Neal Gabler: Life: The Movie

I had a hunch about Neal Gabler's Life: A Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998; paperback, 2000, Vintage Books), at least partly confirmed by reading a couple of snatches in the bookstore. I was thinking of something on how our accumulated sense of filmcraft affects the way we stage our imagination of current events. It's not just that film represents reality in certain ways; it presents us with a comprehensive system for imagining reality, which introduces various distortions, which in turn have something to do with why we don't know shit about the world anymore. At least that's my suspicion. Turns out that Gabler's book is about something else. It's basically a fairly useful history of the growth of popular culture in America since the mid-19th century. The early part mostly covers theatre -- among other things, it explains the presence of the theatrical troupe in Deadwood. Movies and television follow, with pervasive effects.

Just a few quotes here. This starts to get down to politics with the introduction of "the secondary effect" (pp. 96-98):

If the primary effect of the media in the late twentieth century was to turn nearly everything that passed across their screens into entertainment, the secondary and ultimately more significant effect was to force nearly everything to turn itself into entertainment in order to attract media attention. In The Image, Daniel Boorstin had coined the term "pseudo-event" to describe events that had been concocted by public relations practitioners to get attention from the press. Movie premieres, balloon crossings, sponsored sporting contexts, award ceremonies, demonstrations and hunger strikes, to name just a few examples, all were synthetic, manufactured pseudo-events that wouldn't have existed if someone hadn't been seeking publicity and if the media hadn't been seeking something to fill their pages and airwaves, preferably something entertaining.

But the idea of pseudo-events almost seemed quaint by the late twentieth century. Most people realized that the object of virtually everyone in public life of any sort was to attract the media and that everyone from the top movie stars to the parents of septuplets now had to have a press agent to promote them. What most people were also coming to realize, if only by virtue of how much the media had grown, was that pseudo-events had proliferated to such an extent that one could hardly call them events anymore because there were no longer any seams between them and the rest of life, no way of separating the pseudo from the so-called authentic. Almost everything in life had appropriated the techniques of public relations to gain access to the media, so that it wasn't the pseudo-event one was talking about anymore when one cited the cleverness of PR men and women; it was pseudo-life.

Yet not even pseudo-life did full justice to the modern condition. That's because the media were not just passively recording the public performances and manipulations of others, even when life was nothing but manipulations. Having invited these performances in the first place, the media justified covering them because they were receiving media attention, which is every bit as convoluted as it sounds. The result was to make of modern society one giant Heisenberg effect, in which the media were not really reporting what people did; they were reporting what people did to get media attention. In other words, as life was increasingly being lived for the media, so the media were increasingly covering themselves and their impact on life.

That we intuitively know life has become a show staged for the media may explain why by the 1970s there was such a fascination with the mechanics and logistics of entertainment: with conventional performers' hirings and contracts, with movie budgets and grosses, with television ratings, with backstage dramas and turmoil as well as with press agents, spin doctors, speechwriters and anyone else whose job was to contribute to creating an effect. [ . . . ] It is almost as if having lived for so long with the idea of the suspension of disbelief for conventional entertainments, we demand a confirmation of disbelief for the unconventional entertainment of life to prove to ourselves that we weren't being fooled, that we knew life was all a scam.

The president as "entertainer-in-chief" (p. 108):

Or at least that is how it was before presidents realized the centrality of perception to governing. This realization is usually attributed to John Kennedy, who had a wonderful flair for the dramatic and a keen awareness of his own charisma, but the pioneer, once again, may have really been Richard Nixon, who lacked Kennedy's natural ease and needed to compensate. According to political analyst Jonathan Schell, Nixon, borrowing a page from his own campaign playbook, "began to frame policy not to solve real problems but only to appear to solve them. . . . " What Nixon comprehended is that since the presidency no less than the campaign is played out in the media, one could provide them with set pieces -- staged rallies, an early-morning visit with Vietnam protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, a trip to Red China -- that presented you as having achieved what you had said you wanted to achieve whether or not you had actually achieved it, just as during the campaign one provided set pieces that showed you were what you said you were whether or not you actually were. It was government of, by and for images.

Of course, it gets worse (p. 109):

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, thought of presidential image-making strategically rather than, as Nixon did, tactically. Reagan intuited that in a society where movies are the central metaphor, everything boiled down to perception and that therefore there was nothing but perception. "What he wanted to be, and what he became, was an accomplished presidential performer," wrote Reagan biographer Lou Cannon in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. Other presidents, of course, have been consummate performers; Franklin Roosevelt comes immediately to mind. But for Roosevelt the performance was always a function of the presidency, a means of selling his policies. For Reagan the presidency was a function of the performance. What he was selling was good vibes.

More on Reagan (pp. 111-112):

Summarizing Reagan's first administration, the political columnist Morton Kondracke rhapsodized that he "has cast a kind of golden glow over the past 4½ years, his programs representing a return to bedrock American values and his optimism shielding the country from bitter realities such as burdensome debt, social inequity and international challenge. Reagan is a kind of magic totem against the cold future." [ . . . ]

And if Americans readily acquiesced in the illusion, it was not because they were credulous enough to believe that there were no problems in the nation but because Reagan's presidency was a pretty good movie as movies go: well executed, thematically sound, coherent, deeply satisfying and, above all, fun. If made people feel how they wanted to feel. "You believed it because you wanted to believe it," President Reagan once told a columnist who insisted he had seen the young actor on the set of the movie Brother Rat, even though Reagan had not been there. "There's nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time."

Sports become entertainment; so does religion (p. 120):

If sport didn't have a difficult time transforming itself into entertainment, neither, it turned out, did religion. Evangelical Protestantism, which had begun as a kind of spiritual entertainment in the nineteenth century, only refined its techniques in the twentieth, especially after the advent of television. Televangelists like Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart recast the old revival meeting as a television variety show, and Pat Robertson's 700 Club was modeled after The Tonight Show, only the guests on this talk show weren't pitching a new movie or album; they were pitching salvation.

One thing this leads to is an idealization of life as grand as is possible in the movies (p. 233):

By the 1990s, with the deliberation that people were bringing to their entire existence, one could talk in the same way about "trophy lives," like Donald Trump's, which were designed as vehicles big enough and brilliant enough for the magnitude of stardom that the successful and wealthy had achieved.

There are numerous books that discuss the effect of media upon politics -- Joe McGinniss's book on Nixon's 1972 campaign, The Selling of a President was one that I read back in the day, and Al Gore's The Assault on Reason is a more recent one. One that may be closer to my original interests here is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death -- a book I was at the time inclined to dismiss given my fondness for amusement. My druthers there have changed little, so I don't see a necessary relationship between popular culture and our debased politics. In particular, it seems to me that if you fix the politics the culture may or may not improve, but at least it won't matter so much.

posted 2007-07-07