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Essay on Neal Gabler's Life: The Movie
Gabler has written about an age where combined self-absorption finds its opening in a civilization where movies represents our uppermost actuality, where the movie screen projects all our displeased fantasies. His theory is that we have grown to be actors, either instinctively or not, and that as such events are fixed and/or interpreted as being "cinematic." We all want to be the stars of the movie, that which is life. An additional significant theme is that entertainment has trumped substantive knowledge in the media notes so that we are well entertained but revoltingly under informed. Movies and television have spawned an "entertainment revolution," according to Gabler, altering the way we comprehend reality.
Even though Gabler avoids the ontological abyss suggested by the cartoon, his message is comparable: Life in America is now considered by its entertainment worth. As the leading medium, film/TV has shaped the criteria by which entertainment value is measured. The most priceless self or self-image doesn't "feature" character or fixed values so much as it embodies an ability to "morph," what Robert Lifton called a protean quality to adapt, so that one achieves the sort of celebrity status that can take one to the "other side of the glass." As common people reach for their minutes of fame, they spiritually position themselves within the structure of personal movies, or "lifies." (Biskind, Peter (1999)
Gabler asserts that people have come to carry out their lives more by principles of entertainment than by core values cultured early on. As the quote from Francis Bacon suggests, this is not an entirely new thought. Furthermore Gabler's book shows how willingly the suggestion can be gaudy. At a halt, Gabler's thesis rolls satisfactorily across two of today's great sound stages: Hollywood East, as Washington is sometimes called, and Hollywood Middle East, otherwise known as....
