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Life, the Movie
In an important book that sharply illuminates our obsessions with celebrity, gossip, scandal, and real-life melodrama, Neal Gabler shows us today's astonishing conversion of life itself into Entertainment--Life the Movie.
Revealing what now unites phenomena as diverse as modern art, President Clinton versus Kenneth Starr, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Unabomber murders, and Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, Gabler demonstrates how our hunger for entertainment and the massive exploitation of that hunger have combined to make everything from religion to politics to painting to the news into branches of show business; how Life the Movie has generated and popularized its own stars--the rich and famous; and how all of us are not only an audience for the life spectacular, but also performance artists acting out our own dramas within it.
Starting in nineteenth-century America with the theatrics of the popular stage and the sensations of the popular press, Gabler traces the phenomenal rise of Entertainment as it challenges high culture. He also shows how entertainment, most notably with the arrival of the movies, comes to dominate the national consciousness by introducing a new way of seeing, until it seems that every endeavor and idea must become part of the grand, ever-growing, ongoing Big Show or risk invisibility. How this came to pass and what it means for our culture and for our personal lives are explored in a book at once astute, witty, concerned, and a lively pleasure to read.
Revealing what now unites phenomena as diverse as modern art, President Clinton versus Kenneth Starr, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Unabomber murders, and Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, Gabler demonstrates how our hunger for entertainment and the massive exploitation of that hunger have combined to make everything from religion to politics to painting to the news into branches of show business; how Life the Movie has generated and popularized its own stars--the rich and famous; and how all of us are not only an audience for the life spectacular, but also performance artists acting out our own dramas within it.
Starting in nineteenth-century America with the theatrics of the popular stage and the sensations of the popular press, Gabler traces the phenomenal rise of Entertainment as it challenges high culture. He also shows how entertainment, most notably with the arrival of the movies, comes to dominate the national consciousness by introducing a new way of seeing, until it seems that every endeavor and idea must become part of the grand, ever-growing, ongoing Big Show or risk invisibility. How this came to pass and what it means for our culture and for our personal lives are explored in a book at once astute, witty, concerned, and a lively pleasure to read.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
51 people are currently reading
1170 people want to read
About the author
Neal Gabler
13 books172 followersNeal Gabler is a distinguished author, cultural historian and television commentator who has been called “one of America’s most important public intellectuals.” His first book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the Theatre Library Association Award for the best book on television, radio or film. On the centenary of the first public exhibition of motion pictures in America, a special panel of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named it one of the one hundred outstanding books on the American film industry. His second book, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named the non-fiction book of the year by Time Magazine. His third book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, is currently being used in college courses across the country to examine the convergence of reality and entertainment. His fourth book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, a New York Times best-seller, was named the biography of the year by USA Today and won Mr. Gabler his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also the runner-up for the prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in England. His new book, Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity and Power, was published by Yale Univ Press this past April as part of its Jewish Lives series.
Mr. Gabler was graduated with high distinction and highest honors from the University of Michigan and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He holds advanced degrees in film and American Culture. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, where he won an outstanding teaching award, and at the Pennsylvania State University. Leaving academe, he was selected to replace departing co-hosts Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on the public television movie review program, “Sneak Previews.” He has also been the host of the American Movie Classics cable television network, of “Reel to Real” on the History Channel, and of “Reel Thirteen” on WNET, the public television station in New York, for which he won an Emmy.
Mr. Gabler is a contributing editor at Playboy and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters Opinion, and his essays and articles have appeared in Atlantic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, Men’s Journal, George, Time, TV Guide, Variety and many other publications. In 2014, he won the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club. He has also been a contributor to the Fox News Channel and served as a panelist on the weekly media review program “Fox News Watch” from 2002 to 2007. One television critic called him a “megawatt brain…whose take on media coverage was fiercely individualistic, profound and original.” He has made appearances on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Charlie Rose” and the PBS “NewsHour.” And this year he is contributing a weekly column to billmoyers.com on the election and the media
Mr. Gabler has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University, a Freedom Forum Fellowship, and was a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar. He has also been the chief non-fiction judge of the National Book Awards and a judge of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Society and Entertainment at the University of Southern California and is a Visiting Professor in the MFA Literature and Writing program at SUNY Stony Brook. He was also the 2013 recipient of the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship at Washington College. His older daughter Laurel was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where she received her doctorate in Public Health. She is currently matriculating at Harvard Medical School. His younger daughter Tanne taught in the World Teach program in American Samoa, was an A
Mr. Gabler was graduated with high distinction and highest honors from the University of Michigan and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He holds advanced degrees in film and American Culture. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, where he won an outstanding teaching award, and at the Pennsylvania State University. Leaving academe, he was selected to replace departing co-hosts Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on the public television movie review program, “Sneak Previews.” He has also been the host of the American Movie Classics cable television network, of “Reel to Real” on the History Channel, and of “Reel Thirteen” on WNET, the public television station in New York, for which he won an Emmy.
Mr. Gabler is a contributing editor at Playboy and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters Opinion, and his essays and articles have appeared in Atlantic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, Men’s Journal, George, Time, TV Guide, Variety and many other publications. In 2014, he won the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club. He has also been a contributor to the Fox News Channel and served as a panelist on the weekly media review program “Fox News Watch” from 2002 to 2007. One television critic called him a “megawatt brain…whose take on media coverage was fiercely individualistic, profound and original.” He has made appearances on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Charlie Rose” and the PBS “NewsHour.” And this year he is contributing a weekly column to billmoyers.com on the election and the media
Mr. Gabler has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University, a Freedom Forum Fellowship, and was a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Scholar. He has also been the chief non-fiction judge of the National Book Awards and a judge of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Society and Entertainment at the University of Southern California and is a Visiting Professor in the MFA Literature and Writing program at SUNY Stony Brook. He was also the 2013 recipient of the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship at Washington College. His older daughter Laurel was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where she received her doctorate in Public Health. She is currently matriculating at Harvard Medical School. His younger daughter Tanne taught in the World Teach program in American Samoa, was an A
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January 28, 2009
Disappointing book. (first a digression: If you are interested in the history of Hollywood, his earlier book: Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood is long and chatty but definitely worth reading, but this book is not)
Life: The Movie promised to be a thoughtful discussion of how modern individuals have more and more come to value the image they create of themselves rather than "what they really are." His key unstated premise, that there is some "reality" apart from our culturally embedded myth-making creation of it, is basically naive and there are several flawed views that go with it:
1. He suggests this preoccupation with image is a new and peculiarly American phenomenon, which it is not. For example, even though he quotes Joseph Campbell, he misses Campbell's point that we have always looked for heroes and tried to emulate them in various ways that are creative (i.e. myth-making or "not real").
2. He suggests that this has been driven by "entertainment" (a low pastime which appeals only to the senses) which has defeated "art" (which is supposedly more intellectual and reflective) and that this is a relatively new thing, but he is wrong. In Shakespeare's early plays there were scenes that were acted onstage in London with hands theatrically hacked off and copious amounts of pigs blood pouring from sacks in the costumes. In Bern, Switzerland, one end of this charming old city has a bear pit (the suggested past use being for bear-baiting, a somewhat 'unsophisticated' sport), Rome had its "Circus" and the list goes on and on. Low entertainment is not a modern idea democratized by the lower classes. The general desire to excite the libido or the adrenal glands has been around for a very long time and it has been a shared possession of rich and poor alike. The effete intellectual is a relatively recent phenomenon of only the last few centuries and may be again dying away.
3. Though he mentions movies here and there he doesn't address in any real detail the role movies have played in the making of our modern view of ourselves(e.g. I don't think he even mentions the Western).
4. For all his reading (there are many quotes and there is a long bibliography at the back of the book) he seems to have missed some people who should be key to his investigation: Roland Barthes (see his book Mythologies) makes clear that the meaning of even the most mundane cultural item (e.g. household bleach) is deeply soaked in myth and cultural context; and Jung, who attempted to show how our psyche is inherently mythic.
5. Though he brings up the interesting fact of a more common modern phenomenon, the SELF CONSCIOUS creation of a self image, he does not really get to the roots of that phenomenon. For example, the freedom that we have in America makes it more possible for us to cross class, education, and cultural borders than in previous times or in many other countries. That freedom is double edged, because, in a world where have much more opportunity to be different than our parents,it is not exactly clear to us what we OUGHT to be.
6. He talks about "celebrity" and scratches the surface of a very important issue, but never really gets to the heart of it. That issue is how we align and differentiate ourselves as individuals in modern culture. He fails to mention the role of introversion and extraversion (in the Jungian sense) in the individuation of personality and how a culture that prizes extraversion can quickly become infatuated with image over substance; how that can confuse even our cultural icons (I suppose there are people who really do want to be Angelina Jolie, or at least what they think she is). This is something every person deals with in every culture, it is just more of an issue in a fluid and dynamic culture that has a strong mass media and rampant public worship of its media icons.
7. Finally, I very quickly got tired of his implied (and sometimes not implied) moral judgments about these trends. I don't personally think that reality TV (which boomed a few years after this book was published) is very enlightening or encouraging of moral values (or even civility), but the reasons for its existence have as much to do with Hollywood economics as with people's interest in such things. The medium of commercial TV, commercial film generally militate AGAINST products that will appeal to the few, over-educated, intellectuals. Sex, violence and drama (and comedy) sells. There is a very interesting discussion to be had about the impact of that mass commercial approach, how the mass media limits our options and how we allow that to happen by being willing participants, but he doesn't give it. And, there is something to be said for the amazing quality of the writing and acting in a number of movies and TV shows in spite the "dumbing down" caused by this economic need for commercial appeal, but he doesn't talk about this either.
A newer book (it is not fair to criticize Gabler for missing this as his book was published in 1998) might discuss how YOUTUBE democratizes all of this (within its production cost economics) such that both the most crass entertainment (e.g. teenagers pretending to be Luke Skywalker) and the most specific specialized interests (e.g. "artistic" classical music recitals on medieval instruments)can be addressed. For the moment at least, it doesn't matter if only one person or millions watch a YOUTUBE video. Unlike commercial TV and film, YOUTUBE provides basically free access regardless of popularity or financial returns. They simply make it up in the volume. It would be interesting to think about how YOUTUBE has further eroded or enhanced the issues of self conscious image making that Gabler tried to address.
In sum (too late to be brief!) I was hoping for a book that really delved into why we are so focused on image and how reality TV and movies these days drive self image, but instead I got a confused, heavily referenced, but poorly investigated ramble through pop culture epiphanies. The ideas mentioned above are interesting, but unfortunately, it turns out that this book is not the place to ponder them.
Life: The Movie promised to be a thoughtful discussion of how modern individuals have more and more come to value the image they create of themselves rather than "what they really are." His key unstated premise, that there is some "reality" apart from our culturally embedded myth-making creation of it, is basically naive and there are several flawed views that go with it:
1. He suggests this preoccupation with image is a new and peculiarly American phenomenon, which it is not. For example, even though he quotes Joseph Campbell, he misses Campbell's point that we have always looked for heroes and tried to emulate them in various ways that are creative (i.e. myth-making or "not real").
2. He suggests that this has been driven by "entertainment" (a low pastime which appeals only to the senses) which has defeated "art" (which is supposedly more intellectual and reflective) and that this is a relatively new thing, but he is wrong. In Shakespeare's early plays there were scenes that were acted onstage in London with hands theatrically hacked off and copious amounts of pigs blood pouring from sacks in the costumes. In Bern, Switzerland, one end of this charming old city has a bear pit (the suggested past use being for bear-baiting, a somewhat 'unsophisticated' sport), Rome had its "Circus" and the list goes on and on. Low entertainment is not a modern idea democratized by the lower classes. The general desire to excite the libido or the adrenal glands has been around for a very long time and it has been a shared possession of rich and poor alike. The effete intellectual is a relatively recent phenomenon of only the last few centuries and may be again dying away.
3. Though he mentions movies here and there he doesn't address in any real detail the role movies have played in the making of our modern view of ourselves(e.g. I don't think he even mentions the Western).
4. For all his reading (there are many quotes and there is a long bibliography at the back of the book) he seems to have missed some people who should be key to his investigation: Roland Barthes (see his book Mythologies) makes clear that the meaning of even the most mundane cultural item (e.g. household bleach) is deeply soaked in myth and cultural context; and Jung, who attempted to show how our psyche is inherently mythic.
5. Though he brings up the interesting fact of a more common modern phenomenon, the SELF CONSCIOUS creation of a self image, he does not really get to the roots of that phenomenon. For example, the freedom that we have in America makes it more possible for us to cross class, education, and cultural borders than in previous times or in many other countries. That freedom is double edged, because, in a world where have much more opportunity to be different than our parents,it is not exactly clear to us what we OUGHT to be.
6. He talks about "celebrity" and scratches the surface of a very important issue, but never really gets to the heart of it. That issue is how we align and differentiate ourselves as individuals in modern culture. He fails to mention the role of introversion and extraversion (in the Jungian sense) in the individuation of personality and how a culture that prizes extraversion can quickly become infatuated with image over substance; how that can confuse even our cultural icons (I suppose there are people who really do want to be Angelina Jolie, or at least what they think she is). This is something every person deals with in every culture, it is just more of an issue in a fluid and dynamic culture that has a strong mass media and rampant public worship of its media icons.
7. Finally, I very quickly got tired of his implied (and sometimes not implied) moral judgments about these trends. I don't personally think that reality TV (which boomed a few years after this book was published) is very enlightening or encouraging of moral values (or even civility), but the reasons for its existence have as much to do with Hollywood economics as with people's interest in such things. The medium of commercial TV, commercial film generally militate AGAINST products that will appeal to the few, over-educated, intellectuals. Sex, violence and drama (and comedy) sells. There is a very interesting discussion to be had about the impact of that mass commercial approach, how the mass media limits our options and how we allow that to happen by being willing participants, but he doesn't give it. And, there is something to be said for the amazing quality of the writing and acting in a number of movies and TV shows in spite the "dumbing down" caused by this economic need for commercial appeal, but he doesn't talk about this either.
A newer book (it is not fair to criticize Gabler for missing this as his book was published in 1998) might discuss how YOUTUBE democratizes all of this (within its production cost economics) such that both the most crass entertainment (e.g. teenagers pretending to be Luke Skywalker) and the most specific specialized interests (e.g. "artistic" classical music recitals on medieval instruments)can be addressed. For the moment at least, it doesn't matter if only one person or millions watch a YOUTUBE video. Unlike commercial TV and film, YOUTUBE provides basically free access regardless of popularity or financial returns. They simply make it up in the volume. It would be interesting to think about how YOUTUBE has further eroded or enhanced the issues of self conscious image making that Gabler tried to address.
In sum (too late to be brief!) I was hoping for a book that really delved into why we are so focused on image and how reality TV and movies these days drive self image, but instead I got a confused, heavily referenced, but poorly investigated ramble through pop culture epiphanies. The ideas mentioned above are interesting, but unfortunately, it turns out that this book is not the place to ponder them.
February 9, 2023
This book was written just before social media became a part of our reality. So, it's interesting and enlightening to read this knowing what is to come once social media hits.
February 20, 2018
The 20 years since this book was published has validated Gabler's thesis. Trump has internalized his movie where he is the hero, the only hero, and demands homage to that "lifie." The only problem with living your life as a movie is that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, school shooters, and everyone else slaps you back to their reality and you have no way to understand it. Television and television news keeps pushing the "life as a movie" meme and social media has concentrated it to the individual level. We all want to "live our dreams," but we must remember that they are only dreams.
October 21, 2017
We are all just a lifie in a cast of other lifies. A good read, and a thesis that has certainly not be refuted by the intervening score of years since publication.
"But perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, of the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon over Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority."
"But perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, of the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon over Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority."
August 27, 2009
Interesting, if not totally engrossing, argument. Gabler traces the history of entertainment in America from its roots in the 19th century to today's Internet virtual reality lives. A thoroughly well-documented tome. This is isn't just argument and good rhetoric. It's scholarship too. We learn from this book how each American is the lead actor in his own film script running in his head. At his conclusion, Gabler makes no value judgments on the Disneyfication of reality in America. He merely invites us to choose between reality and post-reality.
August 26, 2015
An overstretched and outdated look at our relationship with reality and media. Various tics (most irritating: quoting someone famous and then going back and revising their quote to be directly applicable to whatever Gabler is talking about) slow down what is otherwise a competent, if repetitive, writing style. There are better and more incisive books dealing with this material.
August 7, 2022
A very interesting book and thesis. The historical parts are particularly enlightening. The 20 year old discussion of Donald Trump remains completely on target.
But then the author goes and pounds everything under the sun into his theory -- overreaching and overkill.
Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is similar but more original, subtle and insightful.
But then the author goes and pounds everything under the sun into his theory -- overreaching and overkill.
Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is similar but more original, subtle and insightful.
January 8, 2020
This could have been very interesting, but it wasn’t.
March 30, 2023
'Do you ever get the feeling that things are not as rosy as they appear to be underneath the surface?"---The Beatles, YELLOW SUBMARINE (The movie, not the album or song by Ringo).
If you ever get the feeling that you are a bit player cast in a movie by a bit director, you are not alone. Neil Gabler, skilled chronicler of Hollywood and the rest of American entertainment (AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD, WALTER WINCHELL) argues that this is literally true. We have all either invented ourselves as minor movie and television stars or the mysterious "They"---the capitalists, media giants, news moguls, et al---have reinvented us inside a film we laughingly call life. Long before David Foster Wallace (INFINITE JEST) and Neil Postman (AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH) Gabler posited and documented the end of the distinction between image and reality. President Ronald Reagan quoted episodes from his own godawful films, and other, especially war movies, as if they had really happened. (Flash forward: Remember when President Donald Trump claimed ICE agents had found a Muslim prayer rug on the US-Mexico borderland; a scene that actually appears in the film SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO?)
More troubling for Gabler is that literally anything in American life can and is turned into entertainment. O.J. Simpson gave us first that wild car ride down the Los Angeles freeway and then his trial turned into a media circus, complete with Jay Leno's "The Dancing Judge Itos". Then there's the phenomenon of the media turning nobodies into somebodies way beyond their allotted 15 Warholian minutes of fame: Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding and "Kato", the leech who stayed at O.J.s house, among other lemmings. (Harding had a great film made about her life, I, TONYA; who the hell remembers Nancy Kerrigan?) If we have been warned so many times that American life is literally becoming a bad TV show or movie, why isn't anybody listening?
A NOTE ON CRITICAL METHOD: Many people have criticized Gabler for borrowing the "everything is an exhibition" thesis from the French, i.e. Deleuze, Derrida, Braudillard. True, but they are no fun to read, although Braudillard could be fey in interviews.
If you ever get the feeling that you are a bit player cast in a movie by a bit director, you are not alone. Neil Gabler, skilled chronicler of Hollywood and the rest of American entertainment (AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD, WALTER WINCHELL) argues that this is literally true. We have all either invented ourselves as minor movie and television stars or the mysterious "They"---the capitalists, media giants, news moguls, et al---have reinvented us inside a film we laughingly call life. Long before David Foster Wallace (INFINITE JEST) and Neil Postman (AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH) Gabler posited and documented the end of the distinction between image and reality. President Ronald Reagan quoted episodes from his own godawful films, and other, especially war movies, as if they had really happened. (Flash forward: Remember when President Donald Trump claimed ICE agents had found a Muslim prayer rug on the US-Mexico borderland; a scene that actually appears in the film SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO?)
More troubling for Gabler is that literally anything in American life can and is turned into entertainment. O.J. Simpson gave us first that wild car ride down the Los Angeles freeway and then his trial turned into a media circus, complete with Jay Leno's "The Dancing Judge Itos". Then there's the phenomenon of the media turning nobodies into somebodies way beyond their allotted 15 Warholian minutes of fame: Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding and "Kato", the leech who stayed at O.J.s house, among other lemmings. (Harding had a great film made about her life, I, TONYA; who the hell remembers Nancy Kerrigan?) If we have been warned so many times that American life is literally becoming a bad TV show or movie, why isn't anybody listening?
A NOTE ON CRITICAL METHOD: Many people have criticized Gabler for borrowing the "everything is an exhibition" thesis from the French, i.e. Deleuze, Derrida, Braudillard. True, but they are no fun to read, although Braudillard could be fey in interviews.
Read
September 30, 2020A throughout interesting read, one of the kinds of books that makes you look at the world and all the familiar things in a new light. It contains everything from the class origins and differences between art and entertainment and how entertainment subsumed art, how almost everything has fallen into the mould of entertainment, be it the news, sports, lives of "celebrities" and even our own lives. It goes deeply into the interesting case of the "celebrity", a person who, according to Boorstein, is "famous for being famous". A really hitting quote was "Earlier movies were measured up against life, how accurately they portrayed life, now our lives are supposed to meet the expectations set by movies". It was quite amusing the way some things were put, like how people go to the Hard Rock cafe to buy souveniers, but if they don't eat there, then what are the souveniers supposed to make them remember? The act of buying souveniers? This was exemplified on a larger scale by what were termed as "pseudo events", events created especially for media coverage. Many ideas in the book were inspired from The Image by Boorstein and that's what I am going to read next.
February 27, 2023
Note to self: Re-read this book with a dictionary nearby.
April 6, 2016
I found this enjoyable. Gabler traces (though at times the path is difficult to follow) the history of public performance as a "natural" act in the daily lives of individuals. In some ways, we've always done this; a lifetime of consumption, watching visual entertainment, and projecting ourselves online, has led this behavior to increase.
Gabler illustrates a facet of human behavior which has always irritated me--staging. I'm referring to the person who can't or doesn't cook, but insists on having a designer kitchen. It's the person writing a never-finished novel at a coffee shop. It's the person whose Instagram makes his/her life appear much more interesting than it actually is. It's the bathroom full of for-display-purposes-only guest towels no one can use. It's not that I don't enjoy a bit of theatricality and presentation, but I'm too much of a realist to enjoy seeing this sort of thing go too far.
I liked that Gabler describes this behavior without judging it (unlike me). It's just, um, when and where does it end, when one's surroundings are always a live set? To where can a person finally retreat and be real without concern for presentation? So, um, a bit depressing in the end.
Gabler illustrates a facet of human behavior which has always irritated me--staging. I'm referring to the person who can't or doesn't cook, but insists on having a designer kitchen. It's the person writing a never-finished novel at a coffee shop. It's the person whose Instagram makes his/her life appear much more interesting than it actually is. It's the bathroom full of for-display-purposes-only guest towels no one can use. It's not that I don't enjoy a bit of theatricality and presentation, but I'm too much of a realist to enjoy seeing this sort of thing go too far.
I liked that Gabler describes this behavior without judging it (unlike me). It's just, um, when and where does it end, when one's surroundings are always a live set? To where can a person finally retreat and be real without concern for presentation? So, um, a bit depressing in the end.
December 7, 2013
Budd Schulberg wrote that when his novel WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? was reissued in the 1980s that he was surprised by the number of fans who loved the book and saw Sammy as a role model to emulate. I feared such a reaction to Neal Gabler's LIFE THE MOVIE: HOW ENTERTAINMENT CONQUERED REALITY, that readers would willingly use it as a blueprint to fantasizing their lives in accordance to Hollywood feel-good blockbusters. By the end of the book, which is descriptive rather than prescriptive, following the history of entertainment on its march to monopolizing everything, Gabler anticipates my concern. For him it's less a concern than a fork in the road between the realists who want to live life as is and the post-realists who value happiness over reality, which they deem malleable anyway. Which side you're on will color your response to the book's descent into the entertainment rabbit hole, but the dominance of entertainment, celebrity and the pursuit of manufactured pleasure has only gotten greater in the decade after Gabler wrote this book, and the question he poses at the end remains unanswered. Or maybe not.
September 6, 2011
This book is a huge overview of popular culture history, and as such is useful. If you break it down it can appear like an overly opinionated rehash of many books before it, which it references and from which it quotes freely. These notably include Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death or Boorstein's The Image. As those books are not really picked up anymore, which is a shame, I assign this to students to get a forceful argument on the dangers of pop-thinking, and provide a decent history of American popular arts.
It has lots of nice observations, it can be argued with, it has good quotes. Postman's books are wonderful, and they should be reviewed often. They provide keener insights, but Gabler's book is a good way to set conversation in motion and review our past.
It has lots of nice observations, it can be argued with, it has good quotes. Postman's books are wonderful, and they should be reviewed often. They provide keener insights, but Gabler's book is a good way to set conversation in motion and review our past.
February 24, 2016
Good thesis which experience bears out. While Gabler provides a plethora of examples of how entertainment has infiltrated everything from religion to home decor, I begin to feel as if, perhaps, reality was being stretched in order to fit the model, at times Genuineness doesn't seem to exist for Mr. Gabler. Rather, all of life's elements have been sucked into the Matrix from which there appears to be no escape. Therefore, at times it reads like a monumental conspiracy theory implemented by the masses for the masses. I'm sure that studies in psychology, sociology and media studies would and could provide a bit more substance to why we have allowed entertainment to proliferate into every sector of our lives, as we have.
July 6, 2016
A book focusing on the way movies have transformed peoples' sense of themselves. Celebrity. Life as a 'plot,' and people as characters.
I would recommend it, even though, with the revolution in consciousness produced by the internet and social media, it is more of historical interest than pervasively relevant today. Similar in that regard to a book it reminded me of, Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which focused on television. Postman's book was essentially before cable: 1980. So you could set up a sequence that might be useful to study: Postman, Gabler, and then S. Craig Watkins on "The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future" (2009).
I would recommend it, even though, with the revolution in consciousness produced by the internet and social media, it is more of historical interest than pervasively relevant today. Similar in that regard to a book it reminded me of, Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which focused on television. Postman's book was essentially before cable: 1980. So you could set up a sequence that might be useful to study: Postman, Gabler, and then S. Craig Watkins on "The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future" (2009).
March 6, 2010
"For the truth is that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much, but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear." (Jose Ortega y Gasset, a well-chosen quote, by the way)
I reread this after hearing Gabler on NPR earlier this week. It holds up very well, especially after American culture has worsened by another decade. It's hard to believe no one else has rated this book.
I reread this after hearing Gabler on NPR earlier this week. It holds up very well, especially after American culture has worsened by another decade. It's hard to believe no one else has rated this book.
October 10, 2015
At some point after I started using Goodreads, I transferred all my holds and lists of books to read to the site. Some of those books had been on a list since, oh I don't know, 1998, like this one. I think I have to look a little more closely at those books before I get them from the library - 17 years really changes a book on current entertainment culture.
So, it was somewhat of an interesting read when viewed as a snapshot of a particular point in time, but it's so weird reading about life as a movie and not having reality TV be a part of the conversation.
So, it was somewhat of an interesting read when viewed as a snapshot of a particular point in time, but it's so weird reading about life as a movie and not having reality TV be a part of the conversation.
December 31, 2010
I was spending the night at my in-laws and woke up without a book to read and found this in my wife's pile of old college textbooks. It looked interesting, but Gabler's thesis, that Americans want to be entertained at all times and many treat life like a movie as a coping mechanism, an idea he neither condemns nor condones, seems like a great big "duh" from me. He's not a bad writer, but nothing he had to say seemed all that shocking or even original when you get right down to it.
August 27, 2011
After being excited to find this book in a used bookstore, I started reading and kinda got bored with it. His observations on the history of entertainment was interesting and the best part, his reduction of every conflict as some sort of class warfare got very tiring and was extremely simplistic. I technically haven;t finished it yet, but I may never pick it up again after getting through about a third of it.
April 25, 2007
Neal Gabler is a qualified writer and connects several ideas here. His thesis of America as "the republic of entertainment" is true. I was surprised but enjoyed his lengthy discussed of the development of entertainment in the US since its founding up to the first moving picture. His last chapters should convict anyone of the power of media, especially film, in our culture.
August 15, 2010
I picked this book up with the belief that I would get an interesting, deep conversation about entertainment overcoming reality as the preferred way to live. What I got was actually a boring, cynical, snobbish, rant-like narrative on how entertainment is the preferred way to live. As I write this I'm in the last couple dozen pages, but I think I've had enough of it.
April 16, 2011
A cogent if not groundbreaking look at how visual media took over the American popular imagination. Written before the internet happened, the proof of the book's basic thesis that America has become the United States of Entertainment is borne out by the fact that it applies equally well to the digital media Gabler could not have considered at the time of the book's writing.
April 7, 2014
B+/A- -- close to being a perfect book, only I'm iffy about quickly Gabler is to label certain behaviors a performance. The book, as Gabler warns us, is descriptive rather than prescriptive, because one reads and can't help wondering if things are just meant to be this way. Better than anything, it helps us see the images that the movies stain into us, how cinematic each of our fantasies are.
September 21, 2009
An interesting (if at times really confusing) look at how America honed it's greatest export: popular culture. (No, Kanye at the VMAs does not make the index). History nerds will rejoice, as well as the average joe with a thirst for pop culture. It's fun academia. I promise.
June 21, 2010
While Neal Gabler makes a very interesting point about life as performance and provides an intriguing history of entertainment overtaking American public life in Life: The Movie, his lack of any solution or resolution and his own cynicism hurt an already very dated book.
May 29, 2013
Read this in 2013 and constantly reminded myself it was written in 1998. Living 15 years in the future, a lot of the points seem so obvious now. However in its time, it was a rather prescient book in terms of the internet, reality TV, Twitter, etc.
March 29, 2007
This book changed the way I look at the world.
June 15, 2007
Sort of terrifying. Made me want to smash my computer to pieces and stop going to the movies. Pretty good, all in all.
Currently reading
January 14, 2008Bought this 10 years ago but never cracked it. After my 8-year-old came home asking questions when the news of Jamie-Lynn Spears's pregnancy broke, I picked it up again...
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