How Entertainment Conquered Reality , Neal Gabler traces the evolution of high and low culture in American society through the 19th and 20th centuries, and describes how low-brow entertainment became so influential in the United States.
Movies promote the fantasy that there are simple narrative solutions for all of life's problems.
Movies are full of sex, scandal, gossip, and action. In this book, Gabler demonstrates how this fantasy has shaped our society. It's a thoughtful, in places chilling, account of the way entertainment values have hollowed out American life and if not supplanted reality, at least threatened it. Though Neal Gabler's study of the culture of entertainment does have one original and interesting idea, essentially it is a synthesis, or omnium gatherum, of work previously published by others, notably Leo Braudy, Richard Schickel and Neil Postman.