Book | Chapter
(1986) Thinking about society, Dordrecht, Springer.
American society has experienced the movies as a widely sold good/service and as a secularised religion; modes that overlap. Religion is a (big)business; business preaches the religion of success; movies sell both business and religion as forms of success. Hollywood dramatises salvation-through-success as much offscreen as on. Salvation in this Hollywood religion has five overlapping forms: power, wealth, status, sex and immortality (PWSSI).1 Movie people in general and movie stars in particular are seen to be rewarded with power, wealth and status, as signalled by their expensive presentation of self (clothes, hair, teeth, plastic surgery), large and luxurious homes (subject of guided tours and guide books) and their mobile and extravagant lifestyle. Many of them, even the apparently unpromising, are seen to be endowed with a highly desirable and marketable characteristic: sex-appeal, an asset that can be displayed both onscreen and off. And finally their being 'somebody" means not only that attention is paid to them but, also, they are deathlessly preserved on film, videotape and newsprint forever. PWSSI cannot be distributed equally in society, for such an arrangement would be unstable. Indeed one might say that a society can be characterised partly by how PWSSI are distributed and partly by how it thinks PWSSI ought to be distributed: its practice and its religious myth.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5424-3_24
Full citation:
Jarvie, I. C. (1986). Explorations in the social career of movies: business and religion, in Thinking about society, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 368-389.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.