JOLLY DAYS

Our Time

In some ways movies are the detritus that washes up on the beach of our technological society, bearing the cleverness and vested values of our time. There are a few good movies, and you are grateful for them, but mostly, for me anyway, who cares about movies except as a slightly better quality shallow diversion, and somewhat useful quick check of what is floating about in the mass mind?

Sometimes though, movies give rise, in commentaries, to true sociological insight, as they should, because movies are by their nature more sociological documents than esthetic ones. It would be easy to miss, mid-article, this rousing section of a review, which considers the relation of documentaries to reality TV on its way to reviewing a bunch of recent documentaries.

Here then is an extended and brilliant excerpt from Stephen Holden's piece in Friday's NYT.

These movies challenge audiences to examine reality at a moment when the very term has been warped beyond recognition by reality television. This has been the summer in which mass culture, in its search for new commercial distractions, reached a dangerous tipping point. There is a sense of exhaustion in the air, as though the accumulation of cultural debris, celebrity worship and meaningless competitions had reached a critical mass.

How much longer can we continue to live inside a bubble where Jennifer Aniston's broken heart and Tom Cruise's public meltdown compete with the war in Iraq, famine in Sudan and the catastrophe in New Orleans as headline news stories?

Are the fame-seeking narcissists who swarm through reality television shows an accurate mirror of who we have become as a people? Or are they an illusion marketed by hucksters who cleverly play on a creeping self-disgust, then devise fresh new camouflage to mask that deepening sense of revulsion?

The relationship of reality television to the rise of the documentary is another question to ponder. Did reality television prepare the way for the new popularity of the documentary? Or is the increasing popularity of documentaries a response to the Orwellian political climate.

Seventy years ago T. S. Eliot observed in his poem “Burnt Norton,” “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”…