We live in the entertainment age, consuming ever-increasing quantities of divertissements.  As the world economy continues to screech to a halt, new games, music, films, and television shows are released and gobbled up with the rapacity of a bulimic model-actress on a pre-purge eating binge.  It is said that, in tough times, people turn to various forms of escapism, thereby creating an inverse relation between material instability and a world of fantasy.  During the Great Depression, for example, a guy who could scrounge up fifteen cents comforted himself in the dark embrace of the movie theater and, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, “forget his troubles.”

A movie might help you forget your troubles, but don’t mistake it for mere entertainment, mere distraction, mere mindless and mild pleasure.  Doing so may be detrimental to your intellectual well-being.  This, however, is just what some people want.  Many of those who create, produce, and distribute film and television have a penchant for alternately disavowing responsibility for the content they put out — it’s mere entertainment, after all — then taking credit for creating something “important” and “meaningful.”  Thus, the execrable “Dude, Where’s My Car” may be excused, while “No Country For Old Men” is a work of art that dwells on existential crises such as the possibility of problem of evil in a world without meaning.  (Of course, there’s a lot going on in the latter film, and I don’t pretend to know the minds of Cormac McCarthy, from whose novel the film is adapted and who also co-wrote the screenplay, or the Coen brothers, who consistently make films that make us think.  So, I could be very wrong about what ‘Country’ is really about, but that’s hardly the point here.)

Thus, almost without fail, whenever the product is accused of negatively impacting society in the form of mindlessness, or at least having little to no artistic or craft value, the criticism is dismissed by studios and filmmakers alike with the “It’s just entertainment,” line.  But this is just a euphemistic stand-in for denial, a cynical sleight of hand that attempts to distract the critic from the issue.  It’s something like the wife who dismisses the husband’s complaint about her extra-marital affair by saying, “It didn’t mean anything,” as if that somehow excuses the monumental breach of trust.

Though people disagree over the quality of a given film or television show, album or video game, few seem to take issue with calling these things entertainment.  That is, there is no doubt that these things are ‘for fun,’ which means something flimsy, insignificant, trivial, and without value.  It is diversion and distraction, nothing to be taken seriously.  I mean, it’s not real, right?  Why, then, is it that what we see in films and on television becomes part of our collective consciousness, or at least past of the popular culture vernacular?  Why do we mark periods in our lives by our favorite songs, movies, and television shows?  Do we really believe that we did not learn things, positive and negative, from what we saw on television or in the theaters?  If we play games repeatedly, do we not begin to form beliefs about the content of these games, beliefs that are then generalized to “real life”?

For centuries, how to live life, how to understand oneself and the function one fulfills in society have been conveyed in stories and myths.  Before Homer’s epic poems were Hesiod’s Theogeny and Works and Days, and the Mesopotamian-era The Epic of Gilgamesh.  Later, plays performed a function similar to that of the oral stories.  We need only look to Aristotle’s Poetics, for example — his analysis of story and rules for storytelling — to see the importance of stories to personal development.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s teacher Plato, held that art is dangerous precisely because it is mere imitation.  As such, it is twice removed from Reality, the realm of Truth.  Nonetheless, Plato’s dialogues are themselves works of art meant to bring the reader, little by little, to rational contemplation of Truth.  In fact the medium of entertainment, of metaphor making, arguably allows avenues for thinking in ways that direct communication does not.  To disavow such opportunities to explore interesting ideas and stories and people dooms it to fail as a medium when its subject matter is indeed gravely important.

Even when the subject is not profound, the medium of its dissemination is.  Human beings rely heavily on our senses for information and the construction of knowledge.  For the sighted, the visual sense is, perhaps, the most significant.  As a general rule, we believe what we see even when our judgment becomes more perspicacious than our sight.  Children, for example, find it confusing when asked to distinguish what they see on a television screen from what they are told is real.  For years, I thought “The Brady Bunch” was a real family who happened to be on television.  (Silly me for not foreseeing the reality show boon.  I could have made a bundle!)  Similarly, adults have difficulty discerning the images they see with, say, social expectation.  Here the relationship between empirical, that is, physical experience and concepts becomes much more blurred.

But let’s suppose entertainment is in fact just fun and play, with no deeper significance.  This does not mean, however, that these things — and so also entertainment — are not important.  Indeed, even if entertainment was exclusively fun and diversion it would still provide human experience with stimulation similar to what play is for children.  Entertainment is no less meaningful as play than are ideas which engage us in thought about who and what we are, what the world is, what is real, what is meaningful, why some things are funny, what humor is and how it is important to human life.  When people in the entertainment community, from actors to studio executives, claim on the one hand that film and television are “only” entertainment, but claim on the other to be interested in “important” projects, they show clearly how little they understand about what it is they do.