Today, apart from a few enclaves in New York and San Francisco, the forces of entertainment clearly have the field to themselves. "And what's wrong with that?," many defenders of the system would aggressively counter. "What is wrong with entertainment?" I have heard that question asked many times by students and it deserves an answer. To help understand the ideological role played by entertainment, it may be worthwhile to take a step back for a moment and analyze the function of entertainment in another nation at another time in history. By doing so, it may become easier to recognize the part Hollywood plays in the management of social life. The locale I have chosen is Spain, the time the baroque era.
II
Imagine a great and powerful country in the thrust of severe internal changes. A strong upsurge in the population has forced masses of people to move from the countryside, where the local economy could no longer absorb them, to the larger towns and cities where work was still available. In moving away from their ancestral abode, the laborers shed their traditional subservience to the local gentry, selling only their manpower to their new urban employers. Indeed, as they established themselves in the
