The Trouble with Art and Entertainment 2:44 PM

I enjoy and value the arts. Particularly books, but I also enjoy music of various genres, movies, musical theater and, as a result of my wife's steady and patient efforts, dance and even fine art (to a degree). For the purposes of this piece I'll focus on the cinema. While we are burdened with drek like the Fantastic Four movies, the Star Wars prequels, and pretty much everything Tim Burton made after The Nightmare Before Christmas, we've also created the LotR trilogy, the original Star Wars trilogy, the Godfather trilogy, the Avengers and its component movies, etc. They may be the minority, but there are still a ton of entertaining, inspiring and edifying movies out there.

But watching a making-of feature on the Avengers the other day, and again marveling at the talent and effort it takes to make really good movies, I had a disturbing thought.

As great as these movies are, as much as we love them, are they, perhaps, a symptom of a declining culture?

I'm not even getting into the divide between Left and Right, and the entertainment industry's strong lean towards the Left. That's a different rant. LotR and Star Wars have no overt political messages other than, “be courageous, resist evil, it's better to be the scruffy, gritty secondary (Strider, Han Solo), than the neophyte hero (Frodo, Luke Skywalker).” If you can't agree with that sentiment then why are you reading me?

No, I'm talking about the movies themselves, independent of any political content they may or may not contain.

Stop and think about it, we spend billions of dollars a year on entertainment. It's one thing that we have the disposable income to buy some DVDs, it's another that we, as a culture, have become so committed to our own entertainment that we've set the market value for entertainment in the millions and billions. I'm picking on A-list actors and film makers, but they're hardly the only paychecks I question, professional athletes and “musicians” I'm looking at you.

Hyperbole aside, I'm not begrudging these folks their wealth. Even the ones I don't think produce a damn thing worth buying still earned it by selling it honestly on the market. Hate Justin Beiber all you like, if we raised our daughters to deride his crap instead of swoon over it, he wouldn't be a phenomenon. The fault lies not in our stars, metaphorical or literal, but in ourselves.

If we're dumb enough to pay a twenty-two year old linebacker three million a year to smash running backs and quarterbacks, then why shouldn't that young man take the money? In my not-so-copious free time I'm still trying to write. Realistically I hope that after retirement I can become a solid mid-list author, but if for some reason one of my novels starts pulling numbers like Rowling I'm not going to give the money back on the principle that folks should've been spending their money on more important things.

So I'm not trying to spew hatred at art or artists.

All I'm saying is, we have a culture where people will go into debt to make sure they have direct TV and a 72 inch, high def, plasma screen TV to watch it on. We have a culture where our A-list entertainers make exponentially more money than any one of a dozen vital professions. We have a culture where the majority of voters feel they have to subsidize charity into a government function while we the gainfully employed (and many who are not) spend billions on things we could easily live without and give a pittance, or nothing at all, to charity.

I'm not innocent in this either. Oh, we tithe our ten percent, plus a little extra now and then, like good little Christians, and I give to various charities on the Combined Federal Campaign. But I have a great big TV, a bunch of movies and books, and not a few video games. It's not like I'm against entertainment or having nice things. I just worry that we're trying to fill a deeper void with our materialism. We buy the movies and video games and books not just to enjoy them and perhaps be inspired by them, but to live the lives of heroes vicariously because we've given up on trying to be heroes ourselves.

So I'm not suggesting some socialist redistribution of wealth. Like I said, we gave them the money, they didn't steal it. It's a viable economic transaction, and it's not the problem, really.

I'm just saying that maybe we need to reconsider art's purpose in our lives- instead of throwing money into it in return for an escape from lives we lost interest in long ago, perhaps we need to let our Jedi, and superheroes, and Dunedain, and teenaged wizards inspire us to actually do something about all the darkness in the world. I'm not saying throw on a pair of tights and go vigilante (although if that's your thing I recommend some kevlar under those tights and strongly encourage a Punisher model, rather than a Batman model, in the real world, Bruce Wayne would've had a .357 lobotomy around his fifth issue, I don't care how strong his ninjitsu is).

I'm saying give more to charity (also check the efficiency of the charity, not every donation has equal effect), go on a mission, join the peace corps, become a teacher, become a doctor, become a soldier, sailor, airman, marine or coastguardsman, be the next Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking- for God's sake DO SOMETHING- and then raise your kids to do something too, maybe not what you did, but something. Don't sit on your ass watching movies and forgetting that there's a real world out there that desperately needs good people to be active in it.