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Movies have become what director Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" — a red herring that triggers a plot but has no other inherent value. Like MacGuffins, movies have little inherent purpose except to be talked about, written about, learned about — shared as information.Movies just don't matterLos Angeles Times, July 31, 2005 http://snipurl.com/gmazInterviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story: It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all From Wikipedia http://snipurl.com/gmb1
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Pooh-Bah
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Two of my favorite movies, Ronin and Pulp Fiction, feature MacGuffins, each in the form of a brief case that is sought by two or more competing parties. It's often amusing to read or hear criticism of such films that they "never even explained what was in the briefcase."
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The link from the LA Times article by Neal Gabler was one of those things I wish I had never read. It's like pure, distilled stupidity.
Movies just don't matter By Neal Gabler, Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is the author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
Now is the summer of Hollywood's discontent. There are plenty of theories about why box office and attendance are down, and most have an element of truth. But the real reason may be a culturally momentous change. Over the last 10 years or so, being entertained has been supplanted by a seemingly more gratifying exercise: being in the know.
I guess I didn't get the memo.Subtle reference to movie that was actually entertaining.
Movies, television and DVDs are attracting fewer patrons because people, especially young people, value being entertained less than they value knowing about entertainment and entertainers. Movies have become what director Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" — a red herring that triggers a plot but has no other inherent value. Like MacGuffins, movies have little inherent purpose except to be talked about, written about, learned about — shared as information.
Count me out of this trend. I guess this explains why before a movie at the theater I have to endure a Coca-Cola-sponsored movie trivia slide show that features questions about movies so trivial in themselves that the prospect of knowing trivia about them is embarassing.
Just think: Everyone in our society knows a welter of facts about popular culture. Just about everyone reads People magazine, or supermarket tabloids, or newspaper gossip columns, or watches "Entertainment Tonight" or its knockoffs, or scours the Internet, or talks with friends about people and events of the entertainment world. Everyone knows the big movies, the hot stars, the latest celebrity snafus, even the TV ratings and movie grosses.
Maybe he needs to get out of Hollywood for a week and talk to some people of the intelligent, friendly people in Iowa or Ohio or something.
Fan magazines and gossip columns have been around as long as films. The modern wrinkle is that those with knowledge about entertainment now far exceed those who watch or listen to the entertainment itself. Watching a movie used to tickle viewers to want to know more about its stars. Today, knowing about the stars is an end in itself.
No that's only true for Hollywood gossip columnists and other sycophants.
It's hard to imagine any American today not knowing about the childhood traumas of Oprah Winfrey; her rocky romance with beau Stedman Graham; her cycle of dieting, ballooning and dieting; the books she reads; even the amount of money she makes. Oprah may be the most famous woman in America.
I must be a man of unimaginable intelligence then.
The ostensible source of all this interest is her daily, syndicated television show, which, judging by Oprah's visibility, should be the most-watched program. In fact, Oprah's show attracts about 8 million viewers a day, according to the latest ratings. It's reasonable to assume that those millions of viewers are basically the same each day. That's 8 million out of a country of nearly 300 million, or less than 3%.
You can fool some of the people all of the time.
Eminem has sold only 10 million CDs, and the "Today" show gets only 6 million viewers on a good day — and just about everyone knows who Eminem and Katie Couric are.
I know who Anna Nicole Smith is, but that doesn't mean she can play cello.
More people will read, hear or joke about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes than will see either "War of the Worlds" or "Batman Begins." More people will read about the romantic entanglements of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie than will see their movie, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."
Maybe that's because people can elect not to go see "Batman Begins" but if the broadcast media keeps coughing up celebrity sputum then eventually someone's gonna catch a cold.
None of this would matter for the box office were it not that celebrities' real-life sagas — what I call "lifies" because they combine life with the narrative appeal of movies. Lifies provide many of the same satisfactions as movies do. Once upon a time, these peccadilloes might have advertised stars' films. Now they don't so much advertise the movies as replace them. In the battle of competing narratives, people are likely to prefer the real-life ones with real-life consequences to the fictional ones on screen. Most movies suffer by comparison.
This guy has his finger on the pulse -- the pulse of a dimwit who subscribes to US magazine and who thinks TIME magazine is for intellectuals.
And because they are largely MacGuffins, movies suffer from another rivalry as well. The traditional benefits of entertainment were the pleasures of the experience. For that, you had to see the movie, read the book or hear the CD. These were — and are — powerful pleasures, powerful enough to make entertainment a multibillion-dollar industry. But as society has grown more complex and the information we can know has grown exponentially, knowingness — the idea of being in the know and of having the expertise to navigate through the haystacks of available information to find the needles — has come to provide an arguably more satisfying form of gratification. That's why the knowingness industry, including the Internet, seems more vital than the entertainment industry. Google is the new metaphor for fulfillment.
Those who know are at the prow of culture, especially if they know trivial factoids like who might be dating whom...
The prow of culture? *chortle*
...what obscure rock band is on the cusp of stardom or the characters on a little-watched cable TV show.
Too much time on their hands?
Conventional entertainments like movies face a terrible double-whammy — lifies supersede them and knowingness makes seeing them irrelevant. The one thing that moviegoing did provide was a communal experience. Some defenders of the movie theater claim that watching DVDs at home cannot provide the same bond. Maybe not, but knowingness can supply the bond. The communal experience of a theater is being replaced by the communal experience of having knowledge of it, which is why chat rooms and websites are almost certainly more popular than the movies that are chatted and blogged about.
None of this is to say that the movies won't rebound. They've been written off before, and all it takes is two or three more "Revenge of the Siths" to create headlines that Hollywood is back.
This is actually the saddest thing in the whole column, that "Revenge of the Sith" [it's singular, by the way] is a great movie that stands aside from the dismal spiral of crap that Hollywood has been producing. This is like using The Monkeys as a cultural milestone in the history of rock music.
But given the changes in society, the long-range prospects are not promising. It might be more than a long summer for Hollywood. It might be a long decade and then some.
About ten years?
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I think you are "Right On!" in everything you have said, Alex William. But I think you may be taking LA entertainment writer Neal Gabler too literally. Personally, I think the real target of Gabler's "Movies Don't Matter" piece is our air-headed [dare I say "heirheaded"?] celebrity culture - a culture neatly captured in this recent NY Times piece by Frank Rich: Two Top Guns Shoot BlanksBy FRANK RICH New York Times, June 19, 2005 Extract: "The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19rich.html?hpAfter all, it is our mass culture which drives the mass of the movies we get, not the other way around. If our movies "Just Don't Matter", it's because our mass culture is trivializing everything which does matter.
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Here's another example * of what Frank Rich and Patrick Goldstein were writing about, Alex Williams: Celebrity véritéStill photographer Steven Klein tells stories with image-building mini dramas. By Chris Lee, Special to The Times Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2005 Depending on the beholder, the images exist either as art or as testament to the refined celebrity image-crafting that helped propel Jolie and Pitt's action-comedy, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," to a $50-million opening weekend in June (just days after W, the women's fashion magazine, hit the newsstands).
The photos are also emblematic of the latest trend in celebrity portraiture.
No longer content to appear in photos wearing fancy clothes in glamorous locations, and increasingly leery of overexposure in the 24-hour celebrity news cycle, famous people want to act out scripted dramas in promotional stills — just as they would before movie cameras.
"It wasn't a photography shoot. It wasn't a celebrity shoot," Klein said. "We looked at it like a small, independent film, an investigation into the breakdown of a family."
http://snipurl.com/gnf8
* "The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."
Frank Rich, New York Times, June 19, 2005
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Lauren Bacall weighs in with her own views on this "new rogue genre" in the current issue of Time: Lauren Bacall criticizes 'vulgar' Tom CruiseUSA Today, August 1, 2005 In an interview in the Aug. 8 issue of Time magazine, now on newsstands, the 80-year-old actress says, "When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise."
"His whole behavior is so shocking," she says. "It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness."http://snipurl.com/gnfpIs she old-fashioned? Or does she have a point? Is this a new genre? Soap opera verite? And who is to blame? The stars who behave as Greek gods, or those who worship them as gods, having nothing else in their lives to worship?
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journeyman
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>having nothing else in their lives to worship?
And why must you continue to prate on this type of crap so unceasingly, and at length?
The Lone Haranguer
The Lone Haranguer
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And why must you continue to prate on this type of crap so unceasingly, and at length?
Because I have you around to honor me for it, snoot.
Why else?
There is nothing like a sanctimonious "haranguer" to pump up the click count on one of my homilies. :)
P.S. Who can doubt that I have single-handedly brought you out of your shell, snoot.
Whether that is a good thing for the Board or not, I will leave to others to judge. But I'm kind of fond of you myself. Keep up the good work.
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Pooh-Bah
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Well at any rate I see nothing new about publicity stunts.
/enjoying Pride and Prejudice immensely
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I see nothing new about publicity stunts.How true, Alex Williams. The virus seems to be contagious. Publicity stunts the latest trend in Bollywood IANS [IndiaGlitz.com], Monday, July 18, 2005 Whether the Salman and Aishwarya controversy is a publicity gimmick or not may never be known but there is no doubt that Bollywood seems to be getting bolder with its publicity stunts. Such stunts in Hollywood are a given. So much so that Tam Cruise's declaration of love for Kate Holmes was met with severe scepticism as both actors had films ready for release. http://snipurl.com/gnvlFor more on this story, please see "Marry me, Katie!" in The Limerick News [Wordplay today].
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Carpal Tunnel
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Whether that is a good thing for the Board or not, I will leave to others to judge.
Really? I don’t get that impression-- since when others (do you want a list? I have lots of lists--lots of NAMES) have complained about your long, boring non word, “gossipy’ types posts—and stated your behavior was a reason for leaving this board, you seemed to say..
Well they are free to come and go as they please. –
So when “judgment’ has been made, you “ignore’ the judgment.—and what’s more, you have claimed, no one has the right to judge you or the quality of your post. (So you seem to want to have it both ways!)
BUT, to be honest.—others shouldn’t be judging you.
Shouldn’t you be able to judge your own behavior? Aren’t you an adult, capable of reason? Shouldn’t you be able to understand this board, part of WORDSMITH is dedicated to discussions about words?
This often becomes discussions about local (or not so local ) lexis’s or idioms, or about parts of speech, (is spindle a noun or a verb?) about greek and latin (and norse, and a host of other languages) and how they have contributed to English.
And while you ‘ complain’ that media today is full of MacGuffins., you seem to be intent on providing MacGuffin after MacGuffin – opening topics that are just barely about words to begin with, and that quickly become, by virtue of your repeat posting, nothing at all to do with words, word usage, word play, or any other vaguely language related topic. They become thread about thread about “paris hilton’ , or tom cruise
(and you direct other to limericks in other forums about “news’—and indicate the topic there is tom cruise too) or other trite media topics.
do you really think tom cruise and his antics are news? Aren’t you here arguing against such non news masquerading as news? ) again- you seem to want to hold to opposing postions..do you have any postions? Or do you just do what ever is expedient at the time? --right now you seem rather two faced and duplicitous.
Tell me, what does tom cruise, or Publicity stunts the latest trend in Bollywood or Celebrity vérité or any of your other posts in this thread have to do with words, in any sort of way?
(OK, you used words to construct the post, but then English is heavy dependent on words!)
I have, up to this point, basically ignored this thread—since I recognized very quickly it was just an other example of your pushing your own agenda…and it was buried in Misc.. where, often, topics have strayed far from the subject of words.. but –you said.. Whether that is a good thing for the Board or not, I will leave to others to judge.
Do you want our judgment? Will you listen? Or will you once again whine and complain every one is picking on you?
Or perhaps you can asses your own behavior:
Is this thread anything about the word MacGuffin?
Or is this whole thread just another example of you using a MacGuffin to actually post the very garbage (media hype) you seem to be against?
and do you really think snoot or anyone is honoring you for your repeated MacGuffins?
Oh by the way, thank you for the word MacGuffin..—It a good term to define exactly what seems to be going on here.—its so much easier to form a well reasoned argument when you know exactly what it is that you are against.
and do you really think snoot or anyone is honoring you for your repeated MacGuffins?
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and do you really think snoot or anyone is honoring you for your repeated MacGuffins?
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
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Pooh-Bah
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Alex, not only did I agree with you but I got the pleasure while I read your post of hearing it in my father's voice along with the snorting and newspaper rattling that used to accompany the reading of twaddle.
It seems that Mr. Gabler writes with blinkers on. I should imagine that far more people read about the Olympic ice dance voting scandal than watched the event but the Olympics are still around. Same with the Baseball betting scandals of the past.
Perhaps what we need is better plots. Or at least some kind of plot.
As for the prow of culture I wouldn't likely quote sex lives of the rich and infamous to impress a job interviewer.
PS were movies supposed to "matter".
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PS were movies supposed to "matter"?Well, yes, for some, Zed. But not necessarily for you and me. I mostly go for 'escape' myself. Aside: Lest this discussion be considered recalcitrant by those who expect their "Miscellany" strictly structured, may we consider this discussion a discussion of the meaning of the word "matter"? - that is, "matter" in the sense in which you have used it, Zed, and also in the sense in which Gabler used it in his headline "Movies just don't matter". Films That MatterMedia that Matters fest brings young filmmakers to the fore. By Geoff Aung, Columbia University Tuesday, July 26, 2005 Let’s be honest: There are films, and there are movies. City of God, for example, is a film, while War of the Worlds is a movie. We at Campus Progress tend to fall on the filmy side of the divide, but we’ve got nothing against Scientology City, I swear. Especially when Hollywood = Wedding Crashers. But despite gems like the latest from the Wilson/Vaughn collective, the truth is we just can’t count on the local Loews to serve up the goods these days. Expensive popcorn, yes; meaningful cinematic goods, no.
That’s where Media That Matters comes in. For the fifth year running, Media That Matters, a part of Media Rights, a non-profit organization that connects filmmakers, activists, educators and youth, has put together a film festival featuring the best from young and even younger filmmakers creating art for social change. As one of the featured artists, Sarah McLachlan says, “Media That Matters is about people making the switch from apathy to action.” Call it reel progressivism.http://snipurl.com/goq4
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old hand
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> Well at any rate I see nothing new about publicity stunts.
Yeah, these people's job is the effective dissemination of themselves as a brand, or archetype of what is 'sexy', 'in' or whatever else. Compnaies started catching on to this idea a while ago too. This means that the most successful firms with the brightest people are becoming the ones that produce the least but market themselves most effectively.(try the film "The Corporation")
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