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.
Now your talking truly great cinema!
FMCDH
I read this and was expecting something much funnier to follow. But why give it away for free, eh?
This is one reason I believe a movie like Casablanca will never be made again. In that movie there was definitely a spark between Bogart and Bacall (?) but they never did anything about it -- and that was the emotional power behind the movie.
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.He seems to be saying that entertainment today depends on the use of stock figures and situations, and signals that effectively act like "laughter" or "applause" signs. I guess that's as opposed to the good old days--<sarcasm> heaven knows that commedia dell'arte didn't depend on stock figures, and the songs of the troubadours didn't depend on stock situations such as a dialogue between a man and a woman he was trying to seduce...</sarcasm>I'm gonna need a pretty convincing example to buy what this guy is selling right here. Seriously, what on earth is he talking about?
Last night our electricity was out so I turned on a radio. WMAL was broadcating "When Radio Was". I really enjoyed it.
Set your alarm tonight for 1:00 am :)
But when wasn't this true? That's my point.
What the author completely fails to demonstrate is that this is some kind of change from the way films used to be. In short, he's "faking" the argument, by making some sweeping generalizations but not provided any justification for them.
Instead, they rip off the car chase stuff from Bullitt and French Connection.
No, the bad moviemakers rip off the car chase stuff from Buillitt and French Connection. Yet again you're comparing bad movies of today with good films of yesteryear. I have yet to see one fair comparison.
They have an explosion scene.
Yup, Saving Private Ryan had an "explosion scene" (Normandy). How derivative....
When they are thru, you have a big-name big-cost movie that is really just a string of scenes and no real pretense of a movie. That is a fake.
No, it's a schlocky, bad, movie. It's not a "fake". It's still a movie, isn't it? Just not a very good one. And?
Are you under the impression that bad movies didn't exist however many years ago?
Did producers make fake and crap before, in the 50's and 60's for example.
Heck yeah. You really don't think so?
The point is that we simply don't remember the bad crappy derivative stuff which was put out in the 50s and 60s, because it was (drumroll) bad. That doesn't mean that all the movies that came out between 1950-1969 were of the quality of North by Northwest. Ever seen those "beach" movies with Annette Funicello? Give me a break.
And when people go to see an Adam Sandler movie, ... well, you get my point :)
The trouble nowadays is that too many of the big-name big-cost movies are formulaic ripoffs.
Maybe. I'd certainly prefer it if less of them are ripoffs. In any event, I won't argue.
That doesn't make them "illusions of entertainment", however. Just bad movies. Bad movies are a phenomenon which has been with us for quite some time. I still don't see how you or the author of the article can seriously expect to get away with saying otherwise.
Take "Fast and Furious" for example. Take "Tomb Raider". Take "Remember the Titans". Take "3000 Miles to Graceland." Please take them.
No thanks, you keep 'em ;) Sigh. But you keep proving my point. Yes, those are bad movies. You took some bad movies from today, compared them with good movies from yesteryear, and then declared "movies used to be better".
It's nonsense. Why don't you start by comparing apples with apples: Compare good movies of today with good movies of yesteryear. Wouldn't that make a little more sense, hmm?
Boy I hated to post and run but I agree, most of the movies produced each year fit into the 'we're not going to present acutal character development, we're just going to provide the cues that go along with it, and you'll react like we actually did it anyway.'
August 1, 2002| New York Observer
The New Ship of Fools
by Rex Reed
Hollywood is the new Ship of Fools, and with a boring, amateurish, incomprehensible and stupefyingly pretentious pile of swill called Full Frontal, the prosecution rests its case. This is the most deluded piece of crap since Mulholland Drive, only it seems twice as long and half as interesting. Before it crashed and burned, David Lynch’s dementedly overrated Mulholland Drive at least held a morbid grip on the imagination. Steven Soderbergh’s dementedly overrated Full Frontal doesn’t even offer a grace period; it falls apart in the first five minutes. Everything after that is a week’s vacation in Kabul.
In the dense array of animated zombies that populate this gimmicked-up Soderbergh drivel, a vast number of performers who should’ve known better prove Hitchcock’s theory that actors are nothing more than cows you lead through a fence. While several Hollywood imbeciles prepare for the 40th birthday of a producer named Gus (David Duchovny), scenes unravel from a fictional film called Rendezvous, which has a black star named Calvin (Blair Underwood) and a white star named Francesca (Julia Roberts in a blond wig). As shots from the fake film progress on perfectly clear 35-millimeter film stock with professional lighting and sound, the continuity is interrupted by the digitally recorded "reality" footage of the people behind the scenes while Mr. Soderbergh breaks through the "fourth wall" of cinema. The fake movie looks like a real movie that doesn’t give you headaches; the "reality" stuff is so grainy and dark you feel like you need to shine a flashlight on the screen to see what’s going on. Sometimes the movie just goes out of focus completely and stays that way for minutes on end, the way photographer Bert Stern used to shoot whiskey bottles to look like a blur of pinwheels. (It made a lot of people sick but didn’t sell much Four Roses.) The same kind of pretentious retro assault on the optical nerves makes Full Frontal look like the world immediately following Lasik surgery.
But back to the brain-dead characters. Mopey, monotoned Catherine Keener plays Lee Bright, a 41-year-old "icy bitch" who works as a V.P. of human resources at a large corporation and takes out her sick fantasies on fired employees; on her younger, unmarried sister Linda (Mary McCormack), who works as a hotel masseuse; and on her emasculated husband Carl (David Hyde Pierce), a writer for Los Angeles Magazine and author of the Rendezvous screenplay. In the execrable movie-within-the-movie, Mr. Underwood is also playing a black actor named Nicholas who is being profiled by (and falling in love with) an arrogant magazine interviewer named Catherine (Julia Roberts in a brunette wig). Carl bakes the hashish brownies for Gus’ birthday, gets fired from his magazine job (presumably for publishing too many nude Brad Pitt covers), and comes home, already so depressed he’s ready for a whole bottle of Seconal, to find the dog has eaten the brownies and is now semi-conscious. While he’s on the phone with the vet, he finds a letter his wife Lee has written asking for a divorce. Meanwhile, Lee is having sex with the actor Calvin, and Lee’s sister Linda gets an extra $500 for a 30-second hand job on a client who turns out to be the mysterious Gus. For extra confusion, Mr. Soderbergh keeps cutting to a play called The Sound and the Führer, in which Adolf Hitler returns to Hollywood as a psychotic and much-revered studio executive. Everyone shags off to Gus’ party (except Hitler, who has to teach a Pilates class), where the guest of honor never shows up because he’s upstairs naked with a plastic bag around his head. Director Soderbergh appears from time to time doing what he laughably calls "directing" this garbage with a black box covering his face. Apparently everyone involved is considered such an expert on the subject of self-obsessed Hollywood hypocrites they require no identity. You’re not supposed to ask why Julia Roberts can’t tell the difference between Francesca and Catherine, or why she plays them both the same way. If you don’t already know that Julia Roberts can’t act, then the joke is on you. Everyone else is dreadful, too. David Duchovny gets a massage. Brad Pitt shows up to improvise a few inanities (a homage to Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven). Terence Stamp is seen entering and leaving a hotel lobby (a homage to Soderbergh’s The Limey). Mouthing superficial baloney, none of them has any talent for improvisation, and the incoherent jumble they babble is so annoying it makes you think of pain-management clinics. Editor: "I want this magazine to drink from the bottle!" Petulant movie star Julia Roberts, throwing her lunch on the floor of her trailer: "This arugula is so bitter it’s like my algebra teacher on bread!" Black actor: "From Sambo to Sidney to Denzel to me, us brothers ain’t gettin’ or givin’ no love!" Insane actor playing Hitler, whose leading lady walks out when she catches him drinking blood: "People who are offended by drinking blood are obviously not drinking any blood, O.K.?" This is the catastrophic result of turning over the contents of the safe to second-rate directors after they win their first Oscar, and moaning when they shovel back their masturbatory fantasies in your face. The most disgusting impersonation in the film is a swinish pig who calls himself Harvey. Since Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein gave these amateurs the money to waste, then allowed them to make fun of him on screen, the in-joke seems like insulting double jeopardy. Maybe he’s such a sport that he thinks it’s funny. I don’t. I mean, how many ways can you spell F-O-O-L?
Mr. Soderbergh’s aim is to convince amateur filmmakers that they can buy any basic camera at any convenience store and make a movie just like Full Frontal. He’s right: With no talent, experience, intelligence or perception, you can make a movie just like this one, as long as you’ve got pals like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce to trash themselves in front of your video camcorder, and Miramax to write checks. The result is career suicide, of course, and any guarantee that the audience will pay money to watch it happen is as big a gamble as WorldCom stock. Ask Mr. Soderbergh to explain this gibberish, and he would probably tell you it’s supposed to be bad satire. But who wants to spend good money watching neurotic non-people cruise the Internet for sex, eat food sweetened with fruit juice by Wolfgang Puck, and talk in pointless non sequiturs? If this is what Hollywood people are like, no wonder their movies are so lousy
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