Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

by Neal Gabler

Book Overview

The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything--news, politics, religion, 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375706534
• ISBN13: 9780375706530
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Either you're a star or a nobody

This short book is jammed packed with great ideas and beautifully coined phrases. Neal Gabler has synthesized an analysis of how entertainment has influenced our lives. He has a rare talent for social commentary. Extremely well researched and organized. If you're up to the cerebral challenge, go for it. The thesis begins with an interesting history lesson about entertainment. Life was particularly dull on the farm in the 19th Century. After people moved to the cities, they had time to sit down and get entertained. Movies became America's preferred entertainment pastime. Newspapers morphed into tabloid journalism. Tabloid journalism morphed into television. Eventually reality took a backseat to entertainment on television. The 20th Century's biggest contribution to Art was the invention of the "Celebrity". Celebrities are "famous for being famous". Today we increasingly see professionals - lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors and scientists - vying for celebrity status in their fields. Even inanimate products - Coca-Cola, Nike, Microsoft's Windows - have been "celebritized". We are social animals, adopting the roles that society gives us. Movies and TV present models for dressing, talking and behaving. There are social pressures placed on us to conform to these standards. However, the standards of people shown on "the other side of the glass" are warped and unrealistic. Many people think that their lives are failures if they don't become a celebrity. Gabler makes no conclusions, leaving it to the readers. He does make a brilliant analysis of the philosophical dilemma facing each of us: To seek reality or delusion. Studies have concluded that, from a mental health standpoint, those who live with happy delusions, however unrealistic, seem to live happier lives. Since the 19th Century, there has been a shifting of values from pragmatic realism to a culture that accepts and embraces delusions. These polar opposite viewpoints are the basis of disputing opinions on many issues. This book reminds of another I read many years ago, "The Birth and Death of Meaning", by Ernest Becker, one of my personal heroes. I've circled so many gem phrases in "Life" I will never be able to re-sell my copy.

splendid essay on the necessity of keeping your attention

This is an absolutely fascinating look at the notion of entertainment, as it evolved as a form of popular culture into a political and even life compulsion. From the beginning, I was rivetted by Gabler's wonderful writing and unusual ideas. You can read this many times to great profit. Gabler begins with a definition of what entertainment is: as opposed to the high art tradition, which requires elite education and effort to "get" it (e.g. to "properly appreciate" Opera), entertainment emerged as a democratic impulse soon after the beginning of the 19th century. Rather than high brow fare for esthetes, entertainment brought an immediate sensation of pleasure to the masses and a sense of losing oneself in a story without preparation. WIth the development of technology, Gabler continues, entertainment entered the news, particularly as images, but also as exciting stories, first in the penny press and then in film and finally TV. The penny press brought news to the masses at a price it could afford, largely replacing the elitist partisan editorials that cost 5 times as much in Jefferson's day. The trick was finding the right hook for less educated audiences, to get them into a narrative with which they could identify personally. This history is told in splendid detail, in a well spring of ideas that makes the reader (or at least me) want to research a lot more into this. From popular culture, Gabler then argues that the need for entertainment created a kind of bizarre feedback loop, according to which it must be manufactured, even when it does not exist. That means that reality is made to fit the story, not the other way round. This leads not only directly to celebrity - those who are famous for being famous more than for having accomplished anything, e.g. Zsa Zsa Gabor as a "personality of glamour" - but also to a transmogrification of the news and even politics, particularly with Ronald Reagan. Rather than pondering complex issues, Gabler believes, the public now wants flashy stories, mood, and outsized personality. As such, he posits, Reagan could say it was "morning in America" while ignoring pressing issues, keeping the public lulled - diverting them - by spin and PR. This Gabler sees as a significant problem in our body politic and I would agree: who doesn't feel disgusted with the way the news media examines politics as a horse race rather than help to analyse the problems that politics should solve? As Gabler says, what reporters tend to report on is how campaign tactics get people to react. It is a bore. In another example, Gabler tells the story of when doing a story on Christie Brinkley's lifestyle in her new Long Island house, House Beautiful journalists arrived to discover that she had not yet moved in or even decorated it. No problem! Without her approval, they hired an interioir decorator to "do it" for the interview photographs, and Brinkley liked it so much that she kept it. That is what readers, in Gabler's view

Pillar to understanding society

Along with Paul Fussel's Class, these books are provocative views of modern society. Like "Class", Gabler doesn't really tell you anything that you don't really know but he does lay it out in a manner that I, at least, had never considered deeply. In doing so, he revealed a weakness that I recognize in myself and in much of the people in this society. Weakness? Gabler doesn't judge. He presents the case and steps back but there is some amount of consternation. How else can you view it? When a person's life becomes nothing more than fulfilling a part in the play? Is that good? Or is it the natural outcome of a society that finds itself more and more removed from the constraints of Mother Nature?

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.

Awesome!

Very compelling read. If you want to be challenged to think, this would be the book. I highly recommend it, and i'm sure i'll be lending it to several of my friends.