I like movies and I have the habit of wrinting about them. This has made me think of how these stories we have seen on screen for all over our lives have influenced our percepition of the world around. I witnessed here in Brazil, based on my own experience as a kid in front of the TV, how movies and TV shows display a pattern to be followed and, sometimes, copied, without any critical thinking. After all, we still have faced a brutal invasion of the pop culture mad by and for Americans.
NEARLY 160 years ago, Alexis De Tocqueville observed that Americans lacked an appreciation for what he called the ''pleasures of mind.'' Instead, he wrote, they ''prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for beauties self-proffered and easily enjoyed. . . . They require strong and rapid emotions, startling passages, truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of the subject.''
Those words remain, in fact, a pretty good description of the impulses that drive American popular culture, what one might call a constant quest for ever greater sensationalism. But the characteristics Tocqueville ascribed to our books, poetry and theater are now no longer confined to amusements; they have leached into almost every aspect of American life, and, why not to say, world life. Any putative Tocqueville looking at America today would see a whole Republic of Entertainment in which strong and rapid emotions, startling passages and rousing truths pervade journalism, politics, education, religion, art and even crime. Indeed, ours seems to be a world molded in the image of the movies and intended for our viewing pleasure.
To most of us, this has been obvious for some time in the country's public life. However serious their subtexts may be, news events like the O. J. Simpson trials and Lewinskygate are vastly entertaining spectacles that are promoted, packaged and presented very much like the latest Hollywood blockbusters, only these stories happen to be written in the medium of life. Not to mention Michael Jackson’ life and death and others magnetic plots that would appeal to any kind of taste.I wondered if the tragedy that is about to fall onto my Flamengo would be of interest to the producers in Hollywood.
What has been less evident than the transformation of public events into entertainment, however, is something arguably much more important: the extent to which entertainment has gradually infested our own personal lives, converting them into ''movies'' too. It is not just that audiences may find daily life as entertaining as fictionalized stories, as ''The Truman Show'' and some comedies that portrait the routine of Americans. “American Beauty” is another example that crosses my mind. Just yesterday, I was rewatching “O Assalto ao trem Pagador”, by Roberto Farias, and started to think how these common stories tend to stir on people’s minds.
It is that over the years our moviegoing and television watching has been impregnating the American consciousness with the conventions and esthetics of entertainment, until we have become performers ourselves, performing our own lives out of the shards of movies. One might even think of American life, including quotidian American life, as a vast production in which virtually every object is a prop, every space is a set, every person is an actor and every experience is a scene in a continuing narrative. What Joe would say about that?
It has been a long process that has brought us to this point -- a process that may have been set in motion by the country's very active sense of democracy. In Europe, where the class hierarchy was rigid and class distinctions obvious, any sort of personal theatricality, aside from that of self-conscious, rebellious Bohemians, was limited to the upperclasses, which could afford flamboyant display. But in Brazil, where class boundaries should be more porous and distinctions less apparent, citizens quickly learned that how one looked and behaved largely determined how one was perceived, prompting Walt Whitman to lament the ''terrible doubt of appearances.''
This emphasis on class by style infused 19th century American life with a kind of subtle theatricality as the middle class and later the working class imitated the affectations of the gentry in hopes of being regarded as gentry themselves. By the early 20th century, though, these old models of gentility had yielded to new models in the mass media, especially the movies, and the change ushered in a marked difference in aspiration. What had begun in the 19th century as a way of appropriating class became in the 20th a way of making one's life more closely approximate the glamorous visions one read about in novels and picture magazines or saw on the screen.
Today, with the burgeoning of mass culture, this everyday performance art may be America's most ubiquitous art. Though obviously not everyone is willing to concede that he or she is becoming a performer, there are telltale signs everywhere that ordinary life is cinematic. Take fashion. There was a time when fashion was, as Tom Wolfe once put it, the ''code language of status,'' a way to express where one stood in the social order. Nowadays, when nearly everyone has access to designer clothes, even if it is only a pair of jeans, fashion is less expressive than imaginative. What one wears doesn't necessarily convey who one is; it projects who one wants to be -- which makes clothing into costume.
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CD - Miles Davis - Time After Time: Amazing recordings of some classics, like "Time After Time", "Corcovado" and "Round Midnight". Davis is obligatory, no more than that. Two-CD pack, with charm and talent. Be careful: do not listen alone or you will be missing someone from your past. Look and listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTf_d30Anzk
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