LET THEM ENTERTAIN US
by
DONALD DEWEY
_________________________
Don
Dewey has published 25 books of fiction, non-fiction and drama,
including Marcello Mastroianni: His Life and Art, James
Stewart: a Biography and The
Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons.
A friend
asked recently if I had seen such-and-such a movie. I said no,
and wasn’t really in that much of a hurry to see it. He
looked at me wide-eyed and asked why not; it had received intriguing
enough reviews, hadn’t it? I said it was because I had
seen something else the day before and was still savoring that
one. The eyes went from wide to the lidless black puddles of
those aliens that walk off mother ships in Steven Spielberg
productions. Well, that was hardly a reason not to see the movie
he was talking about, was it? I said yes, it was. If I sat down
in a restaurant and chose a meal that filled me satisfactorily,
I wouldn’t immediately grab the menu and order another
meal, would I? Same thing in going to the movies. Let the taste
of the one I’d seen linger for awhile. Why blot it out
immediately with something else?
I
could tell from my friend’s expression that I had violated
the prime directive about being entertained; to wit, never stop
going from movie to play to TV program to ballgame and then
back again to the ballet, the opera, and the new reading series
at the library before starting the cycle all over again. Or
if you’re a specialist in the field, as he was, exploit
the 'multi' part of the local multiplex as swiftly as possible,
preferably between the openings on one Friday and those the
following Friday. Don’t let the impact of any particular
film interrupt the routine. Did I truly have to be reminded
that the 9-to-5 portion of our lives is no more important than
the 7:30-to-10:30 part?
There
are, of course, slews of rationalizations for the mania to be
continually entertained, some of them sounding almost practical.
One favorite is that this is the only way of keeping up ---
whether that mean keeping up with some new social dynamic, some
new artistic genius, some new line in cocktail party chatter,
or all of the above. Kill a few hours? Have a buffer with a
new date? Mount a front for somebody? Feel less lonely? All
handy motives for patronizing screens, stages, and orchestras.
But
over and above the reason for a given entertainment is the arc
--- the notion, long elevated to cultural assumption, that any
single entertainment is only as good as its place in an ongoing
series of attractions, that every pleasure (and irritation)
is mere prelude. One of the more obvious examples of this is
the soap opera, which allows us to order our daily lives by
the grotesque disorder of other lives. Then there’s the
arc of the prime time series that permits us to watch typical
Jacks and Jills with Magnums and smart repartee morph over months
into demons, extraterrestrials, or other entities that turn
out to have never actually existed outside nightmares in the
first place. And let’s not forget the arc of the evening
weatherman as he traces for us the birth of a breeze named Walter
off Bali, its growth through hurricane stages off coasts we
never heard of, its menacing of North Carolina ships lighter
than two tons, and, finally, its evaporation into the mist off
Newfoundland. Ah, well, on to the breeze named Xanadu. Every
good story needs a beginning, a middle, an end --- and another
beginning.
Compared
to our need for the ever-lengthening arc, Noah personified modesty
in selecting only two of every mortal species for insuring survival.
On the other hand, there is the striking similarity that the
starting point in both cases is catastrophe --- in Noah’s
case the flood, in ours boredom. Neither clocks nor calendars
can be entrusted with the relief task; they are reminders of
the problem, not solutions to it. We need our distracting stories,
and the most important of these is the one about avoiding the
banalities around us. Do you really prefer talking about some
neighbor or co-worker to the latest adventures of George Clooney
or of one of the Kates? The law is the order, even in reruns.
How else are we ever going to get into forensic labs, whether
operated by the police, the Navy, or a top-secret government
agency? Did we really ever believe that the cachet of the serial
killer plot was the killer part?
The
issue here is not the rush for gratification; lions exhibit
that every time they see a gazelle bound across the plain. It’s
not even the societal thrust of that rush; that could have been
discerned back when a drummer was taking the edge off another
hard day for his fellow cavemen. Where our addiction for gratification
distinguishes itself is in the reliability and predictability
of the resources for meeting it. The medium is us.