Only Entertainment

Richard Dyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134522934
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Only Entertainment explores entertainment as entertainment, asking how and whether an emphasis on the primacy of pleasure sets it apart from other forms of art.
Dyer focuses on the genres most associated with entertainment, from musicals to action movies, disco to porn. He examines the nature of entertainment in movies such as The Sound of Music and Speed, and argues that entertainment is part of a 'common sense' which is always historically and culturally constructed.
This new edition of Only Entertainment features a revised introduction and five new chapters on topics from serial killer movies to Elizabeth Taylor. In the final chapter Dyer asks whether entertainment as we know it is on the wane.

1

Introduction

Entertainment is a guiding principle in the making and receiving of the arts and media. These essays address some of the meanings and implications of this.

Entertainment is an idea, one that is both historically and culturally specific. While pleasure has surely always been intended and taken in artefacts and performances, the idea of entertainment is distinctive in its emphasis on the primacy of such pleasure, ahead or even instead of practical, sacred, instructional or political aims and functions. This is touched on in chapters 2 and 5 (‘The idea of entertainment’, ‘Entertainment and utopia’). Cultural developments since 1900 suggest that entertainment, at any rate in the forms discussed here, may also be historically specific in another sense, namely that it may now be on the way out, and this is addressed in a brief, speculative concluding essay, ‘The waning of entertainment’.

The essays, written over a period of twenty-odd years and disparate in topic and tone, all seek to understand entertainment in its own terms. This means taking seriously the common sense of entertainment, notions like escapism, glamour, fun, stardom and excitement, as well as phrases such as ‘it takes your mind off things’ and ‘it’s only entertainment’. It also means analysing given instances of entertainment as entertainment, neither assuming one already understands what this is nor pushing the analysis too quickly on to other things. These are the effects of two other terms that have dominated discussion of entertainment: art and ideology.

The discourses of both art and ideology tend to take the idea of entertainment for granted, and therefore not to scrutinize it. The former either seeks to denigrate entertainment because it is not art (not formally perfect, accomplished or innovative, not emotionally deep, with nothing interesting to say about the world) or tries to show that such-and-such an instance of entertainment is really, or also, art; either way, the issue of what entertainment is is side-stepped. Discussion of ideology on the other hand tends to treat entertainment as a sugar on the pill of ideological messages, either condemning it as a disguise for world views of which the writer disapproves or else commending it as a strategy for promoting those of which she or he does approve. Once again, though, what entertainment is is not addressed.

If one uses the terms in a certain way, it is possible to consider all works of entertainment as also always works of art and ideology. They have formal properties and affects and perforce convey world views. In particular, one can try to show, as I do in these essays, how formal properties create, say, the élan of the musical, the allure of stars, the sensuality of disco or the excitement of action movies. However, to analyse entertainments in these terms is to refuse the in fact valuable evaluative connotations of art and ideology and only to consider the way form, affect and world view constitute the enjoyment that an entertainment proposes.

This does not mean that works of entertainment should be immune from ideological criticism. Indeed, one might define the project of these essays as the development of a political engagement with entertainment qua entertainment. This does fly in the face of one of the abiding beliefs of the discourse of entertainment, namely, that it is, after all, only entertainment. However, any entertainment carries assumptions about and attitudes towards the world, even if these are not the point of the thing; and the fact that an entertainment entertains does not let it off the hook of social responsibility, does not make up for sexism, racism or any other deleterious ism.

The task is to identify the ideological implications – good and bad – of entertainment qualities themselves, rather than seeking to uncover hidden ideological meanings behind and separable from the façade of entertainment. Thus in pointing, say, to the celebration of female energy and mastery of the world in The Sound of Music, I hope I have not just identified this as a politically welcome bonus alongside the lovely numbers but rather have shown it in what makes the numbers lovely: the force of Julie Andrews’ delivery, the lilting drive of the tunes, the use of editing to display taking possession of the world. What I do not say in the essay on The Sound of Music, but do in ‘The colour of entertainment’ and in relation to Speed, is that the very trope of mastery of the world – that gorgeous sense of sung, danced or ‘actioned’ expansion in space – also has negative ideological implications. The musical is unusual in assigning the experience of expansion to female characters, whereas Speed and action films generally are much more traditional in their gender division of entertainment labour; both however are part of a celebratory spreading out into and controlling of the world which has distinct racial and ecological implications. It is the feeling form of imperialism and the destruction of the planet. It is on such feelings and forms, the ends of entertainment, that ideological criticism focuses here rather than the ends to which entertainment may be put.

The topics discussed in these essays – which, if not exactly serendipitous, were certainly, and obviously, not chosen as part of a programme of research – are kinds of entertainment that few would dispute belong in the cultural category of entertainment: musicals, action movies, glamour stars, pinups, porn, dance music. Three depart slightly from this. Both ballet and the classic television serial are probably more readily perceived as belonging in the category art rather than entertainment. My polemical intent with these brief pieces (and the references to the news as entertainment in ‘Entertainment and utopia’) is to unsettle the assumption that things that enjoy high cultural prestige are not in fact informed by the same entertainment values as those that are not – perhaps the former are just entertainment for highbrows. The other exception is the article on the trope of serial killing in, mainly, film and television. Here I have deliberately stressed both the formal enjoyments deployed in serial killing fictions (and by implication reportage), alongside the more usual address to its social significance, and also the moral and social significance of those enjoyments.

With these partial exceptions, the essays are about instances of entertainment provided by the industry and business principally responsible for the provision of entertainment. In other words, they are about the dominant definition of entertainment as carried in actual instances of entertainment. As a consequence, they do not ask, why do people like these things?, but rather, what ideas of being liked do these entertainments propose? what do these entertainments say entertainment is?

This collection was first published ten years ago.¹ It appeared in tandem with a collection of essays on representation (The Matter of Images). This volume sold considerably less well than Images. Perhaps the essays are simply not as good; certainly the cover wasn’t. However I do also suspect that, amid all the current academic discussion of pleasure, desire, jouissance and carnival, entertainment is still not taken seriously as a topic. It is too social, too common-sensical, as likely conservative as progressive or transgressive; it is besides a solvent of taking things seriously. Representation obviously matters; entertainment is founded on not doing so. Yet any distinction between entertainment and representation is one of emphasis and convenience. Representation is a building block of things that are entertaining and the power of much representation resides in its ability to entertain.

Entertainment’s representations have been especially concerned with temporarily providing, but also in the process defining, happiness. Goodness is more important than happiness, but only just and it is doubtful that we can be good without being happy (and vice versa). Politics is about fostering and maximizing happiness as well as goodness; we need constantly to have entertainment’s ideas and experiences of what happiness might be and to reflect on them, their implications and costs. That is why it also matters to ask what entertainment is.

*   *   *

I should like to thank those who commissioned and encouraged these essays: Rebecca Barden, Rosalind Brunt, Jane Clarke, Philip Dodd, Jim Hillier, Ann Lloyd, Sally Townsend, Simon Watney and Christopher Williams. I also wish to acknowledge the following for stills and illustrations: BBC Photo Library (Figure 4.1), BFI Stills, Posters and Designs (Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 11.2, 11.3, 11.7, 11.8, 11.10, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 17.1), Granada Television (Figure 4.2), MGM Ltd (Figure 14.1) and Playgirl Inc. (Figures 14.5, 14.10). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made we would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.

Note

1    The articles on the colour of entertainment, Speed, serial killing and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the conclusion and this introduction, are additions to the 1992 edition; the essay on camp in that edition is now to be found in my The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002).

Further Reading

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) Rabelais and His World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Barthes, Roland (1975) The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang.

Barker, Martin and Brooks, Kate (1998) Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, Its Friends, Fans and Foes, Luton: University of Luton Press.

Caughie, John (1986) ‘Popular culture: notes and revisions’, in MacCabe, Colin (ed.) High Theory/Low Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 156–71.

Collins, Jim (1989) Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-modernism, London: Routledge.

Kracauer, Siegfried (1926) ‘Kult der Zerstreuung’, Frankfurter Zeitung 4 March; translated in New German Critique 40.

Lowenthal, Leo (1961) Literature, Popular Culture and Society, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Modleski, Tania (ed.) (1986) Studies in Entertainment, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Mulvey, Laura (1985) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Nichols, Bill (ed.) Movies and Methods, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 305–15.

Rutsky, R. L. and Wyatt, Justin (1990) ‘Serious pleasures: cinematic pleasure and the notion of fun’, Cinema Journal 30 (1), 3–19.

Schlüpmann, Heide (1982) ‘Kinosucht’, Frauen und Film 33, 45–52.

Shiach, Morag (1989) Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present, Oxford: Polity Press.

2

The Idea of Entertainment

Uranie: [Molière] doesn’t care if people attack his plays, as long as plenty of people go to them.

* * *

Dorante: It’s a skill, making people laugh.

* * *

Uranie: When I go to a show, I just consider the things that move me, and if I’ve enjoyed myself, I don’t start worrying about whether I ought to have or whether Aristotle’s rules forbid me to laugh.

* * *

Dorante: Surely the rule of all rules is to please?

Molière: The Critique of ‘The School for Wives’

The clown with his pants falling down,

Or the lights on the lady in tights,

Or the scene where the villain is mean,

That’s entertainment!

It might be a scene like you see on the screen,

A swain getting slain for the love of a queen,

Some great Shakespearean scene

Where a ghost and a prince meet

And everything ends in mincemeat.

Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz: ‘That’s Entertainment!’

Entertainment, show business, Variety are not terms that are normally much thought about. Indeed they are often the final point in a conversation: ‘Well anyway I like it. It’s good entertainment’, said defensively when you are praising an unfashionable film in intellectual circles; or else the tag, now a comic cliché, used in backstage musicals at crucial points in the plot: ‘That’s show business!’ Nothing more ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The idea of entertainment
• 3. A bit of uplift: classical ballet
• 4. Quality pleasures
• 5. Entertainment and utopia
• 6. The colour of entertainment
• 7. The Sound of Music
• 8. Sweet Charity
• 9. Action!
• 10. Lethal repetition
• 11. Four films of Lana Turner
• 12. First a star: Elizabeth Taylor
• 13. The Son of the Sheik
• 14. Don’t look now: the instabilities of the male pin-up
• 15. Coming to terms: gay pornography
• 16. In defence of disco
• 17. Getting over the rainbow: identity and pleasure in gay cultural politics
• 18. The waning of entertainment
• Index