Escapes

As the name of this blog suggests, I’m interested in escape as a human activity. People seem to seek out and/or create many mental escapes from their everyday realities. Literature, film, TV, internet, music, sports, games, drugs, meditation, even dreaming while asleep, all of these activities provide an escape for people. This is certainly not a new idea, but what I’m interested in is what characterizes our contemporary escapes. What are we escaping from? What do we use to escape? And what does this process of escape entail?

But let’s back up for a moment. What do I mean by escape? When we read a book or watch a film, we become invested in the lives of the characters. We follow their stories and, depending on the quality of the book or film, we become emotionally invested, feeling emotions along with the characters on page or on screen. In the span of reading or viewing, we mentally live through the life of another. Through this mental activity, we imagine another world, another life than our own. As we imagine this other world, peopled by the characters of the book or movie, we transcend our own everyday reality. We become caught up in the story of another so much that we temporarily forget our own realities. We can lose ourselves in the book, movie, or TV show. For me, this is a form of escape. We escape into books, film, and other cultural works in order to partially and temporarily leave our own realities.

This escape is not a mindless pursuit. It is more than just vegging out, zombie-like, in front of the TV. Rather, our mind is processing the representation; our mind thinks, and our bodies begin to feel different emotions as we become invested in the work (see my earlier post on the emotions of sports). Books, TV, film, etc., these artistic representations engage both our mind and bodies, and we begin to live through the representation. We stop participating in our everyday lives, and start living through the life on screen or on the page. We mentally inhabit another’s life and the world in which they exist, which provides a temporary escape from participating in our own individual reality. During these mental escapes, our mind and bodies actively engage with the book, movie, show, or song as representations of an alternative reality. These alternative realities can range from the fantastical worlds of science fiction to the more realist depictions of people in communities other than our own. These artistic representations of other worlds, both real and fantastical, have existed throughout the long and diverse history of human cultures, and seem to fulfill a fundamental human need to mentally leave our actual realities and inhabit the lives of others. But, why do we desire to escape into the lives of others? And, what happens when we live too much through the alternative realities offered by these representations, and lose touch with the Real? These are some of the questions that I'll be exploring in my posts this week.