Popular Entertainment and Commercial Interests Popular Entertainment

Popular Entertainment and Commercial Interests

Popular entertainment is overly influenced by commercial interest. Superficiality, obscenity, and violence characterize films and television today because those qualities are commercially successful."

Through a variety of overt and subtle ways, commercial interests are the key determinants of the content of popular entertainment.

For example, two summers ago, a movie called The Cell opened amid criticism of its stylized depictions of extreme violence. In the opening scene, a pretty girl lies dead in a bathtub. The camera zooms into her vacant eyes and pulls out to show the killer fishing out her bloody kidneys. A later scene shows the killer twirling his victim's intestines around on a stick. Critics complained about the senseless violence, but the movie made $57 million in the United States alone. However, when it was time to release the movie in the international market, New Line Cinema had a problem with The Cell.

Apparently, it was not violent enough.

The director ended up making a more graphic version for the European audience. Incredibly, the Japanese arm of New Line Cinemas found the new version too tame. They had the director add more graphic scenes, to pull in a bigger audience.

No one probably remembers The Cell by now. It was one of those summer blockbuster movies, not meant as an Oscar contender.

There have been a host of similar movies since then. Most of them are unmemorable and perhaps interchangeable because they all follow a specific pattern.

Blockbuster action movies are Hollywood's bread and butter. They do well internationally, even in countries where people do not speak English. When faced with earning potential in the hundreds of millions of dollars, concerns like the effects of gratuitous depictions of violence on viewers take a backseat.

The case of The Cell illustrates commercial interests - the need to make money - overtly at work in determining a popular medium's content. However, there are also a number of subtle ways wherein the aesthetics or the message of a work of art becomes secondary to the commercial bottom line.

Most television programs, for example, are structured in four acts, with suitable breaks built in for commercials. Most movies are from 90 to 120 minutes long, a length deemed optimum by distributors. If a movie were longer, there would only be time for an average of two airings a night, instead of the current three. Popular songs on the radio also follow a standard format. They run three minutes long and consist of two stanzas, a refrain, another stanza, then a bridge. This allows for a set number of songs on a CD and a set number of songs playable on the radio per hour.

The publication of category romance novels is another illustration of commercial distribution interests at work. Fifty percent of all books published over the past five years are romance novels. While there are exceptions, most of these category books are formulaic. Depending on the genre, they are a set number of pages long and they all have a happy ending. When asked about the banal content of most romances, a representative of a romance publisher replied, "Romance authors are writing the books that readers clamor for."

There is of course nothing wrong with a romance publisher wanting to make money. Neither is it a crime to enjoy the next Arnold Schwartzenegger action flick or to hum along to the latest Britney Spears tune.

Given the realities of a global capitalist entertainment industry, it is understandable that the first goal of most producers of popular media is to make money.

However, the harm occurs when making money becomes the only goal, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Popular media - books, television, movies, and music - all have a tremendous potential to challenge people, to alter perceptions and to effect change. When media producers shy away from these challenges because a movie will not make $50 million at the box office, the medium's potential goes unrealized.