Text by Joe Kennedy

In Ways of Escape (1980), the second volume of his autobiography, Graham Greene addressed his faintly notorious insistence on portioning off some of his novels to a self-defined category of “entertainments”. He coined the term, he stated candidly, to segregate these thrillerish, plot-driven works, seemingly pre-formed for cinema, “from more serious novels” concerned with the exploration of character and religious, moral and philosophical considerations. Though the so-called entertainments are by no means light on thoughtful characterisation and the “serious novels” plotted with craft and economy, and not lacking in action either, Greene’s distinction has survived posthumously in critical taxonomies and on dust jackets alike, as if pointing to its slipperiness would be disrespectful or even sacrilegious. Greene occupies something of a midpoint in terms of both official and popular conceptions of what entertainment is and does. For both those invested in producing or consuming it and those who sought to critique and reject it, the prevailing associations of entertainment in the 20th century were with action, energy and the frenetically, even moronically, visceral. Film audiences lapped up gangster and war films, James Bond, and later on slasher flicks and high-concept thrillers, all in their own ways screenic continuities of the 19th-century Romance novel (“the essence of Romance,” Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed in an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, “is incident and incident only”). For those of the postwar baby boom the action comic was a dominant literary mode, while cop, spy and sci-fi shows proliferated on TV. Theodor W. Adorno infamously upbraided the busyness of jazz, and, later on, moral panics emerged around the brainlessness and viciousness of “video nasties” and console gaming. For the long 20th century, to be entertained was to be reassured that stuff happened, and entertainment’s essence was apprehended in distinction to what was understood to be “serious”: the narrowing inwardness and subjectivism of literary naturalism and then modernism, abstraction, contemplativeness, irony and self-reflexivity. As Byung-Chul Han demonstrates in his 2019 book Good Entertainment, a genealogy of post-Enlightenment scepticism about the concept, stances like Greene and Hopkins’ had not always supplied the final word on the definition of the entertaining. In the Western Europe of the 18th century, “entertainment” was embellishment, decorativeness and adornment in contexts, particularly religious ones, where meaning and message had historically been privileged over aesthetic sensation. In the case of Bach, Han’s example of compositional entertainment, this meant the subordination of language in religious music to melody, harmony and rhythm, of the intellectual and moral to the sensual and beautiful. While there is some concurrence between the voluptuous and the action-led epistemologies of entertainment – literary modes such as the simultaneously violent and palpably sensualised Gothic novel clearly having a foot in each camp – it’s certainly possible to trace the shift between the two to the late-19th century’s literary revival of the Romance and an emerging cinematic consciousness. 

Image from Big Brother UK, 2000Text from Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale, 1936

Clearly, neither of these ways of framing entertainment are absolutely obsolete. A Bond or Michael Bay film is still a reliable draw at the cinema, and comic-book adaptations (more of which later) are arguably the representative cultural form of our time. For the voluptuous, one need only think of the ever-increasing success of food television and its long-term transformation from throwaway, cheaply made fluff into a display of virtuoso cinematography searching not only for the perfect dish but for that dish’s perfect representation. There’s also a lingering anxiety in “serious” culture about the temptation of sybaritic capitulation to the immediately attractive properties of artworks, especially visual ones, which might lead to the neglect of higher-level form and meaning: film critics are wary about “lush” and “pretty” visuality that conceals a basic thematic shortfall, and those who write on painting sometimes worry about being conned by the material pleasures of paint. Fredric Jameson, for example, scolds the “irresponsible view” he finds himself taking in response to Willem de Kooning. “I like to look at the yellow parts even of those paintings I don’t think much of,” Jameson confesses, guiltily. Despite the cultural and critical stubbornness of these paradigms, something has given way in the first quarter of the 21st century, and it has done so in a way that surprisingly inverts both of the modern period’s pertinent definitions of entertainment. To register this fully, it might be useful to restate what was historically non-entertaining, as it is this that has reworked itself as pleasure in recent times. In the long 20th century, what was excluded by the most prominent definition of entertainment was the slow, contemplative and non-active, exemplified by narrative forms that prioritised character over plot. Prior to that, bearing Han’s critique in mind, the non-entertaining was the substantially meaningful, or what was educative in a spiritual or moral sense. With these ideas in mind, perhaps it is time to ask what exactly has happened both to action and to aesthetic immediacy as ways of being entertained.

Big Brother, the mostly sedentary reality show, first arrived in the UK in 2000, empowering its morally outraged critics with a temporal excuse to claim that it was emblematic of the prurience and laziness that might come to define the 21st century. We would, they suggested, be arrested in a cycle of sloth, becoming disgusting and trivial while spectating upon others behaving disgustingly and trivially. Ever since these millenarian, often superficial and cranky, critiques emerged, it’s been hard to talk about post-Big Brother programming without toppling into either some form of that moralising, even if it’s made respectable with Frankfurt School-y credentials, or reactive sociological defences of the pleasures of mass media of the who-are-we-to-judge-the-entertainments-of-others sort. It’s tricky, in other words, to think about the reality genre in the way that it developed without making some form of value judgement (and I probably want to even as I complain about the difficulty of not doing so). Consequently, the form is perhaps best approached in a way that simply seeks to contextualise it in relation to a broader history of entertainment.

There’s no doubt at all that Big Brother, or Love Island or I’m a Celebrity…, are envisaged as entertainment, even if in their nascent years their showrunners sometimes felt compelled to speak defensively about the useful anthropological insight to be garnered from putting a cohort of strangers in a house or on an island with nothing-to-little to do. They occupy traditional light entertainment and primetime slots in scheduling, and their press focuses on rare moments of must-see eventality, encouraging potential viewers to care about what will happen in a forthcoming bug-eating challenge or when Love Island introduces a new group of suitors. Peripheral and connective aspects of the shows themselves, particularly the opening credits and voiceovers, tend to be brash, colourful, emphatic and, when musical, high-tempo. Think of Big Brother’s iconic, and, in its year of inception, sort-of on-point, trance theme, or of the inevitable thunk of electro-house in Love Island’s cutaways. Established signifiers of entertainment are used to signal to the audience what kind of show they’re supposed to be watching.

Greene’s “entertainments” to some extent permitted him to cast off the “serious” novelist’s burden of characterisation by using the alibi of incident. Today, it often seems that entertainment deploys incident predominantly to punctuate the study of character. Inevitably, these studies are often predictable, banal and silly, but this is not to deny that the emphasis of entertainment has palpably changed, the agonies of Spider-Man shooing the web-blasting to the narrative margins, just as doorstop thrillers and Mills & Boon have been edged gradually out of bookshops by tragic life stories and self-help-autobiography hybrids by everyone from social-media CEOs to sociopathic ex-paratroopers. Subjective introspection was modernism’s actionless niche; now, following its reinvention as schematic psychology, demand for it has replaced the demand for action. The dawning triumph of character in the field of entertainment, however, has been matched by the success of message, and what is called “deeper meaning”, often of the moral or political sort. As Han observes, Kant advocated for the use of entertainment to make moral points back in the 18th century, but this smuggling of seriousness under the guise of pleasure is not what we’re dealing with now. Instead, moral discernment is itself the source of pleasure. When the one-trick meaning of a Banksy stencil is swiftly deciphered, it’s not the case that the serious content was moved in under the cover of the aesthetically pleasing, not least because the images aren’t really nice to look at; rather, the entertainment consists of the recognition of what the image is “saying”: that “society” is too “materialistic” or that violence is the fear of love or that people spend too much time on their smartphones. The technique lies in part-burying the meaning so most of it is sticking out, while still permitting the audience the satisfaction – and the self-congratulation – of feeling like they found it. Also, and not to be forgotten, it is important to make sure that the meaning is one that many, plausibly most, people can get on board with to at least some degree. In the 1970s, people played spot-the-ball in the newspapers, and there was a brief – now sadly forgotten – fad for books that gave clues to some non-fictional treasure secreted in a geographically real location. For the ball or the treasure, read the message, and, in a period in which liberal consensus is high on who or what the baddies are, message fever is everywhere.

Consequently, there are performances of Julius Caesar in which Shakespeare’s extensive and non-reductive wrangling on what power is and what power does are made secondary to the fact the protagonist is given a hairpiece like Donald Trump’s. There are prestige TV series, lots of them, like The Handmaid’s Tale, where even a viewer from Neptune would quickly establish that the events occurring in a fantastical or time-displaced setting are actually a searing comment on the present day. There are, of course, Young Adult novels and their adaptations, the true epitome of popular allegory, successful with an adolescent audience in a way comics once were, which restage contemporary anxieties in tepid dystopias. In the Hunger Games movies, action sequences were frequent but in almost every case half-hearted and incongruous, weak MacGuffins to lead into the next bit of angsty meaningfulness about the corrupting effects of a vaguely defined and vaguely motivated authority.

Are we not entertained, to paraphrase one of the last action heroes? Many explanatory narratives might seek the undertows of this switch around in how entertainment signifies, from a stock Marxism that would hold that individualistic psychologising is inevitable in an economically individualistic culture to the grandiose, but equally vague, liberal commonplace that we grasp for moral reassurance in confusing times. Maybe, the optimists could say, we’re becoming more thoughtful, more attuned to the puzzles of interiority; perhaps, the pessimists could reply, the present day’s surfeit of digital information inhibits our capacity for aesthetic luxuriation. When mass culture’s emphases shift on the scale discussed here, single-cause interpretations tend to be unsatisfactory, and we’re forced to use theoretical get-outs such as the handy “overdetermination”, a way of saying the reasons for a phenomenon are inscrutably alchemic rather than singular and discernible. For now, it’s enough to say that entertainment is no longer “incident, and incident only”, nor does it necessitate the exclusion of the “serious”: in fact, the opposite might well be the case. ◉