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.
"Cultural observers" say lots of stupid-ass things. Right away I'm suspicious; is this article really about movies, or about "Americans"? Can't complain about one without complaining about the other, can he?
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.
Actually, this paragraph doesn't make sense. We have a witty Eco quote being used as a launching pad to explain that movies are immune to the charge of falsifying themselves, because they're already false. Translation: "Movies are make-believe."
Most of us were already told this by our parents at age 2.
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.
Translation: current entertainment isn't really entertainment. How do we know? Because "television producer Phil Rosenthal", whoever that is, says so.
This argumentation style isn't really argumentation, is it? Something vital is missing. Like facts, logic, evidence....
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.
So entertainment engages the audience in many ways - "even physically". But today's "illusion of entertainment" only causes "purely physical effects". So that's why it's not "really" entertainment.
There's a contradiction here. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't argue with a claim that American Pie 2 engages the audience on a lesser level than (say) Saving Private Ryan. It engages them "purely physically", if this guy insists. Fine.
That's entertainment. How is it not?
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.
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?
I'm tempted to part company with him right here, by saying: "I'm reading a New York Times article that makes no sense. So apparently instead of a rational argument of some kind, I'm supposed to respond to a set of signals, a kind of code - namely, the fact that this article appears under the hallowed words 'The New York Times', quotes Umberto Eco, bashes Americans - that advises me how to respond - namely, by clapping and nodding my head like a seal - without having to expend the effort, however minimal, that real convincing argumentation demands."
Just compare a conventional entertainment, the director Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," with its latest avatar, Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds"
I've already complained about this unfair comparison enough. Let's move on.
In mathematics there is something called a derivative — an expression that stands for another set of expressions.
I'm not sure I buy that ("an expression that stands for another set of expressions") as the definition of a derivative. I think maybe he's confusing this with financial "derivatives". But whatever.
The illusion of entertainment is a kind of cultural derivative.
Perhaps it would be, but (a) certainly not in the mathematical sense, just in the generic plain English sense of the word (I still can't figure out why he felt the need to pretend to be a math expert in order to use the word "derivative"), and (b) only if this "illusion of entertainment" actually exists as a real phenomenon - for which he's still provided no evidence other than the fact that some TV producer said so, and some Adam Sandler movie was a piece of crap.
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.
Ah, so central to his grand thesis is the fact that sitcoms (like Adam Sandler movies) are also crappy compared to Frank Capra films. Got it! What a great point.
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.
Yes but "knowing how you are supposed to respond" is not the same as actually responding. There's still such a thing as "good movie" vs. "bad movie". If he's complaining about (say) big commercial movies with rapid cutting, thumping music, but which don't engaged the audience (i.e. Tomb Raider from last year...) then guess what? He's complaining about (drumroll) Bad Movies.
Bad Movies, I hate to break it to everyone, have always existed.
In effect, these entertainments exist largely as a system of reminders of what we once experienced when we watched real entertainment —
Right. Tomb Raider, by failing at its goals, reminded me of The Matrix, which succeeded and was by far a better movie.
(Oh wait, I was supposed to name a grand old classic movie in that space, wasn't I? So sorry....)
Anyway, in short: Bad movies are worse than good ones. Unsuccessful filims are less entertaining than successful ones. What an earth-shaking discovery! The only place where I part company with the author, I guess, is the implication that good films are all a thing of the past. The only way he supports this conclusion is by ignoring all non-Adam Sandler films, of course....
OF course, some may argue that the illusion of entertainment is just another name for bad or formulaic entertainment,
bingo.
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.
For instance....
Even bad conventional entertainment operates on the principle of engagement; it is just that bad entertainment doesn't succeed in engaging.
Right... and so....
As for formulas, while ...
Huh? New paragraph? That's it? I thought he was going to actually explain and justify his claim that what he is complaining about here isn't just bad or unsuccessful films, but is different in kind ("a matter of kind"). How is it different in kind? He never says. I guess we're just supposed to take it on faith.
there is a big difference between old formulaic entertainment and the new illusion of entertainment.
Ah, ok. Well, how so? I can't wait to hear this.
The audience reacts not because it knows the formula — it reacts because the formula knows the audience.
Uh, ok. This is some kind of metaphysical argument that is way over my head. How does it happen that a "formula" "knows" an "audience'?
A movie audience in 1955 goes to see a movie in which a bully pushes around a decent guy. The audience roots for the decent guy to prevail in the end. It's a formula, but the audience "doesn't know" this. Instead, the "formula knows the audience". Therefore it's "real entertainment".
Flash forward to 2002. A bully pushes around a decent guy. The audience roots for the decent guy to prevail in the end. It's a formula, but this time the audience "knows the formula". Thus it's only the "illusion of entertainment".
Two questions: 1. What's the freakin' difference? 2. This guy must have thought everyone was pretty stupid 30+ years ago not to recognize such movie formulas.
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.
Right, as opposed to movie formulas in the olden days, which... cued their audience in how they were supposed to react. I still don't see the difference, save perhaps for the fact that the author of this article was younger in the olden days than he is now, so naturally Everything Was Better Back Then.
And it can do so because the audience, after years of watching movies and TV shows, is now hard-wired to respond.
Ok fine, if all he's doing is complaining about the jadedness of modern audiences and the increase of irony and sarcasm and self-consciousness in entertainment and all that, he's got a point. I still don't see how that makes the entertainment an "illusion", however.
The illusion of entertainment cannot provide all the pleasures real entertainment does, but it is far less demanding and challenging.
Adam Sandler films are far less demanding and challenging than Frank Capra films. What a great point! We've been through this. Doesn't he have any real evidence to provide or fair comparisons to make?
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.
Lots of interesting little claims in this statement. It would be intriguing if he'd actually provide some examples. Which films does he have in mind which "provide the forms and activate the codes" for "young people", one wonders?
Why struggle to write real jokes when you can write "likeajokes" and get the same effect?
Because by writing mere "likeajokes" you can't rise much farther in the industry than some lame sitcom. (Let's remember, gentle readers, that earlier in this article the term "likeajokes" only came up in the context of freakin' sitcoms. But of course here the author tries to pretend that "likeajokes" are what are used in all comedy films. Don't let him get away with this sleight of hand.)
When the audience so embraces this, one cannot really blame producers for attempting to perfect it.
Embraces what? That Adam Sandler movie? That's still his only example. Well, it was a critical failure. It won't be remembered in 40 years. And even in the short term, I'm not even sure it's doing that well; is it?
Seriously, what's this guy's point? Anything?
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.
Fascinating claim. Too bad he never backs it up.
It has grown up with the codes, with "likeajokes" and "likeanaction," and scarcely knows what real entertainment is —
Ah yes, young people today, so uncultured. Not like him.
For them, the codes are not reminders; they are the thing itself.
What "codes"? Does this guy even know what he's talking about? It's beginning to seem like this article is really just a stand-in or a teaser for a much longer, more interesting article - one which contains the actual content, the definitions, the examples, the logic, the arguments.
It is bizarre to think that conventional entertainment may someday become a relic with even the old formulas attenuated into signals.
He said it. Yes, it is bizarre. Truly bizarre.
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.
Only he knows what "engagement" is, and "engagement" is the sole province of the cowboys-and-Indians movies he watched on Saturdays as a kid.
I'm assuming, of course. In reality it's still not possible to tell what point this guy thinks he is conveying, so one has to extrapolate. Hey, I did my best.
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?
Clarke Cooper
The Will to Scorn
http://www.hermenaut.com/a11.shtml
If you've ever been to a movie theater then you may also have been outside the theater or in its lobby. In these places on bad days you might encounter people in flagrant violation of the Golden Rule of cinematic etiquette: Keep your fool mouth shut about this movie, other movies, and anything that's ever been associated with a movie. The reason is that when you fling wide your pie hole and pass opinion in public you're exposing people who have never done you any harm to attitudes against which they are particularly defenseless on account of having either just formed some of their own or readied themselves to form some, and in consequence of this one or more of them may have to strike you dead on the spot. Restraint here is a matter of etiquette rather than self preservation because it's entirely your affair whether you choose to live or die, but it's inconsiderate in the extreme to expose perfect strangers to the risk of life imprisonment simply because you can't wait till you get to the car before you release your foul interpretations. I most certainly do not exempt myself from this restriction; on the contrary, as will be seen it's among my fondest wishes that there be someone at every feature I attend who would be incapable of not murdering me for thoughtless venting; as I hope for them to remain happily at large, my word is "mum."
These people are fine; they are your friends. They only mean you harm, and if they do happen to kill you it will be entirely personal. The ones you want to fear and shun are the ones who on overhearing one of these unfortunate broadcasts—which could be your own if you're not looking sharp-turn to their dates, roll their various eyes and chuckle benignantly: the Scorners.
What is it like, this scorn? Well, if you've ever been to a movie theater where they were showing a movie more than about fifteen years old, unless you were very lucky it was all around you. I recently saw the revised rerelease of Touch of Evil, an Orson Welles joint, and enjoyed it very much; I think it's a swell picture. Current audiences don't necessarily dig it though so at the end when Marlene Dietrich pronounced the story's judgment on Orson Welles' unsanitary old detective most of the house broke into titters mainly provoked, I think, by Dietrich's now-unfashionable solemnity. It wasn't the first unintended comedy they'd found in the work, but because they'd come to see a Classic and had been entertained they left the theater feeling benign, edumacated, and content. This is genial scorn, the kind that starts to smile when the movie begins because, tee hee, it's only black and white: Sure, they did their best trying to make movies in olden times, but the technology was too primitive to do anything that looked real, so you know when monkeys make faces that look like they're thinking? It's like that. Tee hee; tee hee hee.
I have a report, however, of a showing of this same picture maybe fifteen years ago, when it was less a Classic than an Old Movie. In those days the audience apparently didn't so much chuckle at its quaintness as roar at its out-of-date inanity and impossibility. When the lights came up the female of the prosperity-in-sight young couple seated in front of my informant laughed to her man, "Well THAT was the worst movie I've ever seen." Actually it was very likely the best; she may also have gone to see the rerelease and been "very impressed" by it, never remembering having seen it back when it was old-fashioned and terrible instead of a charming attempt and a fine example of what could be done even back then with such limited means. A sufficiently official Seal of Approval will always sway the opinion of a Scorner; once you've stamped their brains they'll greet your product not with Scorn, but Delight.
Now the reaction of this young lady—let's call her Leslie—to a movie she thought was terrible was amused scorn and disdain. If you cock your head and squint a little you can see fodder for that attitude in Touch of Evil: Charlton Heston doesn't "seem" like a "Mexican detective"; Welles is certainly very fat; Dietrich's languid cynicism must be a put-on because who ever feels like that? The world's Leslies and all their dates could not be more perfectly wrong about considering any of this grounds for even the simplest criticism, but these are the sorts of things to which they enjoy reacting.
(snip) discussion of Chasing Amy (it's good but not entirely germane)
So I've seen something I've disliked and been enraged; Leslie saw something she didn't like and she sneered; what accounts for the difference between these two kinds of negative reaction? Why don't the heathen rage? Partly it's just that there are different ways to receive cultural product. Some years ago, when the job which supported me was even crappier than the one which does now and that of my then-mate crappier still I went with her to an episode of workgroup-goes-drinking. Bonding pretexts in those situations are pretty tenuous, and in less than a beer I was chatting with a fellow we should call "Jake," the binder of our conversation being our agreement that we sincerely enjoyed getting high and watching old cartoons. Like there's this game I like to play, pretending that either I or the cartoon is Russian; I know next to nothing about Russian culture so anything in the cartoon that requires cultural membership I get to lose. My favorite is a 1946 Porky Pig that takes us on a tour of American history—George Washington at this, Patrick Henry at that, Abraham Lincoln at the other—but nowhere are any of the people or events named: the whole thing is a mystery to the outsider; it's Ivan the Terrible at the Sack of Orksputsk, Peter the Great consecrating the Festivity of Arkank, Molotov's Great Address. You remember those—it's all the stuff you had to stand up and recite the dates of in Russian History class.
So Jake mentions a taste for Popeye. "Mm," I agree; "or anyway the ones before Paramount took over in '39." Definitely—I love the muttering Popeye; anybody who's got that much to say to himself is okay by me. He's my main man. Paramount Popeye, on the other hand, sucks. You can no longer communicate with him in internal dialogues, there are gratuitous nephews, there's only one plot. Forget it; it's no kind of Popeye at all.
"Oh, well," says Jake. "I don't know anything about the dates, and all that."
"Oh. Oh! OH." I realized to myself. "You mean you like watching cartoons!" In the cartoon-watching sense, that is, where you feast your eyes on the pictures and relish the action. That's different.
Not that there's anything wrong with it. Everybody watches cartoons sometimes, and you can do it with movies, music, Great Literature, or State of the Union speeches; having a good feel for just looking at the pictures is important, in the same way that it's important to have a certain amount of experience with and understanding of various drugs. Lots of things only are cartoons in the first place and it's a silly mistake to think of them otherwise--Pecker, The Impostors, and Freeway are cartoon movies I liked very much. But the intoxicated state, while useful, is inherently irresponsible, and though it can do your responsibilities a lot of good to take periodic breaks from them it furthers no purpose of your own to be doped to the gills every blessed day of your life. Watching Cartoons you never see more than exactly what's presented to your literalist eyeballs. You can regard those things with more or less acuity or sophistication, noticing or not that the backdrop jiggled or that this hand-drawn animation is especially fine or weren't the President's eyes brown before, but all your attention will be delivered over to elements of presentation and the experience will be one of reception.
It makes sense that from this mode you won't be able to generate any greater indignation than "yeah, right." Somebody's offering you a reality and asking you to go along with the story they claim about it, but you can see the zipper on the monster's rubber suit—yeah, right. That is so fake. Real monsters don't have zippers on their rubber suits. Seeing through pretense means your perception is stronger than the deception, so you're better than it is and licensed to be smug.
But can't we all keep our shirts on? This movie...it is a movie. It's not real. Is there really much credit to be gotten by discovering the distinction between reality and make-believe? You did notice, didn't you, that before the princess was abducted and the sorcerer let the demons out somebody stopped you and asked for eight dollars? That's a tip-off—nobody's trying to keep it a secret that the princess is an actress-impostor—we're just pretending. That spaceship—not really a spaceship. That ferocious dinosaur—not even a model; a cartoon in fact: Watch it!
When you're offered a creative work the first thing its creators want from you is to please suspend your disbelief, to go along with this gag; just for the sake of argument, consider a forty-foot ape; let's call him Kong. That concession granted they then mean to spin you a little thing that looks sort of like the reality you came from IF that also contained also whatever unreal elements they need for the narrative: if we brought our Kong to your Manhattan, what might happen then? The contrived elements are a hypothesis, the tale an experiment.
But because of the necessary resemblances of the tale's reality to our reality many people, it would seem, skip ahead to attempt straight belief and acceptance. If coincidentally sane they understand that the events depicted are not supposed to have happened to them but still they take them as news reports from some other place. They enter the experience with only one reality-slot available in their heads, and just swap out the regular cartridge for the depiction's. As long as that depiction remains solid there are no objections; discontent arises when seams appear, signs that the depiction is a forgery, that it comes in fact from the same reality that we did before we went into the show. For someone operating in this mode the illusion-shattering ends the experience, which is judged to have failed in a silly and dishonorable fashion: That was a wire! I no longer acknowledge your so-called "Kong."
Tee, hee hee.
Leslie and other cartoon-watchers who laugh at old movies because they aren't new or boo old racial stereotypings because they aren't the ones we make now are indulging in an apathetic one-eyed fanaticism. They insist on everything being exactly the way they know it must obviously be but can't be bothered to focus a little energy and decry the violation of their flaccid principles.
I can suggest one substantial reason for you to find fault with Touch of Evil if you want: Like much of Welles' work it's overblown and black-and-white gaudy. These are qualities that affect—and effect—the story being told you. They are unnecessary divergences from the story that may serve no other purpose than to get you aroused, and you might, as I do, like that in this case but it should make you suspicious of what you're being told. It happens that one of the things I like about Welles is not this excess vivacity but the fact that he can be excessively vivacious without having that special effect corrupt his story. It is NOT relevant to the movie that Charlton Heston can't speak Spanish—see, he also isn't really a narcotics officer: He's just PRETENDING. Mexicality is not crucial to the movie's themes—what the picture's about is integrity and necessity. If Heston can't give you the impression of integrity bewildered by situational ethics then it's maybe the worst movie you ever saw; if he can't give you an impression of Spanish, who cares? You want nice Spanish, go see Carmen.
Now like I said, there's nothing wrong with a little light superficiality-Jakerie-per se. It's when you try to make something from that that you get yourself into fits of Leslieism. Jake's an easy-going guy-Jake Doesn't Mind-but Leslie says Touch of Evil isn't in color, like other movies are; Leslie says Charlton Heston doesn't speak Spanish, like Antonio Banderas does; Leslie says "Oh my god-that guy was SO FAT." Leslie takes the things she sees and compares them in a connect-the-dots fashion to all the other things she's exposed to most; her process is a lot like morphing, that obscene computer technique developed for making cats and dogs smile on the TV to sell cat and dog food to the humans. To morph from one picture to another you don't make any comparisons or contrasts, you don't do any analysis or synthesis; morphing is the computer-assisted path to making two dissimilar pictures be the same picture, and the more distinctions you obliterate the better. So if the pictures Leslie sees don't match, if the cat won't smile, Leslie gets attitude.
Leslie doesn't assess value; instead she checks to see whether the thing she sees matches everything else and if it doesn't she scorns it. Her Everything Else may be drawn from High Art or checkout-stand disposables, from the Western Canon or the avantmost garde-scorn comes in all brows and traditions. Leslie finds Stephen King scary and Mary Shelley boring, not because King is simpler to read and Leslie is a simpleton (she may be or not) but because King produces "stories" that have just the same kind of scariness as all the other scary Leslie sees when she goes looking for something scary (he is after all responsible for most of those things). It's much easier this way; the cues are all familiar so she can always tell when she's just been scared/touched/delighted/aroused and when she hasn't.
Scorn judges a thing successful when it can tell by similarity that what it's being fed has been put together in accordance with The Way These Things Are Done, deviation from which demonstrates an inability to get it right. On its days off scorn returns lattes that aren't nonfat, the way it ordered them, hello! Things succeed for Leslie to the extent that they don't stimulate you with irritating differences. Scorn is critical soma.
By contrast, what your angry reaction has done is to reach out to and possibly into the work to try and discover what it means to mean on its own terms, and, having grasped that, made a decision about whether that meaning on those terms is sensible, truthful, beautiful, shameful, intolerable, execrable or whatever else the production itself may seem to be. It doesn't take a Creation Scientist—all it requires is the same honest attention you give any person who's standing there telling you something you feel you should try to understand. In school they call it "paying attention," in relationships it's "listening"; in any of these scenaria if you neglect it you'll presently be finding yourself in some kind of trouble. Once you've heard you evaluate and decide whether your addressor is full of s--t or has an excellent point, and you respond accordingly. It's nothing in the world but the respect due someone who's speaking to you.
Leslie never touches the things she's shown; she just sits back glaring at the surfaces, detecting matches and mismatches—"I mean like they come into the room and the clock says 1:20, and then in the next shot it says 1:15!". Where anger is engaging and creative, scorn is obedient, always subject to the material presented to it and one or another set of rules for dot-connecting. Leslie herself never even enters the picture-the whole thing can be done entirely without her. Very likely someone is about to open a Web site offering scornbots that will go out and despise stuff for you, searching the Internet for everything you wouldn't like; when the search is complete your bot comes back and tells you nothing about the things it found except for how terribly unlike your preferences they all were. Buy the stock now—it'll be big big big.
Chasing Amy shares Leslie's refusal to engage—neither Leslie nor Smith has any intention of communicating; they may not even dream of it. Smith assembled a golem of a story, and populated it with a bunch of semblances that flap their mechanical gums to the beat of whatever notions offer the least disruption to his self-conceptions; it's a movie about life in a Holden-shaped hole with decals of friends stuck to the walls-real friends might not always match your preferences. The fake black militant scene is probably the true core of the movie; with all the hollering and shooting there's a lot of noise and commotion and until the gag is revealed it even seems politically threatening. But no, after all—whew!—nobody present really thought what they said or really did what they pretended; it was all void, all a lie, performed for the sake of its resemblance to other things which have been superficially perceived to exist. Scornful, lying production: The cat smiles, and Leslie the lying listener is content.