Many people believe entertainment to be a harmless thing. It is a form of pleasure used to pass the time. But what happens when it becomes a weaponized machine, used to warp an entire country’s culture and sense of values? For America, this is what has happened. Entertainment has changed their culture into a consumer driven, narcissistic wasteland, that has propagated more negativity than positivity in its wake.
Entertainment has changed the culture and values of Americans whether they are willing to admit it or not. Advertisements are a good example of this, as they often use celebrities to push products on the willing and unwilling masses. Today, one-fourth to two-thirds of an average hour of screen time is taken up by television advertisements, many of them featuring popular celebrities, often used for our entertainment . While Americans have always been a growing consumer culture, demanding more of whatever is new, or whatever promises to make their life easier, advertisements featuring celebrities create a different type of consumer culture. Americans now want to consume that which will take them outside of themselves, literally making them somebody else . A woman, believing herself to be unattractive, may see an ad featuring Angelina Jolie. In the ad, Jolie may be peddling a skin care product which promises to make a woman’s skin feel soft, smooth, and even will lift and tone small bags around the eyes and mouth. While these are natural signs of aging that are worn with pride in other cultures, America is a culture of youth, trying to defy age at every culture. Suddenly, the skincare product is a not only a youth serum that will allow for the woman to defy aging, but it will also allow her to be beautiful like Angelina Jolie. Advertisements featuring entertaining figures such as this have helped America create a consumer culture wherein Americans attempt to step outside of themselves and into the life, and sometimes the skin, of somebody else.
Entertainment has also managed to change many values in America, shaping them to be more narcissistic and vain. Shows, for example, like Top Model and The Swan base the entirety of a person’s value on their looks . The Swan is particularly troubling because it takes perfectly nice, well rounded American women who are unhappy with their looks and, rather than showing them that they are worthy human beings as they are, it gives them copious amounts of plastic surgery so that they may finally feel worth something. This only reinforces the idea that Americans can only be worth something if they are pretty or handsome, and everybody has begun to be the best dressed, and best looking at the party that is America. Where values were once based on who a person is, they are now based on what they look like. Social media has only begun to enforce this value. Selfie-culture and social media allow every person with an internet connection to find out their worth based on likes, hearts, stars, thumbs up, and other various forms of validation . It is a society based on narcissism, which has taken priority over all other values, even logic and kindness.
Entertainment has undoubtedly changed the social landscape in America, both culturally and in value. While there are some positive aspects to the change, they are few and far between. Most get lost in the cacophony that is the negativity which most recently has bubbled over into politics. The Simpsons have been a popular television show for over two decades, entertaining families with all varieties of story lines. On March 19, 2000, they predicted Donald Trump would run for president of the United States, win, and it would be the end of the United States. It was, essentially, entertainment predicting entertainment predicting the end. Trump proclaims he is a successful businessman, but with four bankruptcies and over fifteen failed businesses under his belt, it is difficult to take him seriously. Still, here we are in the year 2016, in America, and Donald Trump, host of The Apprentice, is the Republican nominee. It appears that regardless of how many disabled people he mocks, racial slurs he uses, or how much he misunderstands the general ways of the world, the people love him. In fact they seem to love him because of his antics; they find it entertaining. This is where entertainment has brought America. It has seeped so far into the lifeblood of the country that now it cannot run without an anus-mouthed buffoon at the helm, demanding Mexico pay for a wall, China pay back the debt America owes, and that Putin is not such a bad guy. It would be hilarious, if it were not actually happening. Entertaining though it is, this man could be the next leader of the free world, and because of that, entertainment’s impact on American values and culture has been wholly and irrevocably negative.
In sum, the effects entertainment has had on America are irretrievable. America’s population has become a pack of wild, narcissistic animals, demanding to be younger, better-looking, but above all, entertained. Many of them claim to care more about values such as kindness and morality. However, when a person like Trump comes along with his big red nose and puffy pants to give the people what they want, they forget about morals, the new culture of entertainment takes over. Overall it has been negative, and while it may not have impacted every person in the country, it has impacted enough people to let it go too far.
Works Cited
Berger, A. (2015). Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising's Impact on American Character and Society. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield.
Fry, J. J. (2015). Homer Simpson Goes To Washington: American Politics Through Popular Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Lasch, M. (2012). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W & W Norton Company.
