- ISBN13: 9780375706530
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
“A thoughtful, in places chilling, account of the way entertainment values have hollowed out American life.” –The New York Times Book Review
From one of America’s most original cultural critics and the author of Winchell, the story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, glamour, and melodrama has turned everything of importance-from news and politics to religion and high culture-into one vast public entertainment.
Neal Gabler calls… More >>
Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Remarkable and lamentable by what it manages to ignore this work
is more an example of what it tries to describe than an implement
for its understanting! That Gabler manages to write a book about
the spectacular engulfing of the everyday without engaging the
views of Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, Goddfrey Reggio, Georges Perec, Vince Packard or David Riesman is in itself a testemonial of how entertainment effectively compresses the depth of any analysis of its effects to a waffer thin prespective! What is advertised as revelatory soon is revealed as the author’s emphatuation with his own subject. Wwept by the uncontainable wave of superficiality that he purports to denounce, Gabler is already a stand-in in the movie called Life, the delusion he
fully welcomes in his naive reconning…
Rating: 2 / 5
Is most of humanity of the “monkey see monkey do” variety?Gabler seems to say yes.The saturation of the human psyche with all manner of the trivial and inane has been taken to a more absurd level courtesy of tv and accompanying pop culture that follows it.The majority of people,without even realizing it most of the time,live life according to images,conceptions and massive fictions perpetrated by mass culture.In its essence this is nothing new,and the age of tv becoming real life will give way to some other mass pop culture,just as literature become life a century ago gave way to television as pop culture dictator of fad,fashion and image idolizing.Humankind will always have some barometer to dictate the fads,fashions and attitudes of the moment;this moment just happens to be television.
Borrow this one,don’t buy.
Rating: 3 / 5
In an interview (on Salon.com, if I rember correctly) Gabler referred to this book as his Grand Unified Theory of Entertaining. I hope that this statement was uttered with a bit of irony (which got lost in the printed version). In my opinion this work offer little insight of the pervasiveness of entertainment and celebrity in our lifes. The best part is the first, in which the author convincingly presents the genealogy of the culture of entertainment in the United States. Every fact is carefully researched, a good practice that earns the book three stars. The second part focuses instead on the later stages of this culture and its effects on everyday life. I found it superfluous to a great extent. Eventually, the reader feels he is reading an abridged version of People magazine, with some interspersed comment in between the bios of celebrities and their fortunes (Martha Stewart, Ralph Lauren, Elisabeth Taylor, you name it). I don’t know the goal of the author here; it’s not to provoke thought nor to generate indignation. Maybe he was fascinated by his subjects and attracted into their orbit, who knows. By removing it, this book could have become an good article on New Yorker or even Granta. A final comment: other than the common topic, Debord’s and Gabler’s books share nothing else. Gabler does not attempt a deductive explanation based on a philosophy of history (marxism) like Debord. I understand that he is not quoting Debord in any part of his book. Personally I prefer a somewhat superficial but entertaining and humble account like Gabler’s, to a pretentious and self-important one (Debord’s).
Rating: 3 / 5
A very good start on identifying this ’social delusion and madness of the crowd’ phenomenon. Like some of the other reviewers here, I think Gabler is providing only an outline rather than a developed contribution. Some chapters need much more evidence and discussion than is provided, but I agree that he is definitely ‘naming true things’, which is very refreshing. I’m not into “reformers” but I do like Houyhnhnm* truth-tellers. I recommend this book to those readers who find in themselves growing rivers of cynicism provoked by the many smug Yahoos of modern life. (*Check out Gulliver’s Travels: “My Reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only, which Nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-Master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: But when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together.” )
Rating: 4 / 5
It is a good sign (if only to know that we are not alone) when anyone critically discusses the disappointing, alientating society in which so many do not really live, but instead pretend to live, acting on recieved values and donning cloned identities. Yet, I was extremely disappointed that the author made no mention, that I could find, of Guy Debord, the Situationists, and particularly Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which seems the appropriate starting point for this one and only truly human discussion. Those of us who have learned to live again know a good place to go to get the real goods. Unfortunately, the population in this mental space is still a bit thin.
Rating: 3 / 5