In his 1998 book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler wrote the following.
One does not necessarily have to cluck in disapproval to admit that entertainment is all the
things its detractors say it is: fun, effortless, sensational, mindless, formulaic, predictable and
subversive. In fact, one might argue that those are the very reasons so many people love it.
At the same time it is not hard to see why cultural aristocrats in the nineteenth century and
intellectuals in the twentieth hated entertainment and why they predicted, as on typical nineteen
century critic railed, that its eventual effect would be “to overturn all morality, to poison the
springs of domestic happiness, to dissolve the ties of our social order, and to involve our country
in ruin.”
Write a thoughtful and carefully constructed essay in which you use specific evidence to defend, challenge, or
qualify the assertion that entertainment has the capacity to “ruin” society.
Set your timer for 40 minutes. This is a timed writing. In your comments, assign a number to your classmates essay. Scores range from 0 to 9. Give a reason for your score.
