Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality [Paperback]

Neal Gabler (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 29, 2000

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler traces the evolution of high and low culture in American society through the 19th and 20th centuries, and describes how low-brow entertainment became so influential in the United States. This is his central argument: "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." Although Gabler uses the word "metastasized," he doesn't seem to regard infotainment as a cancer that is destroying our society, but rather as something that grows rapidly and certainly worthy of close study.

The scope of Gabler's investigation extends far beyond the movies to publishing, television news, paint brands, fashion--anything that seems to have been transformed by the national passion for low-brow entertainment. Along the way, Gabler raises a series of intriguing questions: Why do some people feel more passionately about celebrities than about their own loved ones? Why is Donald Trump a celebrity? Why was the broadcast of the 1996 Olympics packed with so many biopics that the sporting events seemed afterthoughts? Why does Ralph Lauren call the blue paint he sells "Lap Pool Blue"?

Movies promote the fantasy that there are simple narrative solutions for all of life's problems. Movies are full of sex, scandal, gossip, and action. If our lives were movies, they would be more full of what Zsa Zsa Gabor once called "enchanting make-believe." In this book, Gabler demonstrates how this fantasy has shaped our society. --Jill Marquis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Even before the first tabloids began hawking true-crimes stories and trashy melodramas to 19th-century readers, mass entertainment had cast a spell over American life. How that spell has been magnified to such an extent that entertainment is now "the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time" is the subject of Gabler's slashing, sometimes dubious, critique. "Entertainment" for Gabler (Winchel: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity) is virtually any kind of public fantasy or performance that, in contrast to high art, serious thought or gritty reality, is meant to appeal to the widest possible audience. America has become an "Entertainment Republic," he writes, in which lives are lived for the media, events are staged for the media and no public institution is uninfected by the "ebola virus" of mass entertainment. Gabler has a keen eye for the absurd detritus of cultural history; he skillfully interweaves events as different as the murder of Helen Jewett in 1836 and the ongoing Clinton scandals (both are "lifies," media spectacles "written in the medium of life"), and individuals as different as Buffalo Bill Cody, who rode into battle in Hollywood costume, and the surgically reconfigured Michael Jackson, "a posthuman for the era of postreality." This is no linear history, however, but a grab bag of ideas and events, larded with citations to a huge array of critical thinkers (e.g., Daniel Boorstin, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman). Entertainment is certainly a handy concept to explain how the media has changed how we live and think. But readers will find Gabler's tendency to boil American history down to this one master narrative reductive to be an often fascinating but far from persuasive trip down a rabbit hole of cultural theory.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (February 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375706534
• ISBN-13: 978-0375706530
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Scratches the Surface May 22, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "When I Crashed the Car It Was Just Like a Movie!" February 4, 2004

By Panopticonman VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Read it and you'll never see things the same way again! August 10, 2000

By Bruce Aguilar

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars splendid essay on the necessity of keeping your attention September 24, 2007

By Robert J. Crawford TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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, would take for a reality to model their own lives on!!

Or alternatively, we get celebrities "writing" books (with a little help from expert word smiths) that get attention because they are who they are rather than what they have to say. You even find public intellectuals taking outrageous positions because it will get them attention, as Gabler argues Camille Paglia has done with her attacks on feminism. In my reading, this is what gets thinkers like Steven Pinker to argue that parents have no impact WHATSOEVER on their children's personalities, whom he argues both learn more from their peers and whose behavior is primarily genetically determined. That argument is outrageous to parents, but it gets him ample media attention. The issues, even the truth, are secondary to entertainment value in this view.

To conclude, Gabler argues that we are all now seeking to create lives that are entertaining, drawing our own narrative in a kind of "mediated self"; the sources of these, he says, are film, celebrity journalism, and over-hyped "news". Reality, in his view, matters less than the idea one can make and maintain of one's life story; while this flatly contradicts Frued's "reality principle", perhaps it is possible now for people who live in a bubble of affluence.

Of couse, my description cannot do justice to the subtlty and elegance of Gabler's argument. This is extremely heady intellectual stuff. While I believe that he takes the argument too far as intellectuals often do when creating a new metaphor, the book is so dense with ideas and frankly so right on the money that it is worth a careful read.

For example, in my own work researching business, this argument is extremely relevant. I have been in many companies whose marketing strategy is to develop a kind of narrative for the consumer to enter, either to imagine they belong to some "tribe", or as a feeling of taking part in something bigger than themselves, or simply a series of products that evolve as a story progresses. For example, Ducati is making motorcyles that recall the company's past glory in races: they are still excellent bikes, but they also evoke an experience of belonging to a story, complete with accessories, the periodic appearence of Ducati bikes in films, etc. This is also true of Disney self-reinforcing multimedia marketing (characters in film and parks = buzz, which sells toys), LEGO's bionicles, Alessi's quirky appliances that bring art into the home, and any number of other companies: they are in part manufacturing an alternative reality, an experience (of entertainment), that is to be found in how we describe ourselves to ourselves.

This book has allowed me to articulate this to myself in a new way, though I must sift through the ideas in my own mind over time. I am sure that anyone interested in culture, politics, or business will feel the same way once they have read this book. This is delicious brain food.

Warmly recommended as an outstanding intellectual adventure. This is a masterful essay that consolidates a huge range of research, including updates of Neil Postman, Marhall McLuhan, Daniel Boorsten and many others. His prose is unusually dense and vivid. A final thing that I should add is that, while Gabler is very critical about these developments, he states very clearly that he wants to stimulate debate rather than offer prescriptions - he admits he has none. Read more ›