The Glamour Trap - Review

Washington Monthly, March, 1999 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Are "entertainment values" blinding us to what really matters?

A few months ago, I attended with a friend a 150th anniversary reading of the Communist Manifesto. This was my first time inside the Cooper Union, a stately old building in lower Manhattan that was, in February 1860, the site of a speech by Abraham Lincoln that set the Eastern intelligentsia buzzing and played a major role in his subsequent nomination. "Let us have faith," Lincoln concluded, "that right makes might. And in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

On this night in 1998, a large crowd had assembled in that spirit. But it was a gray-haired crowd. I wondered why. Did it reflect ideological shifts over generations, or the fact that igniting a revolution or even joining a movement--whatever its ideas--is simply out of step with the values of people my age?

For my part, I attended the reading not as a participant, but as an audience member. I had come because the Manifesto reading featured the playwrights Wallace Shawn and Tony Kushner. I had come in search of provocative ideas. But also for entertainment.

In Life the Movie, Neal Gabler argues that entertainment has "conquered reality." He insists his book contains no "high dudgeon." But his idea does have obvious moral implications, which is why it deserves to be taken seriously. My dictionary defines entertainment as "that which holds the attention by amusing or diverting." If we are "diverting" ourselves, it raises the question of what from? If our relationships--even our internal identity--is constructed around entertainment, then what happens to the more sober demands of reality?

Gabler's conceit is that entertainment is no longer just something we like or participate in, or a technique used to beguile us. It is who we are. We don't just spend our time being entertained. We live in what he calls a "life movie"--with Martha Stewart supplying the sets, Ralph Lauren the costumes, and Tina Brown the scripts. Our audience may be our family and friends--but it is also increasingly an audience of millions, through shows like Jerry Springer's or "Americas Funniest Videos." Life, Gabler argues, has become "the biggest, most entertaining, most realistic movie of all, one that play[s] twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and feature[s] a cast of billions."

Gabler's story begins in the early 19th century, the point at which an American popular culture emerged that was distinct from its European counterpart. "Nostalgists may like to think of America before the movies and television as the land of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Church and Emily Dickinson," he writes. But that's like thinking of modern America as the land of Martin Luther King Jr, John Updike, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Lowell. "It is true, but only so far as it goes."

In fact, as serious artists noticed with horror, junk was everywhere in this era. "I should have no chance of success while public taste is occupied with their trash," Nathaniel Hawthorne complained of the success of novelists like the "lachrymose" Susan Warner and the "salacious" George Lippard, "and I should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

If the ultimate triumph of popular culture ever was in doubt--and Gabler believes it wasn't, given that the superior numbers of the "lowborn" and the entrance of poor women into the cultural marketplace--a new medium of entertainment made the calculus all the more clear. "It has come then," the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote in 1922, "this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth changes."

What had arrived, first in vaudeville houses, then moving to the backroom of penny arcades, then to "nickelodeon theaters" named for the cost of admission, was the movies. The working classes made up nearly three-quarters of film audiences in the early days; the fact that moviegoers still munch popcorn and slurp drinks in theaters today is a reminder of those origins. In the early days, films were bawdy and provocative, ridiculing the elites and alarming the middle classes. A Detroit News headline from 1916 read, "LOW GRADE PERSONS ONLY LIKE CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND MARY PICKFORD, PASTOR SAYS."

This headline shows that popular entertainment, as a locus of discontent, once threatened the better-off. It also hints at how the movies would slowly suffocate that function, by shifting focus from the stories being told to the actors on the screen. We can still be ennobled by the work of people who happen to be famous. But the distinction between appreciation and star-gazing seems to get fuzzier each year.

Walter Winchell, the subject of Gabler's previous book, played a major role in this transition. With a popular radio show and newspaper column, Winchell dished a delicious blend of news, opinion, and gossip. Making careers and lobbing verbal grenades, he helped create the modern celebro-journalistic complex. (It is an indication of Life The Movie's thinness that Winchell is barely mentioned.) In a recent interview, Gabler explained that Winchell "understood that gossip, far beyond its basic attraction as journalistic voyeurism, was a weapon of empowerment for the reader and listener. Invading the lives of the famous and revealing their secrets brought them to heel. It humanized them, and in humanizing them demonstrated that they were no better than we and in many cases worse."