Life, the Movie
My Pilgrim's Progress

A L S O_.T O D A Y

The man without principles
By James Poniewozik
The career of the great German cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a case study in the virtues of intellectual inconsistency

T A B L E_.T A L K

My so-called Zeitgeist: Discuss what's meant by the word "mainstream" in Table Talk's Media area

R E C E N T L Y

Truth in advertising
By James Poniewozik
The downfalls of Miller Lite's "Dick" and Spin's Michael Hirschorn show marketing can still explode when you defuse it
(01/26/99)

Wall Street Journal personals work!
By Susan Lehman
A Page 1 feature about a filthy-rich businesswoman was "a giant, high-class singles ad." Plus media news and notes from all over
(01/21/99)

A battle for the soul of America
By Steve Erickson
It's time for the American people to realize that the Clinton trial isn't really about Clinton -- it's about democracy
(01/20/99)

Magazine racks
By James Poniewozik
Esquire, Cosmo, Self and Men's Health show us their tits
(01/19/99)

Of Fallowships, Flynt, Republican phone sex and demon goddesses of love
By Susan Lehman
(01/14/99)

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Gabler claims he's actually not an anti-entertainment scold, that his book is simply descriptive and that he doesn't take sides; in his Newseum talk he noted that as a longtime film critic he by definition has to love popular culture. But he sure has a funny way of showing it. "One could do worse," he writes in his introduction, "than to lay much of what has happened in late-twentieth-century America" -- of course anything that "has happened" in America today is for the worse unless explicitly stated otherwise -- "to the corrosive effects of entertainment." And he concludes that there are two sides in the "great cultural debate that loomed at the end of the twentieth century and promised to dominate the twenty-first." The first are the "realists," who seek to defend "reality itself" from the entertainment culture and who, with Neil Postman, believe "culture-death is a real possibility." The second are the "postrealists," who, like the entertainment addicts of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," want "the grail of total gratification and [ask] why they shouldn't have it."

In other words, it's the guardians of civilization against the nihilistic junkies. Not that he's taking sides or anything.

It's difficult to criticize Gabler's book, because almost nothing in it is wrong. That is, yes, the seamless meshing of military, political and media goals in the Gulf War was sickening. Yes, the entertainment industry's fabrication of off-screen reality has become breathtaking (the Mighty Ducks hockey team, the Hard Rock cafe, etc.). But the thousand rights in this fact-and-note-laden work add up to an overarching wrong, albeit one highly in tune with contemporary suspicions: that in almost all aspects, daily private life has become an entertainment-aesthetic-suffused performance. (Here's one easy way to test this kind of ambitious, all-explaining cultural theory: If it seems to make perfect sense about everyone else in the world, particularly those people you don't like or respect, you might give it a second look.)

"Life the Movie" is undercut by its very comprehensiveness, or by its indiscriminateness, anyway. There's almost nothing Gabler can't turn into life-as-performance fodder: The Milli Vanilli scandal is evidence, but so is, for no clear reason, a college student's buying pirated term papers. He relies inordinately on examples of the feeble-minded, criminal, eccentric or insane -- Mark David Chapman, Timothy McVeigh, Arthur Bremer, Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan. (One could probably trace the rise of the mass-deception school of media criticism, by the way, to Reagan, whose adversaries bitterly consoled themselves that Americans were under the sway of a master thespian -- which, as Jacob Weisberg pointed out recently in the New York Times Magazine, no one ever accused Reagan of being during his film career.) And while Gabler notes that the media encourages its subjects to live their lives hyperbolically, he takes the media's hyperbole about itself at face value, so that Kurt Andersen calling President Clinton "The Entertainer-in-Chief" or Russell Baker calling scandal coverage a "soap opera" becomes proof positive of his thesis (aha!) even though the all-the-world's-a-stage trope is one of the press's biggest rhetorical crutches outside the cab-driver interview. Gabler even cites the satires "To Die For" and "The King of Comedy" as evidence of regular people's "desperation to get to the other side of the glass," putting himself in the strange position of arguing that we're losing the distinction between real life and movies -- while drawing his own evidence about real life from the movies.

Part of the problem with Gabler's mass-cultural-life-as-total- entertainment dynamic is that it's a closed system. That which is entertainment is popular. Therefore, that which is popular is entertainment. But what exactly does that prove? Take this crucial broad-brush Gablerism: "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." It neatly encapsulates the problem with "Life the Movie" -- the first half is eminently sensible, the second falls apart -- and it's a perfect example of the big, slippery catch-alls so tempting to writers on the media. What is this "everything"? Does it include asteroids? Storm systems? Viruses? Of course not -- the media might have used Asteroid XF-11, say, as entertainment, but it certainly didn't turn itself into entertainment.

So Gabler must mean all human endeavor, right? Except that his critique rests on the absolutely correct argument that much important human endeavor -- say, the massacre of civilians in Algeria -- barely makes news; in fact plenty of nefarious endeavor relies on the preferences of the newscast to avoid notice. So, near as I can tell, this "everything" must be "those human endeavors that the media pay attention to," which thus makes Gabler's statement self-fulfilling but largely meaningless. If you define TV news as entertainment, and "everything" as "everything that's on TV news," it's easy and righteous-indignation-affirming but none too helpful to conclude that everything is entertainment nowadays.

It's too bad, because Gabler nails a number of real problems before overreaching toward what he calls his "unified-field theory of media," the sort of bold polemic that gets notice and lands you on the stage of a place called the "Newseum" -- exactly the same ploy Gabler criticizes under "soundbites, intellectual." He's at his strongest in the chapters on the symbiosis between the news media and politics, expertly laying out ways that politics has modulated itself to accommodate the media, placing the press "in the peculiar position of having to judge how effectively a politician used them." Gabler situates this phenomenon historically and relates it to the larger culture, unlike much journalistic criticism, which looks at news media in a vacuum. Most important, Gabler rightly recognizes that the media exists as it does primarily because we want it to (and -- no mean achievement for a media critic -- he respects his readers enough to give us credit for knowing what we really want).

But Gabler loses these small, important arguments in his larger one. "If you weren't part of the life movie" in the late 20th century, he tells us, you were part of the "vast anonymous audience. To many, this was too terrifying a prospect to contemplate." Slick word, that "many." You might also say, but to less dramatic effect, "to an extremely small but disproportionately visible minority." As Gabler notes, the Internet has made possible voyeuristic phenomena like JenniCam, but you could just as easily argue that that's the law of averages; if the Net has allowed some of us to paint our toenails on camera, it's allowed others to put up pages on lepidoptera and lunch-box collections. Even the string of dysfunctional volunteers for talk TV is questionable evidence of our hunger for attention: Most of us don't want to be on Montel and can't entirely understand why anyone would -- and that puzzlement is essential to the shows' excruciating appeal. As a recent Wall Street Journal feature showed, many of the most truly powerful of us -- the CEOs of American corporations -- are avoiding public attention and celebrity in droves. Mindful of the old proverb, most of us don't want to lead interesting lives. We want to watch them.

N E X T_ P A G E | George W.S. Trow is different from you and me