To lose yourself in a movie. That's the point, right? To enter into a womblike oblivion, and then be taken up by some character with a strong narrative flow and surroundsound and visuals, and in effect live their life for 2 hours, to escape from your existence for awhile into somewhere and someone more exciting, more vibrant, more real - or just different. So what's wrong with that?

Bertolt Brecht would say what's wrong with that is the 'escaping' thing. He applied the idea of critical distance to theater specifically but it may be applied to any cultural experience: you must always remember who and where you are. Don't get lulled to sleep so you can continue being a cog in the machine! Don't escape into film! Don't be a passive sponge, be an active participant in the cultural experience, in the whole culture, in society and politics and all the rest of it; all those serious questions about the role of art in society and whatnot. It's like the valve on a teakettle, or a slow cooker. If you allow built-up pressure to escape, then the container will not explode. The status quo of the situation (here represented by the integrity of the container) will be maintained. The pressue will be released as it builds up, and the container succeeds in persisting through time.

Porting this metaphor into the socio-political arena, the argument is similar: if social pressure builds up, but is allowed to escape, then the social container/status quo, here represented by the economic structure of society, will be maintained. Nothing will explode. Nothing will change. Angst and emotions and energy for changing things will escape, be siphoned off into the experience of a movie, and we will come back to our regular lives and our regular situations not fired up with the energy to change anything; instead, we've been released from the pressure of thinking that we might, by virtue of having not experienced it for awhile; say, 2 hours. Which does not seem like much, but since in 2 hours a movie can cover a person's whole lifespan, or indeed generations or eons, it can be a psychological experience of a great amount of time.

The corollary then being that if you couldn't ever escape the reality of your situation by seeing a movie, you would not seek to escape from it temporarily, but might act instead to change it permanently. Or at least, the energy potential for that change would still be there in you, active or latent as your personality and circumstance dictated, but it would not have been siphoned off by refuge in some fantasy.

This is an energy equilibrium metaphor; I'm not sure how completely it scales from physics into social dynamics.

But even those of us who are sympathetic to this theory of pressures and agency in social action still sneak off to the movies, perhaps even more than now and then, to lose ourselves in a character, and a story not our own. Are we backsliding? Are we incorrigible? Are we simply petty bourgeousie whose economic alliance should be with the proletariat but whose corrupt social aspirations are with the elite? Are we just angst-ridden artists, remoras on the underbelly of a overstuffed late capitalist shark?

Film isn't the opiate of the masses, is it? That would mean we would have to disapprove, that we could only like it furtively, against our better judgement.

Or is there something else going on?

The danger with economic analysis is that, in order to focus on economic behavior, it creates, or isolates, Homo Economicus. And that's part of us, but not all of us. We're Homo Festivus - there's all the rest of us. Any analysis or division of that is only going to go so far, but not far enough.

We are more than just creatures of economics. In fact, money can be seen as a metaphor for currency, for interaction, flow, negotiation, relationship, communication. And methods of communication are hardly limited to buying and selling.

For example, consider conversation. All conversations are constructed of more than just the words, there are memories and ideas and tangents and asides that sort of swarm around and are created from social interactions that are nonlinear, nonverbal, nonnarrative, but very real and sometimes more present than the words themselves. And yet the words are also real. So how do we get from real to Reality?

Part of what we do in conversation is empathetic projection. We sympathize with what other people tell us. We imagine ourselves in their footsteps and in their situations, and we imagine we construct the same meanings from things, when we hear their descriptions and follow their solutions. We project, in other words, and when the reactions or the situations or the people are similar enough, we might postulate a mutual projection, which perhaps is what we consider to be understanding. And when it is confirmed with enough words and similar stories and reactions, it is understanding. Deprived of direct access to other minds, this is as far as we get (which isn't really getting, of course, but creating): asymptotic projection, considered to be understanding.

And maybe an asymptotic approach is OK. Would we really want to merge, losing our identity to retrieve another's, which of course wouldn't be another's anyway but our version of theirs? Well, I'm not sure, but at any rate that's not what we do. Instead, we dance with the gap; now close, now far, creating shapes between us that move and change in relation to what we say and do. Perhaps if the shapes are beautiful, then the relationship is beautiful? Or maybe just the conversational moment. Beauty is not something you can hold onto, nor is it something you can create by yourself. Like meaning, it is not possible in isolation. It is possible in relationship, and is what makes it worthwhile to go on, to keep trying. You may never get there of course, but if you don't try you really won't get there, and you should never rule out the possibility before it rules out itself. Beauty, and meaning, are worth that much. So you take the chance. You go on faith. Or imagination, or whatever you've got; you don't look down until you have to.

When we watch an interaction between characters in a film, or read about one in a book, or even have one ourselves; that dance, that collection of projectional tendencies, that web or array or constellation or fanning out of possibility spaces, is what we're caught in, is what we create and spin and fly over and around and through. And is us.

Projection is how we put the meaning back in. We read something, we view something, we hear something, and we put ourselves into those positions, and we map the process, the words and gestures and emotions and ideas, onto an internal model. We try to mimic the experience inside of us so we can imagine what others feel. And it's a dynamic process, constantly mapping and making adjustments and moving things dimensionally through many layers and perspectives, like a n-dimensional game of chess with all the players and squares alive and the boards moving and twisting and diving through each other, and with every element having a will and rulebook of its own and opinions and laughter and outlaws and games.

So, if projection is essential to how we understand, is in fact the act of understanding, then how is it an escape, a fantasy, a detour, a betrayal of our 'social situation?' Perhaps rather than the opiate of the cinematic masses, projection could be a mechanism of social compassion, an instrument of empathy and action and good. Or maybe it is at least a neutral technology, that we can use for either purpose. Movies can become a way in to other lives, by having us live through situations and characters we may never encounter otherwise, and realizing that we can understand them too. And so it can widen our understanding, deepen our compassion, heighten our horror and strengthen our will - in short, extend our experience and make us wider, wiser, wilder. Possibly. It's a possibility space that opens.

And the thing is, in terms of action? That tea kettle and the energy potential for changing society and all that? Well, people have difficulty enacting what they have not already imagined: if they can't imagine it, they can't yet do it. The possibility space has to open before them before they can walk into it. We operate from the level of assumptions first, and then construct our reality from there (construct or view, depending on how hard a line you take on these things).

Back to the movies. Rather than inhibiting our activities in other spheres, getting lost in a movie might actually augment them, and indeed clue us in to even the existence of other spheres. We imagine we're characters we've never met, and in situations we've never encountered, and in that imagining become closer to the world of possible experience, and the wider understanding that that entails. And how can an expanded understanding limit us? It does not. In fact, it's the opposite. Instead of thinking of it as 2 hours lost, we can think of it as an increased understanding of where people might be coming from, or involved in, or experiencing or being motivated by. And increased awareness, increased compassion, active empathy, and a narrowing of the asymptotic gap in understanding, can only be a positive motivator in the social arena, a more directed agency, a wider sphere and better all round.

Fun can be good for you.