Life the movie : how entertainment conquered reality / Neal Gabler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gabler, Neal.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Social aspects--United States.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Social aspects.

Television broadcasting.

United States.

Motion pictures--United States--Influence.

Television broadcasting--Social aspects--United States.

Television broadcasting--Social aspects.

Television broadcasting--United States--Influence.

Physical Description:

303 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Vintage Books edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Vintage Books, 2000.

Summary:

From one of America's Most Original Cultural Critics, 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 them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that preoccupy the traditional media and dominate the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O. J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton, the Ayatollah's bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie. Real Life as Entertainment is hardly new--as Gabler shows, it is older even than the penny press--but the movies, and then new information technologies, have so accelerated the phenomenon that it is now the reigning popular art form. How this came to pass, and just what it means for our culture and our personal lives, is the subject of this witty, concerned, and sometimes frightening book.

Contents:

1. The Republic of Entertainment 11

2. The Two-Dimensional Society 53

3. The Secondary Effect 96

4. The Human Entertainment 143

5. The Mediated Self 192.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-287) and index.

ISBN:

0375706534

OCLC:

43607351

Publisher Number:

99955656349