Word: gablers
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This is just the type of story Life the Movie is loaded with. Gabler has uncovered case after case of the extreme and bizarre effects America's preoccupation with entertainment and celebrity has produced...
Extensive thought and research has clearly gone into this book. Gabler supports his arguments with quotes from other relevant works. He is obviously well versed in American history and makes use of it in his arguments. Unfortunately, Gabler did not use his exhaustive and insightful outline of historical events and processes to draw conclusions about cause and effect relationships which would have enriched his narrative...
...Gabler's command of the history of television, theater, cinema and journalism in America is exceptional. He extends his claims to fields such as religion, sports, publishing, visual art and even education. It seems that even Harvard is subject to the magnetism of celebrity: "Academstars like ...Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," Gabler writes, "built their reputations the way stars usually did: by gaining media attention, in this case writing articles for newspapers and magazines and appearing as experts on television programs, or glomming onto the latest academic fad or controversy...
Once he has tracked the evolution of the phenomenon, Gabler shows us the extent to which Americans have gone to sculpt and alter their own identities, with examples such as the market for professionally written term papers, a retirement community in Florida designed to offer its residents a 24/7 Disney World experience, celebrity quick-change artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson and a woman who underwent 20 plastic surgeries to remake herself in the image of a Barbie doll. He points out the difference between the "inner-directed" character valued in America's past--composed of personal qualities and goals...
...holds things up to the light which we take for granted. For instance, most of us probably would say the Hard Rock Cafe succeeded through the simple combination of innovation, good advertising and luck. Gabler reveals the craziness of it in a way most authors would not be able to pinpoint. "The Hard Rock," he writes, "had been so celebritized that some people went there to buy a souvenir to commemorate the time they went to the Hard Rock to buy a souvenir which, in turn, broadcast to others that they had been to the Hard Rock...