How Entertainment Conquered Reality Analysis

Neal Gabler defines entertainment in his book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality as a damaging power which is able to “ruin” society (Gabler, 1998). However, according to Longman Dictionary, entertainment refers to “things such as films, television, performances etc that are intended to amuse or interest people”; to be more objective, it “entails communication via external stimuli, which reaches a generally passive audience and gives some portion of that audience pleasure” (Bates & Ferri, 2010). The contradiction of these definitions shows that entertainment makes both negative and positive influences on society, so it is not entertainment itself, but the way how it is used by human beings has the capacity to “ruin” or improve

Television distresses the audience from judging the candidates’ policies to scrutinizing their images such as their clothes and body language. Take the 2016 American televised presidential debates for example. Ms. Clinton wore a red trouser suit on the first debate and a white jacket on the last one, and her clothing styles are considered that “not only referenced the first round of the feminist movement in history”, but also as “a symbol of the new wave of feminism today” (Suh, 2016). American tweeter users even followed this “fashion” (Suh, 2016), so to some degree it became a fashion show. In fact, Ms. Clinton’s clothes were intended designed and matched in order to make her “stand out” on the stage (Suh, 2016) and therefore caught more attention from the audience. In this way, she could guide people to believe that she was reliable and qualified to be the president through her amiable and presidential outlook. This example shows that entertainment can be taken advantage of by politicians to create an invisible association between their images and personal abilities to achieve success. While it is well for politicians to be aware of the importance of entertainment, yet it should not be used to harm the seriousness of

For example, on one of China’s most popular dating reality show, If You Are the One, a girl said to the boy that “I'd rather be sitting inside a BMW and crying than sitting on a bicycle and smiling” (Zhao, 2010). Similarly, on another dating show called Go for Love, a girl said that “Do not talk to me, unless you are rich” (Zhao, 2010). Since the two girls’ worship-money mentality was contradictory to Chinese traditional marriage values, audience were attracted by the shows. However, according to Kefan Cao, a Chinese television presenter, the girls were actresses and they were arranged by the directors of the dating shows. This shows that the dating shows were designed to strike the audience with controversial moral values such as “materialism, narcissism and discrimination against the poor among China’s younger generations” (Wang, 2016), so that they can make profits from commercial sponsors. Since the television shows make influences on people, their values conveyed in the programs also impact social morality. If the directors of television shows only focus on the entertaining functions of television programs to make profits, the public’s morality will have danger to be lowered