What’s Entertainment?

I.

I have a lot of trouble with the term entertainment. The word is a minefield; and when that trap is tripped, the effects are invariably devastating. You find yourself running for the cover of your own, hitherto safe position – either absolutely for or against this monstrous, undefined thing.

Slowly but surely in the course of the 20th century, entertainment has became one of those deadly, untouchable bottom-liners that leave little room for discussion. Hardly anyone ever asks what it means, what constitutes it, or why acts are committed in its name.

As the showbiz culture industry grew and intensified, it enshrined this sacred cow. In the history of film production, for instance, we journey from a hopeful 1930s assertion (“movies are your best entertainment”), to a more worried 1950s slogan campaigning against TV (“movies are still your best entertainment”), to a manic, quasi-religious 1970s/‘80s exclamation (“that’s entertainment!” – actually a line lifted from a song in the 1950s musical The Band Wagon [Vincente Minnelli 1953]).

Today, we have on our hands something so intimate, ineffable and magical that it can only ever be pointed to – rarely questioned or taken apart. You feel entertainment, you know it when you see or hear it; only a fool would try to define or understand it.

Well, this fool rushes in. But neither to say a simple yea or nay to the holy institution of the entertainment experience … which is what inevitably happens. I will first part lay out the map of opposing positions on entertainment. Eventually, I’ll shoot for a different, more productive definition. My special interest is in trying to salvage a lively and valid (not pious or pretentious) answer to the question: how do (and why should) one take entertainment seriously?

I suspect there is no such thing as a pure, innocent statement in favour of entertainment – since entertainment itself is very far from being innocently self-contained or self-evident. If we agree with Andrew Britton [1952-1994] in his extraordinary essay “Blissing Out” [reprinted in The Complete Criticism of Andrew Britton (2008)] that there is an ideology of entertainment, it consists of a willed, proud, defiant exclusion of everything which is deemed not entertainment: a list including work, thought, difficulty, complexity and hardship.

Pro-entertainment statements are often sharply defensive – demanding, as they do, the individual’s sacred right to escape from the everyday. When somebody says they just want to be entertained, you can be pretty sure that their desire is, in fact, more elaborately connected to the real world than they want to recognise or discuss.

How often we have heard (or said) remarks to the effect: such-and-such a film is just a couple of hours of fun/action/tear-jerking sentimentality, just a good story well told, just a bit of spectacular special-effects business … so just leave it alone, please, no comment required! Pretty soon, we are into the outrightly vicious anti-intellectualism of pro-entertainment-speak. Attempts to take works of entertainment seriously – to interpret or locate their meanings and effects – are met by endless (and, again, aggressively defensive) derision.

The Sydney Sun (27 August 1987) interviews Robert Englund – Freddy in the A Nightmare on Elm Street films [1984-2010] – and finds an opportunity to ridicule “another case of taking something that was popular entertainment and intellectualising it” (John Hanrahan's article is tellingly titled “Sucked In!”). The movies-on-TV reviewer of The Times on Sunday (30 August 1987) nervously hedges his bets on Mad Max III (1985), ultimately escaping down the fox-hole of mere professionalism and clever fun: “The result in terms of slam-bang adventure is so smartly professional and tongue-in-cheek that you would be a cad to force a serious reading of the text” (John Slavin).

Even at a higher-brow level of commentary, in such a generally serious journal as Cinema Papers (September 1987), we find university-employed writers eager to divest themselves of the stain of pretension when addressing popular films like The Witches of Eastwick (1987). After dutifully analysing the movie at hand for a page, this type of reviewer, suffering massive Bad Faith, declares: to blazes with this, it’s just Fun after all, and “you could do a hell of a lot worse with a rainy afternoon” (Christina Thompson [later a Meanjin and Harvard Review editor]).

Often the flight from seriousness hides under the alibi of intentionality: if the filmmaker did not consciously mean his/her film to say what the reviewer claims it says, then the latter is clearly an idiot. The contradictions involved in maintaining this position are blatantly displayed by the maddening introduction to a book on horror filmmaker George Romero, The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh, by Paul Gagne.

At one moment, Gagne shoves off the “sociological nonsense” that Night of the Living Dead (1968) “spoke to a generation raised amidst the turbulence of the 1960s, and so on”; but, a page later, testifies that in Dawn of the Dead (1978), the “swift undercurrent of social satire” taught him that “a good director could use the feature film medium to present a point of view about society.” Suddenly, the sociology is no longer nonsensical – but only if Romero personally verifies the seriousness of his intention.

On a larger scale, the intentionality shtick blows itself up to a global statement of entertainment philosophy: since entertainment as an entity never takes itself seriously, why on earth should anyone else do so? This is a favourite reflex of Rolling Stone-type rock journalists. Consider, for instance, the dexterous self-absolution performed by one writer tackling the inner-Sydney grunge music scene.

Perhaps the next most common characteristic of this music is the preponderance of anal humour. Now that’s a subject I would rather have preferred not to probe too deeply, and making puns as appalling as that is fully in the spirit of all this and about as serious as you’re going to get me. I mean, if you don’t think “Fuck Your Dad” is funny then you don’t think it’s funny. (Clinton Walker, Rolling Stone, September 1987)

Let us now shift the line of fire, and put the gun in the hands of those entertainment fans who – quite rightly – do not like seeing their intimate reactions and intense pleasures turned into symptoms of the effects of entertainment on the mass audience.

This righteous anti-entertainment position is emitted by spokespersons from two sectors: the high-cultured middle-classes nervous of losing their traditional privilege and power over popular taste; and the old puritanical left, searching for an equally lost, authentically ‘folk’ proletarian culture (as per the example of my former fellow Xpress magazine columnist, Frank Hardy [1917-1994]).

For instances of statements from the first group, we need go no further than that bastion of bourgeois culture, The Age Monthly Review, in their anguished August symposium over the fate of ABC Radio National.

Commercial radio is entertainment happy-talk, formula radio. It is ABC National’s alternative and antithesis (…) Mass audiences are entertained audiences … This noisy liveliness is not mere hosted, take-it-or-leave-it melodrama, but a gripping, addictive spectacle. The rushing happy-talk narcotises the dial finger, if not the mind. Who cares? (Peter Lumb)

Radio National is not ‘entertainment’ so it will never get 30 on the Richter Scale of radio success, but it is about the transmission of culture, about what is distinctive about being human. (Rachel Foggetter)

It still seems that entertainment – not to mention enjoyment – is a principal dirty word to some members of the cultural elite. And as for the high-minded universals about “what is distinctive about being human” … !

Upon reaching local, radical publications like Australian Left Review we find, beyond the Old Left’s disdain for mass-produced media entertainment, a genuine crisis over the validity of popular entertainment/enjoyment, and to what extent it should be politically legitimated (the same crisis rocks all those British magazines like New Socialist now clamouring to look and sell like The Face).

Colin Mercer [1952-2013] –an author with a carefully ambivalent interest in ‘the popular’ as a subject of academic inquiry – gingerly tries to put Crocodile Dundee (1986) on the left cultural agenda by imploring his readers: “Let’s be fair, it’s funny and successful too” (ALR Autumn 1987). Can you picture the kind of person to whom this sort of special pleading needs to be said? There are plenty of them around – all too ready to see in popular art only the ideological messages (sexist, racist, fascist) which apparently work insidiously on the populace at large, under the cover of this sickening goo called entertainment.

It goes, in short, like this. In one corner of the ring, the pro-entertainment battler says: “No matter what pretentious sociological/political/cultural bullshit you think you can extract from this stuff, I think it’s good clean/raunchy fun, and that’s all there is to it!” In the opposing corner, the anti-entertainment contender fires back: “Your fun is actually the hypnotic spell cast by crummy consumerist capitalism, and you’re duped if you can’t recognise the fact!”

In the middle, the referee wavers, checks the Walkman volume on his Heavy Metal music tape and thinks: “It’s fun but it’s ideologically disturbing but it’s fun but …”

Where do we go from there?

II.

What’s entertainment? Rather than look for an answer to this question outside entertainment itself – in the writings of sociologists, philosophers or cultural theorists who could not put together a good stand-up comedy routine if they tried – it might be an idea to go straight to the realm of showbiz theory.

This might seem like a contradiction in terms – since theory is intellectual and entertainment is meant not to be. But showbiz, like any art, is a form of thinking – living thinking, thinking with movements and colours, sounds and structures, thinking on your feet. And one of the things entertainment thinks about, often in very sophisticated terms, is itself.

So, it’s time for a teen movie: Crazy For You (Harold Becker, 1985).

Louden Swain (Matthew Modine) is on a ‘vision quest’ (the original American title of the film) to win a wrestling competition; the film documents his rigorous training. Yet, due to a combination of factors, he loses heart just before the big event. He goofs off in order to visit an older, no-nonsense friend, Elmo (J.C. Quinn) – and, surprisingly, finds him dressing up to attend the match.

Louden dismisses the sport in question: “It’s not that big a deal, it’s six lousy minutes on the mat, if that”. Elmo responds with a story about the famous soccer player Pele.

Had a room here one day. Watching a Mexican channel on TV. Hell, I know nothing about Pele. I was watching what this guy can do with a ball on his feet. Next thing I know, he jumps up into the air and flips into a somersault and kicks the ball in upside down and backwards. The goddamn goalie never knew what hit him. Pele gets excited and he rips off his jersey and starts running around the stadium, waving it around over his head. Everybody screaming in Spanish. I’m here sitting alone in my room, and I start crying. Yeah, that’s right, I start crying. Coz another human being, of the species which I happen to belong to, can kick a ball, lift himself, and the rest of us sad ass human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute. Let me tell you, kid, it was pretty goddamned glorious. It ain’t the six minutes. It’s what happens in that six minutes. Anyway, that’s why I’m getting dressed up and giving up tonight’s pay for this function.

As already suggested, one of the least productive lines on entertainment is one that also comes from the entertainment industry itself: the notion that it’s just leisure-time trivia, entirely insignificant, an experience that only exists for the time it takes to play through. This functionalist, rather cold tale of entertainment should never be entirely forgotten; entire industries are indeed built upon it, not only of production but also of reception – the consumer-guide mentality that governs most exhibitors, distributors and journalists of mass art.

Popular culture, in this account, is just a species of fast food – you’ll either like it or you won’t, folks, and besides, there’s always something else to try. But is that really all there is to anybody’s enjoyment of entertainment? Most of the conventional terms for this pleasure – like release or escapism – explain nothing, and in fact raise all the key questions. Release from what? Escape into what? What it is that happens in those precious minutes, or moments?

Elmo in Crazy For You is right to point to the heart of the matter in all those fascinating intangibles like mood, feeling, emotion, energy. Entertainment is (or can be) that experience of being gripped, shaken up, transported. But transported to where, exactly?

Like dreaming or sex, entertainment offers both a displacement from the norm and a powerful condensation of elements. Many feelings and forces flow into it – entertainment never really, deeply works unless it can somehow tap into and signal the stresses and strains of the social everyday.

The cultural pessimist sees the social function of entertainment as a relentless pacification: the safety valve that lets off the steam of social contradiction and misery, so that its consumers can return peacefully to the status quo the next day. And that is often, sadly, exactly the way it goes – and will continue to go, under the reign of unproblematic operators like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Yet there is always, still, an aura of possibility around entertainment: the potential that some of the real material which is dramatised in the magical, ephemeral space of a song or a film will linger, in an audience’s mind, in its transformed state – as a sign of an imaginable and desired elsewhere. And therefore as a critique of the here and now.

No one gets very far with entertainment by thinking about it primarily in terms of content and messages, whether hidden or explicit. Popular films, for instance, are often not really about their nominal or topical reference-points. Sure, what Dirty Dancing (1987) literally shows is a merry dance craze of the early 1960s – but spare me the comment from dour media sociologists and Entertainment This Week hosts alike that, therefore, the film expresses only ‘nostalgia for simpler days’.

For the days in that film are not simple! They are full of politics and pain, double binds and contradictions. More importantly, Dirty Dancing does not really happen in that imaginary past; it happens in the present, as you watch and feel it. Like so many Hollywood musicals, it provides a moving, singing metaphor for the energy it takes to burst through walls of repression.

Popular art is often not about specific things; it is about the shape of things, about how our world feels to live in. This very vagueness is both the limitation and the potential of entertainment: it rarely changes anything immediately or actively but, deep inside, it moves and can be mobilised in the direction of another world. It is in this sense that Dick Hebdige speaks of (some) popular culture as a space of Utopian longing – not yet articulate, but none the less real in its emotional force.

Ladyhawke (1985), Back To the Future (1985), A Night On the Town (1987), The Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice (1988) ... Year after year, bracing, wonderful films whizz by with only the usual consumerist gloss accompanying them, whether in TV Week magazine or on SBS TV’s The Movie Show: “Great fun, go see it, rates 7 out of 10”.

Supposedly serious critics whose heads and hearts are well and truly in the House of Art stop at popular cinema only when they discern the presence of a Dark Side to the mainstream ideology of the West. They find it in Blue Velvet (1986), River's Edge (1986) or even The Lost Boys (1987) – intimations of horror, perversion and despair troubling an otherwise normal surface.

In fact, for such gem-seeking trawlers, such supposedly subversive qualities serve to redeem, for the cause of Art, what would otherwise be tossed off as enjoyable junk – so that, now, it can be talked about for its deep themes and great auteurs.

Yet all those films which were just fun or exciting or uplifting ... where did they go? The industry, frozen in the eternal present of the latest press release, has no memory for them; and most critics write no history of them.

Despite ubiquitous talk of Pop Culture – variously kitschy, arty, nostalgic or an excuse to parade quotable quotes from French philosophers – there is, in fact, less and less attention being paid to popular art today: how it works, what it does, what it means to audiences.

Many film fans – who began their love affair with the cinema back in the days when Westerns and musicals were the staple fare of film societies – have long since revealed their true cultural colours by drifting upmarket to the Art Houses, and leaving all these more-or-less anonymous teen, horror and action movies of our time for dead.

Is there no road between the dismissal of mass cinema as an indifferent capitalist Industry, and the selective redemption of it as Art?

An old idea, seemingly long forgotten by many (except special commentators such as John Flaus and Judith Williamson), still holds good: that entertainment has a mythic dimension. Myth is another of those scary, much abused, overloaded words. When Good Weekend lifestyle columnist Anna Maria Dell’Oso uses it – to discuss George Mad Max Miller as the “tribal story teller of the electronic age”, or the Jungian duality of woman in Fatal Attraction – I want to ban it from the critical lexicon.

On the other hand, when Sun Ra asks “If you’re not a myth, whose reality are you? If you’re not a reality, whose myth are you?”, I feel he’s really onto something.

However, I do not believe that the word myth has to bear the airy, mystical connotation that would trace every story in the world back to a few Primal Tales at the dawn of time (Man, Woman, War, Good, Evil ... ) – nor do I even think that stories (legends, folk tales, etc.) are per se the central ingredient of any modern, cosmopolitan culture.

Modern myths are more like the furious dreams of everyday life: condensations and connections of thoughts and structures of feeling, poised between profound intimations of crisis and Utopia. In a sense, our Western world is post-myth (bereft of the long term continuities and traditions which myth requires) – and “art is what thought does when myths die” (Raymond Durgnat).

Entertainment is what thought does, what the heart does, in a complex world. Rather than a mindless leisure-time blow-out, the play element of the entertainment experience can be a kind of re-creation, both conscious and unconscious, in a cherished free-time and free-space.

Although it is too easy (indeed, plain wrong) to portray the entertainment industries as the Collective Unconscious of the great mass of people, there is still something in the market calculations of even the least scrupulous entrepreneur which displays he power of intuition – and showbiz intuition reaches for the fears and desires that mobilise large (or at least aggregate) audiences.

Entertainment does not lay these fears and desires to rest; rather, it spins them out, dramatises them in all their fascinating contradictions, projects them upon a screen for reflection.

Many of the keys to our everyday experience are to be found in the most anonymous of popular culture entertainments. When our brains dream of interfacing with technology in Brainstorm (1983) and our bodies symptomatise the ravages of society in the Nightmare on Elm St film series; when we take a break or go on a holiday which confronts us with new life possibilities, as in The Breakfast Club (1985) or Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987); when dancing or singing carve out precious moments of individual freedom and the chance for personal expression in Beat Street (1984) or Absolute Beginners (1986) …

In such cases, entertainment is a limit-experience for those of us (i.e., all of us) who live at the shifting limits of histories and commitments, problems and fantasies.

© Adrian Martin August 1987 / January 1988