Neal Gabler had a provocative but flawed commentary in the LA Times on Sunday, built on the premise that we’re now more infatuated with the backstory of entertainment (personal trials, break-ups, star behavior) than we are with the entertainment itself. Says Gabler:
Movies, television and DVDs are attracting fewer patrons because people, especially young people, value being entertained less than they value knowing about entertainment and entertainers. Movies have become what director Alfred Hitchcock called a ”MacGuffin” — a red herring that triggers a plot but has no other inherent value. Like MacGuffins, movies have little inherent purpose except to be talked about, written about, learned about — shared as information.
It’s not a new argument, or a new concern. And Gabler doesn’t claim it to be. Gossip and backstories about creative icons have buzzed for centuries, in most established art forms you can think of. Scandal, itself, has been a social entertainment since the dawn of the soirée.
But Gabler’s conclusion that creative content and creative experience are now irrelevant in the face of ”the inside scoop” seems more a play for hyperbole than reasoned analysis. There has always been tension and balance between the content of an experience and the context surrounding it — in the mediated arts or in live attendance. That balance may shift in the face of communications technology or social trends, but it never skews entirely to one side.
Back in 2000, inside.com co-founder Michael Hirschorn told the New York Times Magazine, ”I think in a broader cultural sense, the creation of content has become more interesting than the content itself.” While ”interest” and social chatter may, indeed, be turning its gaze to the backstory, there’s still plenty of meaning and power in the moment of experience, as well.
What you know and what you feel are both part of an engaging and transformative moment — whether at the movies, or in the theater, or at the museum, or in the home. Gabler seems to confuse a shift in that ecology with its implosion.
The star system was born when movie moguls realized that there was no use trying to limit salaries by keeping their actors anonymous — people wanted to know about the players in the pictures. Fan magazines, telling primarily fictionalized stories about the stars, sprang forth immediately and have been going strong since. Gabler’s piece ignores that history. Also, his use of the term MacGuffin is a stretch at best (as if he’d been trying to shoe horn it into an essay for years).
Is there a parallel between backstories of movies and the printed information that accompany and influence the recorded music consumers buy? Record covers, liner notes, record magazines, reviews, and advertisements come between the music and the consumer influencing selection of recorded music we buy and our experience of it. Such is the theory of “Setting the Record Strait,” a new book by Colin Symes that examines the historical, musical and sociological context of classical recordings. A lot of this rings true for this classical record collector.
Of course Gabler is correct in his assessment of the contemporary movie audience, but I think it’s because so many younger Americans, raised on TV fiction, gossip magazines, and the like, have developed the attention span of a flea.
A subtle, nuanced movie no longer appeals. If the decibel level is lower than a disco, if there aren’t car chases and explosions, the film won’t attract the mass young-male mall audience the movie industry seems to wish for. The rest of us simply stopped going to films as a regular once-pleasurable part of our lives.
Instead, grownups read more books.