Posted on 08/04/2002 10:41:57 AM PDT by testforecho
WITH summer comes the annual ritual of the Hollywood blockbuster, aimed primarily at teenagers, and with the blockbuster comes the annual ritual of complaining about it.
Critics usually focuses on the thin plots, the lame jokes, the lack of characterization and the bombast of special effects. As they see it, many films now use an aesthetic sleight-of-hand that substitutes volume, speed, size and other neurological overloads for the more traditional satisfactions of entertainment, allowing viewers to expend a minimal amount of emotional energy. These are faux movies, and are about the only kind most teenagers respond to. They are also Exhibit A of a larger phenomenon: the illusion of entertainment.
For decades, cultural observers have been saying Americans live in a world of their own illusions, built to their specifications and designed to replace the disorder and discomfort of the unmanaged reality people were once sentenced to. As Umberto Eco wrote, "American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake."
Entertainment, especially film, with its blend of the real and the fantastic, has long been implicated in this shouldering aside of the genuine. But though entertainment is often blamed for this trend, it is also seemingly immune, because you cannot make a copy of a copy. You know that the French pavilion at Disney World's Epcot is not a real French bistro. But what would an imitation movie or TV show even look like? To talk about facsimiles of entertainment doesn't make sense.
Over the last few years, however, something has appeared that not even the most prescient cultural theorists anticipated. The television producer Phil Rosenthal calls it the "illusion of entertainment," and it is just that a form of entertainment that looks and sounds like conventional entertainment but is not, any more than Epcot's Paris is Paris. Something vital is missing.
In most entertainment, the audience responds emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, even physically. There is a level of engagement, and we usually judge entertainment on the basis of how much engagement it elicits. At its simplest, as in so many teenage movies, the illusion of entertainment eschews other forms of engagement for purely physical effects. At its more complex, engagement is replaced by another mechanism entirely. Instead of character development in movies or full-bodied jokes in situation comedies viewers get a set of signals, a kind of code, that advises them how to respond without having to expend the effort, however minimal, that real entertainment demands. You see or hear the signal and you respond as if you were getting the real thing. Or put another way, you are given the form and you provide the content.
Just compare a conventional entertainment, the director Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," with its latest avatar, Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds" by no means the most egregious offender. Both films tell the same story of a naïf who inherits a fortune and is taken advantage of by urban sharpies. But that's where the similarity ends. Capra's classic is heavily plotted, quiet and often tender; leisurely paced, its comedy character- and plot-generated. You must watch and listen closely to enjoy it. Mr. Sandler's movie is more skimpily plotted, loud, often violent and frenetically paced. Its comedy is virtually all non sequiturs a disappearing butler or a gangrenous foot that is only funny because we know it is meant to be, not because it is inherently humorous. Even the romantic scenes are romantic only because viewers know they are supposed to be, and drippy music signals that they are. Mr. Sandler is working the code. He's stripped Capra down to the absolute basics of form and then added noise and speed.
In mathematics there is something called a derivative an expression that stands for another set of expressions. The illusion of entertainment is a kind of cultural derivative. You watch most television sitcoms and, just by the rhythm of the banter and the laugh track, you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the jokes are funny or not. Sitcom writers call this "likeajoke" because it has the form of a joke without the content. Or you go to a big commercial movie, and just by experiencing the rapid cutting and thumping music you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the action engages you or not.
In effect, these entertainments exist largely as a system of reminders of what we once experienced when we watched real entertainment movies and television shows that engaged us and made us feel.
OF course, some may argue that the illusion of entertainment is just another name for bad or formulaic entertainment, and the signals and codes are the cultural syntax that everyone grows up with. But the illusion of entertainment is not a matter of quality; it is a matter of kind of a different way of processing what we see. Even bad conventional entertainment operates on the principle of engagement; it is just that bad entertainment doesn't succeed in engaging.
As for formulas, while most people are familiar with narrative patterns and understand what they convey, there is a big difference between old formulaic entertainment and the new illusion of entertainment. Formulas are designed to elicit predictable responses through predictable means predictable because they have worked in the past. You show an audience an attractive young man and woman who playfully bicker at the beginning of a movie and it roots for them to wind up together at the end. Or show a bully pushing around a decent fellow and viewers root for the latter to defeat the former. The audience reacts not because it knows the formula it reacts because the formula knows the audience.
THE illusion of entertainment doesn't put the audience through those paces. Being a derivative, it is far more emotionally economical. It gets its predictable responses by cuing the audience in how they are supposed to react. And it can do so because the audience, after years of watching movies and TV shows, is now hard-wired to respond. Virtually all Americans have internalized the code. They are sophisticated enough to know that a certain cadence of speech means funny and a certain editing pattern means action and certain saccharine music means melodrama. They don't need the whole apparatus of entertainment anymore, or even formulas. The illusion of entertainment is a shortcut entertainment lite.
It is not an altogether unsatisfying shortcut either. Just as Mr. Eco said that Americans prefer the fake to the real, so many prefer the illusion of entertainment to the real thing. The illusion of entertainment cannot provide all the pleasures real entertainment does, but it is far less demanding and challenging. It is also more accessible, and since it lets viewers essentially fill in the blanks themselves, it is more certain in its results. In fact, many people, especially young people, are now likely to judge a movie or TV show by how effectively it provides the forms and activates the codes.
Not surprisingly, this has been a boon to the entertainment industry. Why struggle to write real jokes when you can write "likeajokes" and get the same effect? In doing so, however, producers of entertainment have not, as some critics assert, necessarily suffered a failure of talent or intelligence. Rather, they may have made a discovery and then exploited it. Just as the makers of kitsch, which is the illusion of art, learned to produce, in the critic Clement Greenberg's analysis, the effect without the cause, so have the makers of the illusion of entertainment learned how to produce the reaction without the reason for it. When the audience so embraces this, one cannot really blame producers for attempting to perfect it.
Obviously, no work of popular entertainment is entirely illusory yet. But real entertainment is endangered and not only because the illusion of entertainment is flooding the market. An entire generation has now grown up with the illusion of entertainment. It has grown up with the codes, with "likeajokes" and "likeanaction," and scarcely knows what real entertainment is which is why the illusion of entertainment is targeted at the young. For them, the codes are not reminders; they are the thing itself.
It is bizarre to think that conventional entertainment may someday become a relic with even the old formulas attenuated into signals. Yet that is the future we are edging toward a future where entertainment is created by people who don't care about engagement for people who don't even know what engagement is.
"Umm, when you go to the movies now, you are not seeing a movie. You're seeing something like a movie. It looks, sounds, and acts like a movie. It's shown in a movie theatre. But it's not a movie."
What a waste of ink.
That's not to say these movies aren't entertaining. But they're entertaining in the same way the magician at a child's birthday party is. You paid to be entertained so you let yourself be entertained, all the while you know that the tricks are predictable and probably easily deciphered, the jokes are tired, and amusing only in rote, and the schtick embarrassing except that you have nothing better to do.
The "dark, gritty look" of movies like Gladiator and Blackhawk Down is becoming cliche. The vapid scat humor of Dumb and Dumber or anything by Adam Sandler is an appeal to the dullest couch spud. All the moviemaker has to do is keep him from drowning in his own drool before the final credits and he can consider his product successful.
It's Jerry Springer on the Big Screen, the Dark Age of Cinema. But what can you expect from audiences that actually tune into crap like "American Idol" and "Survivor?"
Movies didn't seem to make sense, and they certainly were not entertaining.
I chalked it up to being a generational thing. I was getting to be an "old foggy", that just wasn't "hip" to the new culture.
Kind of like reading Cliff Notes, instead of the book. You get all of the information, but miss the experience and pleasure of the book.
I have to agree with you here (at least somewhat). There used to be a radio program in KC, played Friday and Saturday nights, very late, that I'd set my alarm for... It was called "When Radio Was," and it was replays of the old radio serials, as well as Fibber Mgee and Molly, Burns and Allen, and best of all, The Jack Benny Show!
I've got to say, I don't think that there's anything else on TV or radio that's anywhere near as engrossing or entertaining.
And, no, I wasn't around to hear them when they were on the first time! I'm only 40! lol
Mark
Not really. Just observing that its bizarre, minimalist, jerky composition has been overdone, and is now the cinematic standard for everything from Adam Sandler comedies to dog food commercials.
It's more than coincidence that the increase in banal cinema has accompanied a decline in literacy. As for radio, it only exists for conservative talk and to fill up that big hole in your car's dashboard.
As someone smarter then me said once, "When I was 20 I knew everything, now that I am 50 I know nothing."
Actually I couldn't make heads or tails of the article. It reads more like a facsimile of an article than the real thing (ironically, since this seemed to be the point he was trying to make about movies).
Is this anything other than a variation on the old "stuff was better in my day" theme? The movies this guy used to watch were "real" entertainment, but all current movies are "facsimiles" or "imitations". Yeah, ok, whatever you say, old-timer. Now I'm real impressed that he front-loaded and straw-manned his argument to death by stacking up a freakin' Adam Sandler movie to the one it was "based on", but really: is that a fair comparison?
Ugh. I mean just cuz he can throw a couple Umberto Eco quotes together and bash America doesn't mean he's making any actual good point of any kind.
The use of music, in particular, to suggest a romance between Anakin and Padme that would be non-sensical otherwise.
Um, once you accept that these events are taking place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"; that Padme is the former Queen of her planet but posed as her maidservant practically the whole time; that a Jedi named Qui-Gon Jinn just happened to land on a planet called Tattoine, just happened to wander into a junk shop where the owner just happened to have a slave named Anakin who (wouldn't you know it) it turns out just happened to have a "high midichlorian count" and perhaps was even conceived immaculately - once you accept all these things, seems a little silly to me to complain that a romance between this Anakin and that Padme was "non-sensical". He was a strapping teenager assigned to protect her, and she in her early 20s; in fact a romance between them would be one of the more believable things about those movies, it seems to me :)
Which movie was this? Showgirls?
You're making the same mistake as the author of the article: you take an unmistakably great, classic movie (which of course North by Northwest is), you compare it to some piece of crap released by Miramax or whatever, and then blithely proclaim "See! Movies used to be so much better!"
All based on what? Comparing Frank Capra to Adam Sandler? Alfred Hitchcock to Joe Esterhas? I've got nothing against complaining about modern crap movies or anything, but can't you guys at least try to make a fair comparison?
When was this? 1910? Sounds like you're idealizing history, and in particular Hollywood, just a tad.
It's just as likely that those old films you love starred vapid bed-hopping screwed-up people who Moved To Hollywood To Make It Big, as it is now. Did Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, or Norma Jean Baker (oh, sorry, "Marilyn Monroe"...) really ever "live real lives" as adults? I guess I just wonder who you think you're talking about here.
The people who make movies today grew up watching movies.
This was also true in 1970, 1950, and probably even 1935. Movies've been around, and popular with the young people, a wee bit longer than you seem to think.
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