Our series of reports by the Humanities Research Fellows at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities continues with this piece by Joli Jensen, Hazel Rogers Professor of Communication. Here, Professor Jensen reflects on whether or not the rise of mass entertainments are ruining our ability to take art and politics seriously.
Are entertainment values ruining our culture? Both political philosopher Hannah Arendt (writing in 1961) and communication scholar Neil Postman (writing in 1985) thought so, but for very different reasons. If they are right, then the damage has already been done. But maybe they were wrong. Should we really be trying to maintain art or politics as an “entertainment-free zone?”
Intellectuals have long worried about the impact of the entertainment-centered mass media, particular television. In the 1950s they spent lots of energy trying to categorize television fare as high, medium or low culture. Arendt thought this kind of hierarchy was elitist, and argued in her essay “Society and Culture” that all societies need both entertainment and art, so-called low and high cultural forms. In her estimation, entertainment is necessary for enjoyment–it is biological, but designed to be used up. Art forms, like classical music and renaissance art and Greek sculpture, however, are expressions of aspiration and beauty, and need to be protected in their original form so that they can continue to speak to us across the ages.
Arendt worried that, in the mass media’s relentless search for content, culture producers were “ransacking the past” in search of art forms to turn into entertainment. She believed that art forms could survive centuries of neglect, but not an entertaining version of what they have to say. She believe that when art is turned into something entertaining, it loses its ability to “mean” to us—art’s ability to communicate deep human values is destroyed. Examples of this might be the ways that we turn artists into celebrities, and paintings into canvas tote bags, and play simplified versions of classical music in restaurants. Can the original really speak to us, once it’s been turned into a commodity?
Neil Postman worried about politics, not art, and made his case in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Entertainment. He argues that politics was becoming ever less logical and rational, ever more “shriveled and absurd” because it was adopting the values of show business, and selling us politicians and ideas in superficial, easy to enjoy forms. Politics was turning into entertainment, he believed, and thus losing its ability to help us understand what we need to know in order to self-govern wisely.
Both Arendt and Postman argue for keeping entertainment values separated, but the history of both art and of politics suggests that the boundaries between them were never fully there. After all, Shakespeare intended to entertain as well as inspire, as did classical music. And American politics has long been rowdy and playful, as my colleague Mark Brewin documents in his book on the history of election days.
So maybe there has never been “pure” entertainment, kept carefully separated from art or politics. And maybe this is all to the good. Maybe the permeation of entertainment values is what demystifies public discourse, allowing it to be truly democratic. Maybe art becomes more creative and accessible when it is designed to please an audience. Maybe the whole idea of separate spheres for art, politics and entertainment should be questioned.
Preston Sturges’ 1941 movie Sullivan’s Travels is an example of how an entertainment form can challenge perceived distinctions. It relates the story of a successful Hollywood director, Sullivan, who longs to make a politically serious message movie, instead of the lighthearted comedies he is famous for. But because he hasn’t experienced the suffering he hopes to document, he decides to go undercover as a hobo, only to have the studio turn his earnest quest into a publicity stunt, which leads to many screwball comedy moments. Eventually he gives up, but then is unintentionally imprisoned for his own murder. The movie shifts and darkens as it documents poverty, hopelessness, the cruelty of the prison system. The crucial moment is when a chained group of exhausted prisoners are given the rare chance to join a black church congregation to watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon, where laughter offers a momentary (but not unproblematic) escape from their suffering. The movie ends with Sullivan restored to his Hollywood life, now convinced that making comedies can be of real social value.
So the movie itself is a mix of genres, but it also challenges Postman’s assumption that effective political discourse must always be serious, and Arendt’s assumption that ephemeral entertainment cannot move us across time. Watching the movie many decades later allows us to explore human suffering, through political and social and economic inequality, even as we wince at the time-bound racism and sexism of some of the portrayals. Sturges has made the movie Sullivan might want to make, after his harrowing experiences—a comedy that offers serious political content as a form of entertainment that can, at least by some, be considered art.