What is the point of entertainment? It is a question that has bedeviled me over my score of blissful toil in this weird and wonderful business. Is it icing on the more substantial, complex cake of life – empty but delectable calories of mortality? Is it an evolutionary coping mechanism for the world’s adversities? Is it an opiate of bourgeoise decadence? More credentialed minds have suggested as much; but the average media junkie would probably agree that entertainment fundamentally provides escapism, an invitation to the mind’s momentary respite from daily cares.

The word “escapism” was coined at the depths of The Great Depression, when the ascendent medium of film offered celluloid catharsis to a nation in need. Until recently, the term was a pejorative for literature and movies set in fantastical, unrealistic worlds (e.g. The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars). As media critic Robert Heilman observed in his essay Escape and Escapism, “… the phrase itself connotes condescension and disparagement, and this connotation reveals the continuance of ancient Puritan sensibility…” Since the work ethic of preindustrial, subsistence agrarianism has gone the way of the horse plough, escapism has grown from a niche genre of lowbrow fantasy into a storytelling paradigm that pervades print, film, video games, location-based experiences, and beyond. A cynic might diagnose this as a symptom of an infantile, culture cloistering itself from the horrors of its age; but this argument misunderstands the reasons that escapist storytelling has such a powerful purchase on our imaginations.

Rebukes of escapism often target its elaborate worldbuilding – whimsical settings, mythical characters, and overly contrived stakes. The artifice is dismissed as a truckload of sugar to help the medicine of some Aesopian moral go down. On the contrary, the best escapism does not bury reality; it magnifies it. A black-cloaked baddie like Darth Vader may sit on the cartoonishly cutting edge of Occam’s Razor, but his almost parodic villainy throws his very human grappling with good and evil in stark relief against the space opera setting. His conflict is more than real; it is hyperreal, allowing audiences to transpose the Sith Lord’s moral struggle onto their own circumstances. In this way, escapism does not conduce to abdication, but simulation of life’s crucial struggles.

Theme parks might be called the culmination of escapist storytelling, as they require their audience to literally escape quotidian surroundings and enter a new environment. While these churro-scented redoubts of rides, shows, and overpriced merchandise offer reprieve from mundanities like commuting and doing homework, many invite guests to engage with serious, even grave realities. The iconic Haunted Mansion attraction, a staple of Disney Parks worldwide, brings riders face-to-face with their own mortality. While the ride’s morbidly mirthful song and SFX sorcery offer fulsome sensory delight, every turn brings mordant reminders of death’s inevitability. Still, for almost 60 years, families have debarked their doom buggies smiling not sobbing. This is largely because escapist elements like blinking wallpaper, barbershop-singing busts, and hokey hitchhiking ghosts invite guests to engage death with a spirit of play and a knowing laugh at life’s ultimate punchline.

Madame Montessori once remarked that “play is the work of the child,” but this responsibility does not lapse on one’s eighteenth birthday. As preschoolers play house to apprehend the responsibilities they will one day inherit, the adult imagination must play with ideals to prefigure the life and society we hope to actualize. Reading, watching, and experiencing escapist entertainment can help cultivate virtue in the sophisticated, mature mind. You may never be summoned from the shire to ferry a cursed ring across Middle Earth, but you will one day be called from your comfort zone for a purpose bigger than yourself. Escapism might provide a breather from immediate realities, but it also allows us to confront those human truths that are most real. A few hours in Hobbiton or a galaxy far, far away might be just what you need to escape the boundaries to your real potential.

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