Life is Becoming Entertainment (The Envelope please…)

TV and Facebook are all abuzz with Oscar talk. Sunday night the stars will walk the red carpet and, since I’ve seen (and enjoyed!) several of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture (Inception, True Grit, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech) I’ll tune in to see how my favorites fare. Maybe you will too, and maybe like me you will feel a little conflicted. I love a good story well told. I enjoy movies for R&R. But we may both feel uneasy about how entertainment’s impact on our lives and families is growing like Audrey, the blood sucking plant in Little Shop of Horrors. “Feed Me!!!” Perhaps the most significant cultural shift we are experiencing at the turn of the millennium is how even Life is becoming Entertainment.

TV and Facebook are all abuzz with Oscar talk. Sunday night the stars will walk the red carpet and, since I’ve seen (and enjoyed!) several of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture (Inception, True Grit, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech) I’ll tune in to see how my favorites fare. Maybe you will too, and maybe like me you will feel a little conflicted. I love a good story well told. I enjoy movies for R&R. But we may both feel uneasy about how entertainment’s impact on our lives and families is growing like Audrey, the blood sucking plant in Little Shop of Horrors. “Feed Me!!!” Perhaps the most significant cultural shift we are experiencing at the turn of the millennium is how even Life is becoming Entertainment.

Our Presidential campaign candidates submit to the rule of YouTube, questioned by cartoon characters and Confederate rebels holding assault rifles. Our criminals perform real chase scenes on police shows. Our professors introduce their newest book decked in leather and flanked by buff and inscrutable bodyguards. As Neal Gabler has documented in Life: the Movie, “The deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.”

The finest Art has always offered transcendence—inviting us to stand outside ourselves and gain perspective. Artistic images, music, and stories engage our rational faculties, which mediate and critique our emotional and visceral responses. Entertainment makes an end run around the intellect, stimulating the nervous system in much the same way as drugs do.

If art is sublime, then entertainment, according to Gabler, “is primarily about fun. It pulls us in, holding us captive, taking us both deeper into the work itself and deeper into ourselves, or at least into our own emotions and senses, before releasing us. All one has to do is watch people filing silently out of a movie theater, their eyes vacant, their faces slack, to see how one must reemerge after being submerged this way in a film. Entertainment is Plato’s worst nightmare.”

“If the primary effect of the media has been to turn nearly everything into entertainment, the secondary and ultimately more significant effect has been to force nearly everything to turn itself into entertainment in order to attract media attention.” Including people.

In the Entertainment culture, the gold standard of personal value is no longer moral virtue or even significant accomplishment, but whether or not a person can grab and then hold the public’s attention. And since what grabs and holds attention is fear and pleasure, those elite few who learn how to manipulate fear and pleasure attain the status of dreams: celebrity. To quote Daniel Boorstin, “The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

Gabler writes, “Not only are celebrities the protagonists of our news, the subjects of our daily discourse and the repositories of our values, but they have also embedded themselves so deeply in our consciousness that many individuals profess feeling closer to, and more passionate about, them than their own primary relationships,” a reality portrayed with high impact in (what else) the movie Simone.
When Princess Diana died suddenly and violently, the outpouring of grief dumbfounded the royal family but confirmed People magazine editor Richard Stoley’s set of rules for a successful cover:
Young is better than old. Pretty is better than ugly.
Rich is better than poor. TV is better than music.
Music is better than movies. Movies are better than sports.
Anything is better than politics.
And nothing is better than a celebrity who just died.

Pablo Picasso became well-known for his ability to confound and even shock the public. With his outrageous visions and dramas, so did Ezekiel—stories of dead bones come to life, preaching against a model of Jerusalem with a skillet in front of his face, even becoming his own reality show when God took his wife to foreshadow his desecration of his temple back in Jerusalem. While God acknowledged Ezekiel’s celebrity, “your countrymen are talking together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses,” he was looking for life change, “My people…listen to your words, but they do not put them into practice…their hearts are greedy for unjust gain.”

Eternal life is not so much like the movies. In the unfolding story of the Kingdom of God the plot moves way too slowly. The people are not nearly as beautiful. The real stars are more often obscure than celebrities. But there will be envelopes handed out (sort of)…rewards for transformation, longing for transcendence and meaning, choices for obedience and skill in living…no celebs…whoever wants to drink of the water of life…come…