It's easy to look at the major events of today's news and just become disgusted. Everyone's vile, it seems, and their vileness is small and cramped. It's a parade of people who do wrong things that don't even make any sense. Shooting someone to steal money is wrong but there is a logic to it. Shooting kids in a church? Coercing someone over whom you have power to have sex with you is wrong but there is a clear end in mind. Coercing someone over whom you have power to watch you masturbate? Megalomaniacs who want to rule the world make sense, even if they are evil in their intent and actions. Megalomaniacs who want to rule Twitter?
So on the treadmill I watched Silverado, and the good guys won, and the bad guys lost, and the music and the horizons were wide open, and my spirit feels a little less cramped for awhile.
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And similarly, I'm watching the dumb goofy Hallmark-channel Christmas-themed "romance" (or other) movies. Because in them, people get a happily-ever-after, the jerky grinchy person usually has a come-uppance (and repents, as a result), the estranged family gets back together, the show goes on, the beloved restaurant gets saved....all of that.
Real life may not work like that but I wish it did.
A focus on those kinds of stories also helps us, I think, look for the spots where things approaching that kind of resolution actually do happen, or maybe come close. That's one of the values of their particular brand of escapism.
I have never understood why people ascribe a similar cathartic quality to things like horror movies, for example. I can't see any purpose to immersion in a world worse than real life ;-)
Which is also why I don't like dystopian novels. I KNOW I am a happier person - and perhaps behave better - when my mind is in the more cheerful place where people get a redemption story arc, or people figure out how to forgive, or whatever.
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