It's Like a Movie, but It's Not

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.

No. This was a great article. Think about laugh tracks the next time you watch a TV show that them, like Gilligan's Island. 99% of the time, what is being laughed at on the track isn't something you would laugh at. Try this experiment.

Then ask yourself if you are really experiencing a funny TV show, or are you being cued like a Pavlov dog to find humor where it doesn't really exist. You'll say "yes" I know. Now, extrapolate this to the new crop of movies and start watching for the cues. parsy the poor man's pundit.

Today's "entertainment" calls for the audience to invest little of itself in the process. The viewer is simply a passive observer, not a participant in the cinematic event. Anything cerebral scares the Cheaplaugh crowd. Formulaic jump-cut editing, distorted mise en scene, and pretentious camera angles are supposed to compensate for the lack of plot structure or dramatic integrity (think Matrix.)

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?"

No, you are wrong. This was a deep and profound article. Please read it again. Have you ever watched the movie like North by Northwest. Pay attention to the sexual interplay between Grant and the blonde. (Tippy Hedron?) All below the surface.

Now see how sexual interplay occurs in modern movies. Man throws woman up against a wall and they have sex standing up. Thats how you know they like each other. Do you see a difference?

The latter is a "formula"---sex=love, and you get to see the sex. In the earlier, attraction is in the eyes and the tone of voice and the relationship. You never see the sex, but you know it is there. One is harder to do. One is easier and takes less talent and demands less of the audience. I bet you can pick which is which. parsy.

Parsifal, I agree with you. I had thought it was me these last few years. I just was not "getting" the jokes others seem to get.

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.

Movies used to be made by people who had lived real lives before they got into the movie business. The people who make movies today grew up watching movies. They don't have real life experiences to draw upon, their lives consist of the movies they have watched. This is why their product is so empty, because they have nothing inside themselves to bring to their stories, instead they are endlessly rehashing stories that they have seen before.

Besides, more subtle entertainment requires the use of critical thinking facilities that have atrophied after years of pre-digested pap on TV and radio. Today's audiences are ill prepared to appreciate subtle dramatic or comic touches. Then again, "subtle" isn't a common description of today's cinema. The best today's directors seem to be able to manage is "obscure."

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

It's not old age, for sure. I am 48 and still feel 15 years old inside. Most everything is dumbed down today even more than it used to be. Some of it is because Hollywood has so much entertainment to produce. When I was a kid, there were 3 networks and I think producers were working overtime even then to keep up with demand.

Look at the Munsters, for example. Lame as all get out. Look at Bewitched and I Dream of Genie. The rot had set in way back then. Look at some of the Westerns from the 50's. For the most part stupid, dull, insipid, idiotic plots.

Remember that Doris Day-James Garner movie, where she started selling soap? Remember the gag where the weekly TV show was the same plot week after week, even though the setting might be Nazi Germany one week and the Wild West the next? The kids recognized it, and the adults in the movie didn't.

I think there is a lot of good movies being made today and good shows, too, but you have to wade thru so much dreck to find them.

parsy.

I think the dramatic paradigm (pardon the buzzword) has changed. Audiences today are unwilling or unable to participate, so they expect easily digestible smarm or accept obfuscation as profundity. Radio from yesteryear required that the listener supply the visuals. But most engaging of all was literature, where the entire dramatic universe was conjured inside the reader's head.

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 much as I liked Attack of the Clones, for instance, this guy really nails it on the head.

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 :)

��5{�� ever watched the movie like North by Northwest. Pay attention to the sexual interplay between Grant and the blonde. (Tippy Hedron?) All below the surface. Now see how sexual interplay occurs in modern movies. Man throws woman up against a wall and they have sex standing up.

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?

Gabler's points are all well-made. For the most part I agree. But it misses some of the point about why people go to a movie and what entertainment is about.

The formulaic approach is not something new. How many times did the damsel in distress get rescued from the oncoming train in the silent movies? How many times did Charlie Chaplin take a pratfall to elicit laughter from his audience? How many times did Moe poke Larry and Curly's eyes? How many times did Bob Hope and Bing Crosby go 'on the road?'

Formula is an intrinsic part of technique. Sometimes a film maker rises above formula and produces genuine art. More often we simply see repetition of the tried and true process. So what. That makes the exceptional movie that much more enjoyable.

For the moviegoer I suspect the problem is largely one of expectations. Do I expect great art when I see a movie from Schwarznegger or Stallone, Wesley Snipes, etc? Of course not. I would be a fool if I did. What I do expect and what they can deliver is the roller coaster ride that Gabler so derides. And just like the cool ride at the amusement park I can ride it over and over and still enjoy it. Repetitive? Formulaic? You bet. Do I have fun? Sure.

Is it art? It is certainly craft and that is fine by me. When I want something more out of the movies I go to a different kind of movie. Take 'Il Postino' for example. A genuine work of art. But I did not go expecting a roller coaster ride or even the edge of the seat mystery formula provided by Clancy or Grisham.

If I think of Austin Powers as high art then I am missing the point to the same extent as the person who demands that it be high art. Mike Myers and Adam Sandler are only vaguely amusing to me. But who gives me the right to say that someone else should not be allowed to enjoy them?

By Gabler's standards moviemaking may just as well have stopped after Citizen Kane. Lighten up. I can read Dostoevsky and I can read Clancy without confusing the two. And if I can't it would be my own problem.

Movies used to be made by people who had lived real lives before they got into the movie business.

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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