The World As A Movie

...We are reminded of how publicity affects celebrity by being equated with it...

...Typically, Professor Boorstin attributes the deceptions he discusses to an innocent mechanical hitch of industrialism which he dubs the Graphic Revolution...

...And to say pseudo-events thrive on "our honest desire to be informed" is to be coy...

...What else could a book on that monster be...

...For all the urgency of purpose, the repetitive, simplified, mildly hortatory tone curiously echoes that of the primer...

...In contrast to critical essays which used to be written in a tone suggested by a title like The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, essays whose contents are, actually, every bit as chilling, now appear fussy with reassurances and prefaced, or interspersed, with declarations of love, faith, and humility...

...Such gaping does not make for dispassionateness or a critical objectivity...

...The Image offers a valuable reminder of just how, and how pervasively, publicity has become the substitute for "news...

...Those developments in the present popular romance with art-and-culture which resemble a circus, complete with arttamers and their breathless audience, bring to mind Samuel Butler's point: better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all...

...How they make their way is a process which technology indeed makes different for each generation...

...The scene depicted here reminds one, rather, of the scene in the movie Pimpernel Smith when the Nazi general brags to his foe, an historian and archeologist who had complained about the instant coffee offered him: "In Germany we have discovered that substitutes are better than the real thing...

...Instead, it makes for that further compulsion toward a waterfall of "facts" which leads those who provide them to arrange anticipations of "fact" by way of staged interviews, planted "leaks," and other publicist's methods...

...Boorstin objects to the image-bound experience, as being "little more than interior decoration," a process of "invention rather than discovery...

...Not that some conspiracy is afoot to bury the qualities of judgment and feeling—like his predecessors over the last ten years who have written about the fall into spectutorship of publics lonely or organized or waist-high or status-bound or idbound or distracted, Professor Boorstin is quick to observe that "the problem is created by people working industriously at respectable jobs . . . not by demagogues or conspiracy or evil purpose...

...respectable, if inert...

...It's a nice irony, though, that a time which has prided itself on its moral and intellectual superiority to the "innocence" of previous decades should so eagerly avow the awesome innocence of its own failures...

...Something's gone amiss with "the whole machinery of our society...

...More to the point is how much of the original always gets through—especially when a heavyweight's involved, even a paragon like Flaubert or Vermeer...

...The "message" and style of a major artist willy-nilly make their way...

...THE IMAGE: OR WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN DREAM, by Daniel J. Boorstin...

...The whole question of the morality of mass communications which The Image especially evokes, one which Raymond Williams tackles in the concluding sections of his Culture and Society, is skimped over...

...But the manner of the Stout Fellow school of criticism is so much at odds with the macabre scene it describes as to add a final piquant touch to the allround grotesqueness of that scene...

...They are, all in all, "men of good will...

...one whose eye—despite all the to-do about togetherness or the drooling over Salinger's coy hokum—is fixed everywhere but on his own immediate state, and immediate conflicts...

...He can afford the quip for he writes with a confidence in the style and possibilities of a managing elite which no reader of a study like Daniel Boorstin's The Image will be able to muster...

...Well, this is the day of anti-heroes in fiction, and anti-heroic styles in sociology...

...Nor does Boorstin help the event fulness of his own book when he writes solemnly that...

...In his first, and best, chapters Professor Boorstin notes how a compulsive mass interest in versions of What Happened Ieads to the rehearsal and production of facsimiles of the eventful manufactured for the market like toys...

...More accurately, what newsmen usually express in their "creations" is professional cynicism and expertness in doublethink...

...Belabored by what has been pre-judged and pre-digested to suit our anticipations, we are becoming more and more like Hollywood's movies about us...

...These few instances are typical of a mode of address which has become standard in such sociological trotsroundthe-scene...

...Boorstin defines such carefully plotted Items as "pseudo-events...

...A more qualified slant would have enlarged the book's perspective, and strengthened its style...

...Professor Boorstin's subject is the enormous range of substitutes for the real thing which affect the quality of our everyday experience and resources...

...and "ideals" by expressing them in the chants of the copywriter (the friendly Attend the Church of Your Choice gambit, with its built-in push —Or Else—exemplifies average copywriting method...

...Professor Boorstin's concluding pitch is to advise that each individual find his own shelter, so to say, against the image fall-out...

...we are given—again— the stories of Lindbergh and P. T. Barnum and The Reader's Digest and the Star System...

...This rehashing of oft-told tales leads to a tiresome informativeness ". . . the addition of sound signalized by Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer in 1927 .....When he shifts gear from information to exhortation, Boorstin sounds the chantable rhythms of the Sunday supplements: "The hero was a big man...

...Boorstin's patient, cosy manner becomes positively governessy when, in recommending a book on The Reader's Digest for its "statistics and anecdotes" (!) he cautions that it is also "critical and often snide...

...The abnormality arises when an act more escapist and trite than taking dope or watching a vintage Tarzan movie is rationalized as stalwart good citizenship or an "honest desire to be informed...

...Although we expect a novelist or poet to be as fascinated by the "frivolous" aspects of a scene as by any other, we expect from a venturesome scholar an instructive definition of issues...

...the celebrity is a big name...

...What Boorstin authoritatively describes here reinforces exactly the same impression of the American character one receives from Riesman, Whyte, et...

...He is obsessed with knowing all about What Happened rather than gaining a knowledge of What Is...

...and travel by turning the experience into a tour of the most publicized places by the most publicized means...

...in the making of pseudo-events . . . newsmen find ample scope for their individuality and creative imagination," for this amoral statement might be found in a brochure plugging the advantages of majoring in journalism, and it helps corrupt further any meaning that may still attach to the words "individual," "creative" or "imagination...

...The stance assumed by their authors is that of the stout fellow, the plain blunt man on the road...

...The Stout Fellow style is not one shaped for a Great Audience...

...Primer-fashion, tidbits of local history fill out the chapters...

...He means simply the techniques of printing and photography— techniques whereby any experience or thing under the sun can be turned into a version of itself...

...Occasionally, the strictures on art reproductions or Cook's tours sound like the chant unfailingly recited by reviewers of translated works: ah-but-so-muchhas - been - lost - of - the - original...

...He writes with urgency about daily bombardments of newscasts and song and celebration which serve mainly to reinforce stale habits of judgment and feeling and to diminish character and sensibility...

...lic...

...The need for escape, of course, is a fact of life—of modern life an increasingly grim fact...

...Most of these, packaged and labelled to suit ingrained opinions and stock responses are, of course, a matter of publicity...

...The Image is not an intellectually exciting work...

...A Burckhardt or Freud would have written instead: "our surly desire to escape into information...

...In turn, stars of sport, screen, space, or culture are tamed by their publicity into fitting their image-frame...

...Instant information is the opiate of the pub...

...well-intentioned, if wrong-headed...

...One reason is that it concentrates on the managed majority and ignores the managing establishment...

...This tip, as inspiring as it may seem, is astonishingly lacking in moral point...

...In his study of English poetry and its resources, F. W. Bateson quips about "the non-ruling classes who are more planned against than planning...

...Those involved in oiling the machinery are dedicated, if stupid...

...That impression is of a character as little "wrapped up in himself" as can be...