the future novelist Anthony Trollope, toured the United States in 1828, she was revolted by the casual boorishness she found. One man in the pit was seized with a violent fit of vomiting, which appeared not in the least to annoy or surprise his neighbors, she wrote of a visit to a theater in the nation’s capital. The spitting was incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the usual custom of human beings; the legs were thrown sometimes over the front of the box, sometimes over the side of it.… Other European visitors made similar observations. Americans were ill-mannered, disrespectful, rowdy, unkempt, illiterate, malodorous. After his own visit, Matthew Arnold concluded that in what concerns the higher civilization they [Americans] live in a fool’s paradise.

In truth, most Americans didn’t seem to know or care much about higher civilization. Whatever else one said about them—and visitors did praise their pragmatism, their industriousness, their democratic brio—the overwhelming majority were certainly not terribly cultured by European standards, and there was real doubt whether art, which one critic has described as a kind of divine service to truth and beauty, could survive in a country where the cacophony of the masses drowned out the sweet music of more genteel souls. What especially worried America’s own cultural elite was that their fellow Americans not only had little affinity for art but seemed to have an active antipathy to it.

Of course, the same thing could probably have been said at the time of the general population of any country, even France, Britain or Germany, the places from which many of America’s critics came. There, as here, what was popular was seldom called art and what was called art was seldom popular. Nevertheless, there were differences between European culture and American culture besides the obvious one that European culture was hundreds of years old and American culture in the nineteenth century had scarcely been born.

For one thing, already by the mid-nineteenth century the popular culture here was much vaster than that in Europe and had permeated society much more deeply. Nostalgists may like to think of America in that time before movies and television as the land of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Church and Emily Dickinson, though saying so is like saying that the America of the late twentieth century was the land of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Updike, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Lowell. It is true, but only so far as it goes. In the nineteenth century, as in the twentieth, there was another America, a much larger, more polymorphous America, one which has been expunged from most cultural histories partly because its products were not meant to endure and partly, one assumes, because many cultural historians would just as soon forget about it. This America was not genteel or high-minded. This America loved what even then scolds labeled trash.

Trash was everywhere. The same period that saw the rise of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman and would come to be called the American Renaissance for the quality of its writing, also saw the rise of vapidly sentimental but enormously popular novels like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), a logy, lachrymose tale of a young woman whose parents decamp to Europe, leaving her at the mercy of a series of mentors and tormentors; of bawdy humor almanacs that took delight in skewering polite society and celebrating impertinence; of titillating crime pamphlets that recounted the gory deeds of miscreants like Major John Mitchell, who castrated a young boy with a jagged piece of tin, or the Knapp brothers, who masterminded the murder of Captain Joseph White in hopes of gaining his inheritance and then joked about it afterwards; of a large erotic and pornographic literature; of salacious novels, like George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845), that ripped bodices in the service of ripping the façade off genteel hypocrisy, and of dime novels that purveyed the exploits of heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody in simple, light-footed prose that any schoolboy could understand.

Nor was the situation very different in the nonliterary precincts of the culture. While some historians have made much of the popularity of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century American stage, it was not the sanctified Shakespeare of college English classes that those audiences enjoyed. The plays were reconceptualized, compromised, bowdlerized. Lines were cut and others freely changed, characters were consolidated, whole scenes were excised and, above all, melodramatic elements were heightened, so that only Shakespeare’s basic plots survived, not his language or the depth and complexity of his themes. In addition to this dumbing down, the plays usually had to share the evening with a farce or comic opera, not to mention the variety acts that were interpolated throughout the performance: singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians, comedians. For a time there was a rage for the physically deformed.

Similarly, though opera was performed even in the American backwaters, singers seldom escaped demands for a popular song or patriotic ditty along with, and often right in the middle of, their arias. Classical music was limited to the wealthy. Most Americans seemed to prefer music that was functional, something they could dance to or sing with or tell a story through. As the century wore on, American tastes ran to earsplitting band music, which concertmaster John Philip Sousa extolled over classical music because entertainment is of more real value to the world than technical education in music appreciation. In the visual arts, the monumental canvases of Church, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, which were exhibited in great halls as if they were wide-screen movie epics, yielded to lithographs and eventually to postcards and photographs—an increase in the quantity of images that arguably led to a diminution in their quality.

Though there were clearly major differences between, say, the conventional novels of Susan Warner and the radical novels of George Lippard, nevertheless, by the lights of refined society both contributed to an effulgence of junk, the amount of which and popularity of which could not be underestimated. The Wide, Wide World had thirteen printings in two years, thirty-seven by century’s end, and sold an estimated five hundred thousand copies—by some reckonings second in sales only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin among books published in the nineteenth century. I should have no chance of success while public taste is occupied with their trash, Hawthorne complained of Warner’s success, and I should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. The Quaker City sold nearly as many copies. As for the juvenile dime novels that emerged in the late 1850s, individual titles sold as many as eighty thousand copies, and one publisher alone produced four million volumes in just five years, this at a time when the entire population of the country was less than twenty-five million, making the dimes, according to an 1879 Atlantic Monthly survey, the greatest literary movement, in bulk, of the age.…

But what almost no one seemed to have recognized then was that this flood of trash was the beginning of a cultural revolution, one that would permanently transform America’s taste and change its tastemakers. Prior to the arrival of mass-produced entertainment, American culture, like European culture, had been the special preserve of the wealthy, the educated, the refined—this country’s own aristocrats, virtually all of them landholders. They assumed the responsibility for determining what qualified as good because they felt they alone were capable of enjoying what one critic has called the highest pleasure, the pleasure of complexity, which must be learned. Not to have governed the culture would have been an abdication. The great cultures of the past have all been elite affairs, observed the critic Dwight Macdonald, himself an elitist, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common and which both encouraged creativity by (informed) enthusiasm and disciplined it by (informed) criticism. And so it was here.

As in Europe, the American elite’s idea of culture was a rather narrowly defined notion of art. Whatever these other things were that now overwhelmed the nation—these fat sentimental tomes and slender dime novels, these crime pamphlets and rude almanacs, these stage melodramas, these coarse musicales and this loud band noise—art they certainly were not. For the custodians of culture, art was sublime. It redirected one’s vision from the sensual to the intellectual, from the temporal to the eternal, from the corporeal to the spiritual, all of which made art a matter not only of aesthetics but of morality as well because its effect was to encourage one’s better self. Consequently, artists were expected, as cultural historian Henry Nash Smith observed of nineteenth-century American writers, to present images of beauty and nobility in order to inspire emulation, and to offer readers opportunities to identify themselves with virtuous and attractive characters.

In contrast, cultural aristocrats sneered, the new popular entertainment was primarily about fun. It was about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it. As one elitist has put it, the difference between entertainment and art is the difference between spurious gratification and a genuine experience as a step to greater individual fulfillment. Of course entertainment could, and often did, make concessions to morality by propounding some simple homiletic lesson, if only to fend off enemies, but no one could possibly have attributed the power of entertainment to this. Rather, as critics recognized, its appeal seemed to be that it deliberately shirked the obligations of art.

Moreover, while it was a tenet of culture that art demanded effort to appreciate it, specifically intellectual effort, entertainment seemed to make no demands whatsoever, intellectual or otherwise. Art enlisted the senses, but it enlisted them in the service of the mind or soul; it was hard work rewarded by divine experience. By contrast, to the extent entertainment enlisted the mind at all, it was only in the service of the senses and emotions; it was passive response rewarded by fun. Operating on the emotions and the viscera, on the seats of irrationality and irresponsibility, entertainment was beyond the reach of intellect. As Goethe expressed it in a letter to Schiller as early as 1797, Nonsense placed before the eyes / Has a magical right. Because it fetters the senses / The mind remains a vassal. Before the word became synonymous with lurid, this is what critics meant when they called entertainment sensational, one of the nineteenth century’s most pejorative adjectives. They meant that entertainment induced reactions by exciting the nervous system in much the same way drugs did. In fact, it was entertainment, and not, as Marx declared, religion, that was the real opiate of the masses.

Thus, dime novels were a stimulus or opiate, fumed the Rev Jonathan Baxter Harrison. Lyrical ballads filled mans need for gross and violent stimulants that also blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, wrote William Wordsworth, obviously distinguishing his own Lyrical Ballads from more vulgar ones. Popular music, according to the German-born conductor Theodore Thomas, was the sensual side of the art and has more or less the devil in it. Tocqueville was slightly more charitable in drawing the same conclusion about theater. Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, he wrote, but the keen emotions of the heart.