The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  With scientific research moving ahead so speedily, scientists dare not wait even the two or three months usually required to secure publication in a technical journal. They cannot wait to secure reprints like those which social scientists and humanists circulate among their colleagues. Instead (by a kind of scientific analogue to The Reader’s Digest abridgment of the planted article) they now use the device of the “preprint.” This is a version of an article made available before its “publication.” The most important scientific research institutions are coming to be what Derek J. de Sola Price calls the new “Invisible Colleges”—the regular informal meetings of the most advanced scientists where they exchange their latest findings. In the great centers of research, impatient, energetic scientists will not wait till their fellows elsewhere put results in printed form. They commonly use the long-distance telephone to be sure they have not neglected what their enterprising collaborators elsewhere may have discovered only this morning.

  IV

  THE BOOK, like the magazine article, has suffered a dissolution. This, too, has been a by-product of the Graphic Revolution. In the single year 1901, the number of book titles printed—about 8,000—was more than six times that of all the titles which had been printed in the United States by the year 1804. Such increase, reaching a climax in our own age, has still further intensified the pressures to abridge and to digest books as well as magazines. By far the largest book club in the United States in 1961 actually offered not books but only condensations of them.

  The word “condense,” which originally meant to make denser or heavier—and which only in the early nineteenth century acquired its figurative literary significance of concentrating ideas into a small compass—by the early twentieth century acquired a nearly contrary meaning. The object of a literary condensation now was to make the work not “heavier,” but “lighter,” in every sense of the word. To make it more portable and more palatable to the man who reads as he runs, who supposedly is unwilling to “plow through” the thick original. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, founded in 1950, acquired over half a million members within a single year. Within four years it had 2,500,000 members. In 1958 it had more members than the two next-largest book clubs combined. The sales of individual volumes sometimes came near three million. Almost twelve million Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were being printed every year.

  The rise of the paperback book, with its multiplying reprints of book titles in the public domain, and its need to compete against magazines on the newsstands, has created an ever greater pressure to modify and abridge. Sometimes the abridgment is indicated ambiguously or not at all. More often it is advertised as a superior commodity, precisely because it is abridged. The Bantam Book edition of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur describes itself on the cover as “The Definitive Modern Abridgment.”

  Contrary to highfalutin belief, the gravest problems of literature in the United States today do not come from the small number of books sold. Rather from the contrary fact that books (now including paperbacks as well as hardcovers) are sold in unprecedented large numbers. The narrowing profit margin and the commercial need to put out large runs (100,000 or more in the case of many paperbacks) in order to produce the economies required by the competition have increased pressures against risk-taking. Publishers of paperback books, as Albert Van Nostrand has shown in his admirable Denatured Novel (1960), tend to produce books in only a few patterns: the business novel, the war novel, the mystery novel, etc. More and more of these have come to be commissioned by the “reprint” houses themselves. The exhausting of genuine reprint titles from publishers’ backlists and the desire to produce a risk-free commodity have in turn led to more and more “reprint” originals. Many of these are planted in advance with a regular hardcover trade publishing house, much as The Reader’s Digest plants its articles.

  By 1960, as many as a third of the books on the lists of “reprint” houses were in fact originals, confessed or disguised, and this percentage was increasing. The relation between many publishers of hardcover books and the “reprinters” had become not far different from that between the magazine publisher and The Reader’s Digest. The fact that a large reprint edition of any book has been contracted for before the publication date of the hardcover “original” helps reassure the regular bookseller that the book will have wide appeal and encourages him to stock and push the hardcover book. This fact is given the widest possible publicity in the trade through articles and advertisements in Publishers’ Weekly and by other means. Vice versa, the fact that a hardcover edition has appeared helps the reprint publisher sell his commodity by reassuring potential customers of the paperback that the book has enduring substance. Sometimes a hardcover publisher insists on placing a book with a reprint house before he will publish it himself. He wants to cover his own risks on any uncertain item like a first novel. Sometimes a reprint publisher, having found what he thinks is a salable commodity, will not publish it himself until he has first planted the book for prior publication with a hardcover publisher. In this way he secures respectability and serious reviews—or, in the jargon, he manages to “famous it up.”

  V

  THE MOVIES, which came with the Graphic Revolution, as I have already suggested, made possible a new dissolution of literary forms. Motion pictures offered, for the first time in history, a visual medium for literary work with an audience far exceeding that for the printed work. “Talking” (perhaps they should be called “non-reading”) films removed the movies one step further from the printed page. After the invention of movable type and the introduction of vernacular literatures, the movies were the most decisive new influence on popular attitudes toward literature. And especially on the attitude toward imaginative writing. In this era people began to speak of “nonfiction.” (The earliest recorded usage is about 1910.) Earlier they had treated “fact” as the norm. It was reserved to our age to find so negative a way of describing the world of fact. “Fiction” (that is, “non-fact”) came to seem so real and natural that fact itself had to be described as a departure from it. Surely the movies must have had a large part in bringing us to this way of thinking.

  The movies had a still subtler influence. This more vivid, more universal medium into which literary form could be translated did much to dissolve the very concept of literary form. The motion picture industry became the trade publisher’s largest customer. The most vivid form in which important literary happenings now reached people was no longer direct. The novelist’s product was his novel: a pattern of words with a form all its own. The larger audience, however, now experienced not the novel but a motion picture adaptation of the novel. Of course it was only the printed page that could offer the authentic “original” version of the author’s creation. The movie, at best, was an image of it.

  While the motion picture version of a novel was not produced primarily to be reported, it did have other features of a pseudo-event. It was synthetic, repeatable at will, wonderfully suited to the comfort, convenience, and indolence of the viewer. And it shared the most momentous characteristic of the pseudo-event: for most people it was actually more vivid and more impressive than the spontaneous original, which in this case was the novel itself. Before very long Americans would come to think of the movie version of any novel as the “original.” The literary form would appeal then only as a secondhand printed account. The superior vividness of the motion picture—in sound and technicolor and on the wide screen—made this inevitable. One could buy a paperback version of the “original” movie of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace with illustrations showing the “real” characters (Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara). Sometimes the printed version which came after the movie was made more “authentic” by following the story line found in the movie—often quite different from its literary prototype. After the Walt Disney production of Swiss Family Robinson (itself a barely recognizable version of Johann Rudolph Wyss’s proto-classic) there appeared a “classic” comic book whic
h aimed to educate young people by bringing them a story which scrupulously followed the story in Disney’s much-altered movie “original.”

  This inevitable tendency to view the motion picture as the more authentic inevitably simplified all the dramatic forms which now dominated popular consciousness. For, despite its more elaborate technical apparatus, the movie tends to be dramatically simpler than the novel. Characters or episodes are generally added only to keep the story in a recognized monochromatic pattern: to provide the familiar love interest, to sharpen the distinction between good guys and bad guys, or to insure a happy ending.

  Budd Schulberg, who wrote the scenario for the superb movie Waterfront—a brilliant box-office success—was not satisfied with what could be said in the movie. The movie was made from a screenplay by Schulberg himself before he had written a novel on the same subject. Having seen the movie (directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando), which he found superlatively effective as a movie, Schulberg then determined to write his novel around the same story. He explained his reasons for doing so in an eloquent essay in The Saturday Review (September 3, 1955), “Why Write It When You Can’t Sell It to the Pictures?” This was a clear statement of the too-often forgotten difference between the movie and the novel. Although in Schulberg’s opinion the movie had been well done—it had won every possible recognition, from Academy Award Oscars to the prize at the International Film Festival in Venice—Schulberg still felt he had more to say than could possibly be said even in the best movie.

  Here were two ways of storytelling, and, Schulberg argued, one could not substitute for the other.

  The screenplay is restricted in form. It is the director who has the opportunity to develop character and background through insight, so that the authorship of a film at best becomes a true director-writer co-creation. To take my Waterfront script as an example, its length (after much pruning) was 115 manuscript pages. The novel was five times as long. The film is an art of high points. I think of it as embracing five or six sequences, each one mounting to a climax that rushes the action onward. The novel is an art of high, middle, and low points.… The film does best when it concentrates on a single character. It tells the Informer superbly. It tends to lose itself in the ramifications of War and Peace. It has no time for what I call the essential digression. The “digression” of complicated, contradictory character. The “digression” of social background. The film must go from significant episode to more significant episode in a constantly mounting pattern. It’s an exciting form. But it pays a price for this excitement. It cannot wander as life wanders, or pause as life always pauses, to contemplate the incidental or the unexpected.

  We may often be unfair, then, in accusing movie directors of being simple-minded. They are working in a medium which, like every other, has its limitations. Even at its best the movie remains a simplifying medium. The great box-office successes, even when they had the panoramic sweep of Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, had a simple story line and an uncomplicated (therefore often also a misleading) moral. Even the great D. W. Griffith had a hard time (and produced a box-office failure) when he tried a complexly interwoven story in his Intolerance. And that challenging model, boldly experimental in its intricacy, has not been successfully followed, while the prototypical Birth of a Nation has been made again and again.

  Our extravagant expectations of our power over the world, illustrated by our belief that we can put the essence of a novel into a movie, have led us to forget that something (and in a good novel it is always a great deal) remains in the novel that cannot be moviefied. Simply because many things could be done visually in a movie which could not be accomplished on the legitimate stage or in a novel, we too easily came to believe that there was nothing—or at least nothing of importance—which could not be put on film. The ninety-minute limit (even if doubled or trebled) necessarily includes only a narrow province of human experience. And, as Schulberg insists, despite all the improvements in sound, technicolor, wide-angle lenses, Cinerama, and 3-D, there remains a vast, rich, subtle, world outside the movie-makers’ or movie-goers’ ken. The nuance, the perspective, the contradictions of historical development and social interaction were not made for the camera eye. The real tyrant is not the Hays Office or local censorship, but the film form itself. To be sure, the film can “speak-out,” vividly and terrifyingly, as did Waterfront. But the novel is able, in Schulberg’s phrase, “to speak-in, to search the interior drama in the heart and mind.” While the movie Waterfront ended with a dramatic close-up of Marlon Brando, excellent in its own way, the novel could end “with the deeper truth of inconclusiveness.… A film must act, a book has time to think and wonder.… In the flush of TV spectaculars, wider and wider screeneramas, and all the rest of our frightful, fruitful mechanical advancements the book is still the essential civilizing influence, able to penetrate the unknowns of human aspiration.”

  The danger to our sense of reality is not that movies should be made of novels, and vice versa. But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it. The danger is not in the interchangeableness of the story, but in our belief in the interchangeableness of the forms. We have lost our grip on reality when we have let ourselves believe (as we are eager to be reassured by movie-makers and their press agents) that the movie can ever give us the nub of the matter.

  Yet movie-makers themselves, driven by the needs of the movie form (as the Digest editors are driven by the needs of their form), inevitably treat the novel itself as nothing but the wrapping paper and string of “literary embellishment.” This must be removed to reveal a quintessence, a story line. Thus the multiplying kinds of images—from the printed page to the photograph to the movie to radio and television, to the comic book and back again—make our literary-dramatic experience a limbo. In that limbo there are no forms but only the ghosts of other forms.

  VI

  THE MOVIES were, of course, the first of the new alternative visual forms for narrative literature which were to come with the Graphic Revolution. Motion pictures became commercially important only around 1910. By 1917 Publishers’ Weekly was writing about “cinema novels.” In the 1920’s studios were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for film rights to novels. In 1931 Cheney’s Economic Survey of the Book Industry reported that the incredible prices for screen rights had brought on some severe cases of a new occupational disease known as “ ‘novelist’s nystagmus,’ caused by keeping one eye on the typewriter and the other on Hollywood. The result has been a feverish production of certain books of ‘a certain type.’ ” In the following years the changing economics of the movie industry made the disease more prevalent than ever. After World War II the cost of movie making became so high that most producers instead of owning studios began to lease facilities. It then became easier to produce a movie on credit. Between 1945 and 1960 there came into being over a hundred new firms of independent producers buying novels for the films.

  By 1946 M-G-M had established a contest for novelists which paid the winner $125,000. Twentieth Century-Fox gave Grace Metalious $265,000 to write a sequel to her Peyton Place (1956), the box-office success made from her novel that sold eight million copies. The sequel was to be called Return to Peyton Place.

  When the high price paid for movie rights itself had a publicity value (“It must be good if they paid so much!”), even the business transaction became an elaborately contrived pseudo-event (like the concluding of contracts by movie stars and sports celebrities), with photographs of the signing of the contract, interviews of author, producer, etc. Here was a new kind of advance testimonial whose authenticity actually depended on the fact that big money was paid by the movie producer—the person giving the testimonial.

  In Publishers’ Weekly, the magazine of the book trade, the column “Books into Films” became a regular feature in 1944. By
November 15, 1952, the author of the column, Paul S. Nathan, found the title too confining. “Film rights,” he explained, “after all, are only one kind of subsidiary rights; there is really no reason why publishers, editors, booksellers, and other interested parties should be more concerned with books being sold to the movies than with books acquired by the Ladies’ Home Journal, or by Omnibook for digest, or by the Broadway theater for adaptation.” He added that the advances paid by Hollywood were beginning to be overshadowed by those of the paperback reprint houses; and that television only within the last six years had become “a bigger, more voracious market for subsidiary rights than the movies.” Having discarded the more general title, “Books into Money,” Nathan renamed his column “Rights and Permissions,” and it has remained one of the most widely read features in the magazine.

  It became an axiom of the book trade that booksellers were more apt to be interested in a book, and more inclined to stock it and to push its sale, if the movie rights had already been sold for a substantial sum. This was assurance that the book itself would be profitable. Here are a couple of sample items from Publishers’ Weekly for a single issue (December 12, 1960).

  A Broadway pre-production deal of a like never seen before—one which goes the limit—has just been entered into by Columbia Pictures in connection with the new stage version of Vern Sneider’s new Putnam novel, The King from Ashtabula.

  The studio will furnish the entire financing for the play, which will open under the banner of Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr, with Morton Da Costa directing. Columbia also is making a substantial down payment on the screen rights, plus escalator payments relating to the length of the theatrical run, up to a ceiling of $500,000.