Escape from what?

Article - Matei N. Balan

The Coronavirus pandemic has brought into focus the importance of escapism. While we were stuck in our homes we have found ourselves in the position where what we did to the pass the time mattered as much as anything else. But should this extreme situation we’re in now justify our consumption of escapist media in the rest of the time?

In a cyberspace soaked in escapist content, we have to ask ourselves what exactly are we escaping from. Photo: Min Pham Design / Unsplash

Sometime between the late first and early second century AD, the roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenalis observed that the common people of his time were less concerned with their freedom and dignity, and more interested in what he called panem et circenses (bread and circuses). Juvenalis didn’t just take issue with the fact that those in power organized elaborate distractions, in the form of free food and games, in order mask incompetence and corruption, but with the fact that people were fine with this.

Two thousand years later, in 1931, the English author Aldous Huxley wrote a novel called Brave New World. In his story, Huxley explores what life might be like in a utopian society, which he names World State. Inside this society human beings have been set free from pain and suffering by consuming a drug named soma. It is handed out for free to all citizens of World State, and in small doses, it makes people feel good. But if taken in larger quantities it gives the user pleasant hallucinations and a sense of timelessness. When the citizens of World State experience strong or negative emotions, they are encouraged to take a soma holiday so that they can forget about what’s bothering them.

Both of these are observations and critiques of escapism, a form of mental diversion from unpleasant or uninteresting aspect of everyday life, that can be initiated both by the individual and by external actors, such as a political party, or by the entertainment industry. What both Juvenalis and Huxley have noticed is that escapism involves the need of the individual to escape as well as the political aspect of who benefits from escapism.

We could hardly be blamed for wanting food, or circus, or anything else now, during a global pandemic where most of find ourselves struggling with mental health issues, during hard lockdowns. But should this extreme situation we’re in justify our consumption of media in the rest of the time? We might lose ourselves on TikTok, Twitter and Netflix now. But didn’t we do it before too?

The issue of what we are trying to escape should come up just as often as the effects of escapism. We might now think that we’re escaping from a feeling of growing uncertainty, and dark projections of the future, like that fact that a global recession is around the corner. But just like the citizens of World State in Brave New World, we’re more than often crossing the fine line between using escapism to just feel good and using it to fall into a comatose state of binge scrolling and watching.

Insulating ourselves from things that are hard to cope with is a natural response. But it might also make us less aware of what’s happening around us. It might make us less sensitive towards the world, contrary to what the content we consume might make us think about ourselves.

In the United States, during the Great Depression, there seemed to be an unwritten agreement between cinema directors that people needed help in looking away from the horrors that occurred all around them. Some of the most popular movies at the time focused on comedic plot lines that lifted people’s spirits. But, as historians and critics have argued since, this also made them empathize less with the problems of those around them.