A front-page story in the August 24 Variety begins, “Last week’s Republican National Convention garnered the worst network ratings of any convention in TV history.” An interesting piece of information, but not, as far as I know, one that was noted in daily newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, or on TV. Why does one have to go to Variety to discover this morsel of recent history? Perhaps it has something to do with Variety’s status as a trade journal. Mainstream print and TV journalism may be part of the entertainment business, but they’re not generally about entertainment in the sense that a publication like Variety is.
It may be a partial legacy of the Puritan work ethic that making money is not regarded in our society as any sort of escape. So little, in fact, is it currently considered a form of escape that virtually every other activity that fills our lives–eating, reading, thinking, sleeping, bathing, having sex, exercising, watching TV, talking to friends or relatives, going to movies, getting drunk or stoned–is considered a form of escape, an escape from making money and whatever that entails. Some of these “secondary” activities are treated with more respect than others, but they all generally take a back-seat to what most of us consider the main order of the day, which is going to work.
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- Entertainment is often defined in our minds by what it isn’t. “The life of Jesus isn’t entertainment,” read one of the placards in front of the Biograph a few weeks ago (or words to that effect), in protest of The Last Temptation of Christ. Another placard read, “God doesn’t like this movie.” Does that mean that God wasn’t entertained by it?
This isn’t to say that art (or entertainment) and social purpose always have to be in conflict with one another (think of Chaplin or Tati)–only that Morris hasn’t worked out a way that allows them consistently to serve the same masters. Metaphysical speculations about how innocent people can be convicted of crimes that they didn’t commit and the specific railroading of one hapless individual into the death penalty–later commuted to life imprisonment–are certainly related subjects. But the general should grow out of the particular rather than the other way around, and too many threads in Morris’s tapestry raise other questions–like motive–that his movie never addresses, but still can’t expel.
