 Introduction: A Vivid Map of Our Past
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The Radio Times
Christmas number, December 21, 1923. By mid-decade, the radio was on its way to becoming a center of a domestic life in the middle-class households of North America and Europe, as in Britain. View larger
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When we look nostalgically at the recent past, we often recognize it by the things we used to buy, or else by such modern "heroes" as movie stars and sports celebrities. The movies, music, fashions, sport and designs provide a vivid map of our past, because they all share ephemerality. They are all things of the moment, designed to have a brief life, to bum brightly for the instant and disappear, but are always replaced by other, even more gaily colored things of the hour.
An athletic record or popular song is replaced by another which is little different from it. These pass us in an endless parade with similar functions but different details. In the details of this parade is contained a history of our century.
At one level it is a history of skirt lengths and Top Ten hits, a history of the ephemera in which we wrap our sentimental memories of lost loves and long-ago summers. But it is also a history of how modem society has created images of itself and expressed its fantasies, its fears, its ambitions.
This is also the history of the economic system by which the images are manufactured and distributed and sold. We taIk of the entertainment industry, of show business, of the dream factory. Industrial societies turn the provision of leisure into a commercial activity, in which their citizens are sold entertainment, recreation, pleasure and appearance as commodities that differ from the goods at the drug store only in the way they are used.
For 70 years, Hollywood, "The Metropolis of Make Believe", "the entertainment capital of the world", has manufactured and marketed a non-durable consumer commodity: the experience of "going to the movies" rather than any particular film. in going to the movies, people do not buy anything tahgible. They merely consume time by renting seats in the cinema for an hour or two. What we are really buying is perhaps something different, something aIready our own.
As a name for Hollywood, the Dream Factory has long been a cliche, but no-one has yet found a more evocative analogy for the experience of cinema-going than that of the dream. As spectators we sit, spellbound in darkness, sharing a public privacy with our fellow viewers, all of us engaged witnesses in a fantasy that is not under our control, but is nevertheless ours to make of what we will. The people who mn what Italian critic Umberto Eco has calied "the heavy industry of dreams" are in the business of selling us desires we aIready have. They steal our dreams, and then seli them back to us for entertainment.
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Introduction
