Speech to the Sydney Institute
9 September 1997
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Press Criticism and Public Issues
Katharine Brisbane
I chose the title for this speech some three months ago, when I was invited to give a talk to discuss a book I recently edited and published called
Critical Perspectives. This book is a collection of essays on critical commentary in the press by the eight winners of the Pascall Prize. The essays cover music, theatre, film, art, literature, popular music and restaurants; and are by some of the liveliest and most experienced minds in the business. The writing is sharp and gives a critical insight into the pressures and constraints that prevail in the daily press, and particularly the insistent demands of commercialism. It’s a good book and I recommend it to you. But I want to talk to you not about these authors but about the subtext of their work: the way the press mediates between us and reality; and the way the arts and its critical observers have been disempowered.
But I should have known that it was unwise to expect anything to do with the media to remain unchanged. In the last week I was compelled to recast what I wrote, to accommodate some mention of the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. These events, and the extraordinary expression of emotion they have generated, are almost an apotheosis of the need for empathy in public life which was central to my argument.
I believe that we are losing the power to imagine. I see an attack upon imagination at all levels in public life:
- on television, meaning is collapsed into a kind of visual muzak;
- in the education system, universities are stripped of any sense of the contestability of knowledge, geared instead to notions of quantifiable outcomes;
- in the prevailing political ideology, the limitations imposed by economic reality are not only accepted but have become an end in themselves in the form of economic rationalism;
- in the the delegitimising of intellectual discussion which has made the assault upon the ABC possible.
And lately I see it in the arts.
A curious paradox obtains today in our public life. The arts have been subsidised, industrialised and mainstreamed into amusement and advertising until they now reflect the needs of government and corporations. At the same time so arid has our capacity for empathy become, and so adversarial our attitudes to public issues, that in order to raise these issues in the public mind they must be shaped and dramatised. No news item on television can be related without an enactment or a graphic. The only way we can imagine ourselves into someone else’s real-life dilemma is to make a comparison with fiction. ‘It’s like a Tarantino movie’, we say. ‘It’s like something out of Dickens.’ The more our parliamentarians and public figures talk of practical politics, the more they seek dramatic impact for their statements; the more these statements are edited, dramatised and subjected to photo opportunities. Where once our leaders ruminated in oratory, expecting and receiving our time and consideration, today they master the ten-second grab. The world has changed irrevocably since Vance Packard wrote
The Hidden Persuaders and Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow became the focus of a presidential election. Demand for instant gratification imposes other people’s imagination upon our own, leaving us with an illusion of communication, of involvement in the exchange of ideas, of involvement in the democratic process; but which remains nothing more than that — illusion.
Television, which more than any medium gives rise to that illusion, is a further paradox. It brings into our lives public figures and events with a degree of intimacy which no previous century could have imagined; and which even film cannot reproduce. And yet it discourages understanding. Put a debate on TV and the bulk of viewers change the channel. TV is antipathetic to argument; words are a minor adjunct to the power of colour, movement and music. TV has trained us to react within the narrowest of spectrums but not to engage.
If I describe the Princess of Wales’ life and death as the most extreme example of the power of this illusion, I am in no way referring to the real tragedy behind it, the death of a sympathetic and compassionate young woman at the hands of an allegedly drunken driver. But by marrying the Prince of Wales she entered into a fiction created by royal tradition and the imagination of the British public. What made her exceptional was that she learnt how to appropriate that fiction. She understood the power of the drama in a way that the royal family never did; and reinvented herself, first as a celebrity and then, much more dangerously for family tradition, as a classless, hands-on humanitarian. She upstaged her husband and her peers; she subverted the role she had been called upon to play, revealing in the process the emptiness of the establishment from which, latterly, she had been excluded. In becoming the People’s Princess she kept her finger upon the emotional needs of her public, using the skills of all great performers. She understood the camera intimately; the camera empowered her; the press was her lifeblood and she learnt to manipulate it to create new episodes of her long-running fiction. In the public mind her death has now taken on the inevitability of a morality tale which will continue, as Monroe’s, Elvis’s and the Kennedys’ have continued.