Episode 59: Transcript
Episode: 59: Escapism
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I’m Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:10] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] Today we’re going to be talking about the limits of escapism. Escapism is amazing and fun and it’s kind of really important right now because there’s a lot to escape from in the real world. But what is escapism, and is it always healthy, and how dark can a story get before it’s not really an escapist story anymore?
[00:00:35] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:02] So obviously the first question, and this is always the thorniest question, is, what exactly is it? What is escapism? What are the ingredients in it? What comes to mind for you, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:12] Yeah, I mean, obviously, escapism, just like everything else, is kind of a know it when you see it kind of a thing. Everybody has their own definition of what they consider an escapist story, and to some extent, I guess you could say all narratives have some escapism to them because they’re all stuff that didn’t happen. But I think that a really escapist story is one that lets you get away from the real world a little bit. Which means most of the time it has a world that’s not the same as our world. It could have elements of our world, it could be like Harry Potter, takes place in our world but there’s magic and there’s Hogwarts and there’s flying trains and shit.
Annalee: [00:01:49] Mm-hmm. It’s kind of another world. It’s a bit of a portal fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:52] Yeah, and often we sort of think of escapist stories as being somewhat optimistic, somewhat happy, somewhat cheerful. Often in an escapist story, good people are rewarded, bad people suffer, and maybe bad people do well for a while, but in the end they get what’s coming to them. And there’s a sense of which part of what’s escapist about it is that there’s a little bit more justice than you might actually find in reality. And often that extends to there being at least a qualified happy ending, if not a completely, everything’s perfect now, happy ending. Where order has been restored or justice has been asserted or some injustice has been fixed. Something has been bettered. And often, an escapist story does include a general sense that we can make a difference. We can make things better. You are not powerless, you are able to affect change, and it’s possible to actually go out there and go on a quest or fight evil and actually accomplish something.
[00:02:51] And I think the other key ingredient of an escapist story is that it’s a world that you want to spend time in, and it’s a setting that you actually want to escape into.
Annalee: [00:03:02] One of the things I always think about as being a classic ending to an escapist story is the first Star Wars flick, where everybody, except for the Wookiee, gets a medal at the end. Or there’s video games that end the same way. You get the princess at the end, or… like there’s actually some moment of, you leveled up, or you got XP or you won the prize. And in a better world, Chewbacca would get a prize, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:32] Well, but also, Leia should get a fricking medal. She doesn’t get a medal, she gives medals. She doesn’t get medals. Anyway, sorry, go on.
Annalee: [00:03:40] This is the sidebar about who actually gets to escape, right, in these stories. Because one of the things that we’ve been able to repair in science fiction over the past decade, is actually giving escapist stories to women and people of color and people who are normally not given the medal at the end. But these are all people who need escapist stories just as much as the traditional reader or watcher of science fiction, which is a straight white dude.
[00:04:10] That kind of brings me to another kind of footnote to what you’re saying, which is that escapism varies depending on who you are. And there’s some escapist stories that might work incredibly well for one type of person, but not work for another one. In fact, they might even be triggery for someone else. And I was thinking a lot about the Murderbot series of novellas, and now there’s a novel, by Martha Wells. Which, people really love that series. They really treat it like crackfic, which I think is really just another term for escapist stories. And there’s a lot of violence and sadness and death in, and that’s not really a spoiler, it’s just, it’s part of the story in the Murderbot series. And I feel like, for some people that might be still really escapist. I think for other people it might be too much, it might be too scary. It might not feel safe.
[00:05:18] It reminds me of when we had our episode about romance and we were talking about how in a romance novel, or a romance movie, there’s a kind of implicit bargain that the creator makes with the reader or the audience, which is you will get a happy ending. These two characters or four characters or whoever is going to be in the romance—
Charlie Jane: [00:05:40] Right?
Annalee: [00:05:40] —gets together at the end and there will be some hope. Alyssa Cole was saying, there has to be some hope that there’s a future to their relationship, right? It’s not like they’re just getting together and everybody’s like, oh my God, they’re never going to make it! There has to be some genuine sense that as… sort of like the way justice will be done in a kind of Star Wars context, in a romance context it’s that the marriage will last, or the couple will last.
[00:06:09] So I think a good escapist story has to meet the needs of the audience and also makes this kind of bargain with you, that there will be… you’ll come out of this story feeling happy about where Murderbot wound up. Which, I did! And I think a lot of us did, but you know what I’m saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:29] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:06:29] There has to be some sense of it’s not going to end with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, everybody’s dead.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:37] Right, no.
Annalee: [00:06:37] You know, classic escapist story in the sense that it’s not really happening, but… it’s also a classic not escapist in that you’re doomed.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:49] You wouldn’t want to spend time in that world, especially by the end. And actually, we’ve got a clip from the promo that they put out in 2005 when they were relaunching Doctor Who where part of the selling point is that it’s going to be scary and dangerous.
Doctor Who Promo: [00:07:02] Do you wanna come with me?
[Tardis noises]
Because if you do, then I should warn you… [words echo with sound effects]
Because if you do, then I should warn you, you’re going to see all sorts of things. Ghosts from the past, aliens from future, the day the earth died in a ball of flame. It won’t be quiet, it won’t be safe, and it won’t be calm, but I’ll tell you what it will be.
… I’ll tell you what it will be…
The trip of a lifetime.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:35] You know, first of all, it’s this charismatic dude being like, come with me on this trip. But also, in the end he’s like, it’s going to be scary and dangerous, but it’ll be the trip of a lifetime. And that’s kind of the thing, is like, yeah, there’ll be bad stuff, there’ll be monsters, there’ll be ghosts, the world will be destroyed, blah blah blah. But, it’ll be this amazing adventure, and that’s the selling point, kind of.
Annalee: [00:07:58] Again, it goes back to that bargain that the story creators are making with the audience, that it’s… maybe there will be tough bits, but at the end, everybody gets a medal. We’re going to come out of this because it’s that kind of story. But you were saying, these are worlds that people want to spend time in. And some escapist stories, I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s not always a happy fairy land or sometimes, you get to Fillory, for example, in The Magicians, and you find out, oh, everybody wants to spend time here because, isn’t there cocaine in the air or something?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:42] Oh, really? I don’t remember that.
Annalee: [00:08:44] There’s some kind of… yeah, at least in the TV series, they figure out that there’s just this tiny little bit of, it might not be coke, it might be some other narcotic. But there’s just a little bit of narcotic in the air so everybody’s really enjoying themselves a little bit more than they would normally. And so, there’s these little hints. Although, I would say that The Magicians is a great example of a story that it has elements of escapism, but also isn’t really that escapist. There’s no, for those who’ve kind of seen the whole arc of the series, it’s not exactly medals at the end for everybody.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:22] No. And I think, actually, The Magicians is an interesting example of something that has been a big deal in the past 10-15 years, which is stories that kind of deconstruct these escapist narratives. The Magicians is sort of explicitly deconstructing the Narnia books and also Harry Potter and looking at the cracks and the underbelly and what would it be like if really complicated people with fucked up psyches were in this situation instead of these kind of one-dimensional happy characters that you get in the original source material.
Annalee: [00:09:57] The cracks in the crackfic?
Charlie Jane: [00:09:59] Right, exactly. And I think that the thing that happens when you kind of do that for long enough, where you kind of poke at the underbelly of these escapist stories, or kind of deconstruct them is that you end up being reminded of why they’re so potent and why that original impulse to just escape into something that is maybe not perfect and maybe not pure candy, but has that kind of—you know there’s going to be a happy ending. You know that it’s going to be in some ways a better, nice world than ours. That impulse kind of comes through even stronger once you’ve kind of poked it and kind of deconstructed it. You know, I feel like you’ve had that in superhero comics, you’ve had that in a lot of recent reboots of older TV and movies. You kind of have an attempt to problematize it, but in the end, the thing that still keeps it irresistable is that escapist impulse that drew us to it in the first place.
Annalee: [00:10:52] So what are some of the common settings for escapist stories? Because I think we have a whole history of escapist stories. I mean, you could say going back to fairy tales or oral histories that have heroes. But I’m thinking, let’s cut ourselves off at sort of starting in the 20th century. What are, in scifi and fantasy, where do we go again and again for our escapes?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:18] I think, Narnia, which we talked about is one.
Annalee: [00:11:21] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:21] I think Middle Earth is one—
Annalee: [00:11:22] At least the Shire in Middle Earth.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:24] But I mean, I think Middle Earth in general. When you go to Mordor, it’s really scary and bad, but you’re with your friends and there’s nice elves. And there’s Gandalf.
Annalee: [00:11:33] There’s not really elves in… I don’t think in Mordor there’s elves.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:37] Okay, but you know.
Annalee: [00:11:37] I’m not crazy about Gondor, either. I don’t know.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:40] Okay, well, but Gandalf is there and he dies but he comes back, sorry, spoilers. I think that there are certain genres. I think some of these works that we’re talking about are so big that they give rise to their own genres. Lord of the Ring basically created the epic fantasy genre and I think epic fantasy has escapism kind of baked into it. And obviously, again, people have tried to problematize that and kind of deconstruct it, but at the same time, I think the foundations of epic fantasy, and you and I just binged the first season of Sword of Shannara or The Shannara Chronicles, or I guess. And you know… you could just see how that genre—
Annalee: [00:12:17] Shannanananaaara.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:19] You could just see how that—
Annalee: [00:12:22] Sorry.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:22] That genre of epic fantasy is kind of inherently escapist, and even when George R.R. Martin tries to kind of make it dark and gritty and stuff, there’s still this thing of like, you can be Arya Stark and start off as kind of a princess but also then become a badass and learn to become a swordfighter and become an assassin. And it’s like, you know? There’s a lot of fun adventure in there that’s exciting.
[00:12:46] And I think space opera as well. I think a lot of these genres that sprung up in the mid-ish 20th century are kind of the cornerstones of escapism in a lot of ways.
Annalee: [00:12:55] I mean, these are actually early 20th century, right? Because Princess of Mars, which is kind of both, right? Princess of Mars is the common ancestor of Middle Earth and space opera, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:07] That’s really true.
Annalee: [00:13:07] It’s a kind of a fantasy setting on another world and it has magic, and it has nobility, but it also has actually going to Mars, which is pretty badass when you think about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:20] Going to a Mars full of nekkid people.
Annalee: [00:13:23] Yeah, and naked Martians. I guess that was… you know, back in the teens, a hundred years ago, it was a big deal.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:29] I mean, the Mars rover is naked, so.
Annalee: [00:13:31] We still kind of love it. Yeah, the Mars rover is naked and you know…
Charlie Jane: [00:13:36] So, the only people on Mars are naked right now, so come on.
Annalee: [00:13:39] I am down with that interpretation. That is a hot take that I will fully endorse. So I think… so… we’ve identified two escapist genres. Two sort of settings. High fantasy and space opera, which do share a lot in common. They are settings for adventures. They’re perfect settings for groups of people to come together in fellowship or in some kind of quest. That’s another, for me, a key setting and maybe we’ll talk about this more a little bit later when we talk about characters, but an escapist story that isn’t a romance really has to be kind of a workplace romance. Where, it’s kind of a workplace family story, where it’s not about two people falling in love, it’s about a group of people learning to trust each other or continuing to trust each other and that’s part of the escapism, is this idea of like, it’s not just that you’ve found the one for you, it’s that you’ve found a community. And that each of the people in that community have their own skills and they can all help you kind of bring justice and rebuild the world. As you were saying, you really, it’s really hard to bring justice and rebuild the world on your own and it’s really hard to do this if you’re just in a couple. But certainly with a group of people you kind of have the makings of a new world, even if it’s only five people, especially if they represent much larger groups back home or wherever they’ve come from.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:14] It’s interesting because superhero stories are kind of another key escapist genre. Every superhero has his or her or their kind of gang around them, their community and then they team up. And we just literally were watching Crisis on Earth X, the team up where it’s like Arrow and the Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. And what happens is you have all of the Arrow’s friends are hanging out with the Flash’s friends and hanging out with the members of Legends of Tomorrow, and it’s like this whole extended family of superhero people who are all just being super, hey! How does your superhero thing work? This is how my superhero thing works. And it’s all just like this big happy thing, and then you know.
Annalee: [00:15:59] And the arc of that, it’s like three episodes that all crossover, ends with a group wedding, right? So…
Charlie Jane: [00:16:07] It does!
Annalee: [00:16:07] Which is really interesting because it kind of goes back to that which genre promises the most happy ending? It’s romance. And so when you really want to bring it home and have the happy escapist ending, you’ve got romance, and you’ve got, it’s a group marriage, so it’s like the group getting together.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] Everyone marries everybody.
Annalee: [00:16:26] Everybody marries everybody.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:28] Everybody ends up married to everybody, it’s all just… they’re just going to be all living in a group house being like a poly [crosstalk].
Annalee: [00:16:33] We were fantasizing about that when we watched it last night—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:35] I think, you know.
Annalee: [00:16:35] We were like, yeah, they’re all. It’s just… they’re going to have a big giant bed, all four of them are in there.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:42] The Flash, Arrow, Felicity, Iris, they’re all just going to hang out. It’s going to be awesome.
Annalee: [00:16:47] Come on, the Flash and Arrow, they need to get together.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:50] They are so in love.
Annalee: [00:16:51] They are.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:51] They’re so in love with each other.
Annalee: [00:16:52] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:52] Barry and Olly, oh my God, they’re so in love.
[00:16:55] So we have another clip that I wanted to play that I feel like this clip is the purest escapist thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
Adventure Time Promo: [00:17:03] Excuse me, do you know what time it is?
11:30.
Actually, it’s ADVENTURE TIME, YEAH! What time is it? What time is it? What time is it? What time is it?
What?
What time is it?
What?
Come on, tell me what time is it?
What?
What time is it guys?
Vampire fighting time!
Charlie Jane: [00:17:21] So that was another promo and that was the promo that launched Adventure Time. And I don’t know if you remember seeing that when it… before Adventure Time was even on television. It was just like, you could tell that this was going to be something special and that little kid being like, IT’s ADVENTURE TIME in this crowded area full of people who are like, what the hell is going on?
Annalee: [00:17:42] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:42] You want to go on that adventure with this kid and have vampires and the ice king.
Annalee: [00:17:50] Rainicorns.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:52] And rainicorns! And it’s just… even now I get goosebumps listening to that, you know?
Annalee: [00:17:58] I get the same goosebumps listening to the Doctor saying we’re going to have a trip of a lifetime because, for me the Doctor is the ultimate escape, even when it gets tough. I can always depend on the Doctor to have evidence-based fun and that’s… and I think this is exactly the same kind of hail to the audience, which is, hey! Come with me! We’re going to have fun, and again, that’s—
Charlie Jane: [00:18:24] It’s very similar, yeah.
Annalee: [00:18:26] That’s the call to escapism, and I think what we’re finding here as we talk about this is that there is actually a kind of structure to it and a way that we are signaling that a narrative is going to be like this.
[00:18:41] And I guess this brings me to questions about the limits of escapism and the first one is that there’s a lot of science fiction, say, The Hunger Games, or The Mad Max series or name your favorite post-apocalypse, could even be like the The Lost series, which is basically a small-scale kind of apocalypse. Where, there’s an escapist element, but the world is really bleak and part of the escapism is almost like a Grand Theft Auto type of thing, where it’s just like, yeah! We can kill whoever we want! Especially in Mad Max and Hunger Games where it’s like they literally have permission to kill.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:22] And zombie stories.
Annalee: [00:19:22] Zombie stories, where you have kind of permission to just rake with people with your semi-automatic zombie-killer weapon of choice. Stories like Independence Day, or anything where you have evil aliens that are quite recognizable and we can murder them all. To me, that feels like it’s kind of touching on our urge for escapism but the difference is that in those kinds of stories, there’s a wish fulfillment… But, the way I think about it is that escapism, for me, that promise of adventure is sort of a promise that my suffering in this world will be lifted a little bit. I will be able to put down the burden of being scared about getting a virus that will kill me or losing my job. I think with something like Fury Road, it’s actually instead of lifting that burden, it’s actually kind of like somebody’s taking their thumb and punching my button of fear.
[00:20:23] Like, you’re going to not only lose your job, you’re going to have to become a milk maid or you’re going to be a slave and BLAH! So it’s calling out to me in a really… there’s a different hail, a different call.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:39] Two things about that. One is that I think it comes back to that thing of who is this escapist for, because if you’re the guy who gets to come rescue the women who are being imprisoned and you know, abused.
Annalee: [00:20:52] Well, that’s Furiosa, but yeah. So if you’re the lady.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:55] It’s Furiosa but also it’s Max, it’s both of them, I guess Furiosa—
Annalee: [00:20:57] Sure, whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:00] It’s like, you can fantasize about being the liberator or you can fantasize about being the people who need liberation and obviously there’s thing like Handmaid’s Tale where it’s really intense and it’s super bleak.
Annalee: [00:21:11] Mm-hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:11] and, I don’t know. I think that the other thing is, I think that there is a difference between wish fulfillment and escapism. I think that they frequently overlap a lot. Like a lot of the best escapist stories have a huge, huge element of wish fulfillment, like oh, yeah, here’s a magic sword. Here’s oh, your dad is the greatest warrior in the galaxy and you’re heir to his whatever. Which is what the original Star Wars said before we found out who his dad actually was.
[00:21:37] Wish fulfillment without those kind of escapist things is just pure id. It’s just pure I can do whatever the fuck I want. I can be powerful in a world where nothing matters and where everything is terrible. And it gets back to what we talked about in our rugged individualism episode, where it’s like, that’s the kind of fantasy of being really powerful and not having to give a shit, kind of. And that’s kind of the rugged individualist fantasy, as opposed to the like, hey—
Annalee: [00:22:07] Becoming the Punisher.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:08] Yeah, the Punisher, exactly, God.
Annalee: [00:22:10] Which is not escapist, to me. I think the way I would frame it is that when I’m watching something like Mad Max: Fury Road, it isn’t escapist but it gives me… it’s a revenge fantasy that gives me a feeling of satisfaction, which is different from that feeling that escapism gives of, like I said, it’s almost like a physical lightening. I go into this fantasy world and I feel unburdened, I feel like, okay, here we are. There’s magic, there’s elves, there’s a quest, there’s loyal friends, there’s a darkness that’s comprehensible and has boundaries and can be defeated. And then I get a medal at the end.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:55] Right.
Annalee: [00:22:55] Give me that medal!
Charlie Jane: [00:22:57] You really want that medal.
Annalee: [00:22:58] Clearly, I do. There’s obviously something going on there that we can talk about offline. So, but whereas the feeling in Mad Max for me is, yeah! Get him! And it’s like, punch him in the face, or whatever. And it’s a different.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:17] Right.
Annalee: [00:23:17] It’s not an unburdening, it’s more of a release of rage and anxiety. So it is a release, and it is a satisfaction, but it doesn’t… I don’t feel lighter, for lack of a better term.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:28] So we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to talk about guilty pleasures and just how dark escapist stories can actually get.
[00:23:36] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:49] So first of all, I wanted to play an amazing clip from a 1968 documentary that the BBC did about J.R.R. Tolkien where he talked about how his work is escapist.
Tolkien Clip: [00:23:59] Well, it is meant to be escapist because I use escapism in it’s proper sense, sort of as a man getting out of prison.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:05] Yeah and obviously that clip was the inspiration for a thing that Ursula K. LeGuin wrote later about how… she kind of elaborated on that idea that the duty of the prisoner is to escape and to help others escape. And that escapist storytellings are actually kind of… they’re actually liberatory. They’re not just kind of like abandoning all responsibility or whatever.
Annalee: [00:24:24] Yeah, that’s right. And I think part of her updating of it is just historical context because I’m sure that what J.R.R. Tolkien was thinking about was being in war and the horror of that.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:38] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:38] And how the greatest escape he could possibly imagine is getting out of a cage whereas for LeGuin, growing up in the post-war period, for her it was like, okay, yeah. Get out of the cage, but also help everyone else. Let’s form a civil rights movement or something like that. So she just had a very different perspective on what escape meant, partly because of her own privilege of not having had to fight in a war.
[00:25:03] And so, I think it’s such an interesting framing of escapism because I feel like escapism is kind of… people look down on it as a format.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:15] They do.
Annalee: [00:25:15] It’s really… I think that’s why guilty pleasure is kind of synonymous with escapism? We’re supposed to feel bad that we want to go to Shannara and just hang out with whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:30] Wil and Allanon.
Annalee: [00:25:32] I’m like, who do I want to hang out with in Shannara, I’m just not sure. But anway, I want to hang out in the—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:35] Eretria. I want to hang out with Eretria.
Annalee: [00:25:37] I want to hang out in the fields, like the green fields.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:42] Yeah! So we have another clip from that same 1968 documentary about Tolkien, which, I love this so much. It’s a man with a very impressive mustache explaining why he disapproves of Tolkien’s work.
Tolkien Doc Clip: [00:25:53] Well, I don’t at all like Tolkien or what he stands for. Seems to me that his work implies an escape from political and social reality. Now, this seems to me is reprehensible. It’s an implication of triviality. It’s an implication of regression. A refusal to face up to our political and social problems. Our religious problems of today. And the cult of The Hobbit, the cult of Tolkien in America particularly, seems to be responding to this sort of failure in engagement with our political and social situation.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:36] And he kind of sums up, there, the objections to escapism in general. The idea that it’s abandoning the struggle, that we have real life political problems in this country. We have religious strife, we have all sorts of issues and we’re just going to throw it all away and go off and be with some elves and it’s really just not on. It’s not on.
[Following with fake British accents:]
Annalee: [00:26:59] That is just not how it’s done.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:01] Not. Not okay.
Annalee: [00:27:01] We need some nice rigorous realism and literature.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:06] Right. RIGHT.
Annalee: [00:27:07] If you’re not reading Thomas Pynchon or Joseph Conrad, you’re just not [crosstalk]—
[Ok, back to normal voices.]
Charlie Jane: [00:27:14] I think Joseph Conrad would have been this guy’s jam, probably. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:27:18] Yeah, although, I have to say, I freaking love… I love Joseph Conrad. He’s one of my huge influences. He’s deep in my heart. And he wrote incredibly escapist stuff. He actually did write a lot of high seas adventures and even though they also had many elements of the real world, so. I guess this gets to my question, for you, which is: obviously, we both disagree with mustache guy. But I mean, is it possible… we love escapism and I think both of us believe that it can be very engaging, intellectually engaging but also politically engaged. So how do you have that escapist world but also have it reflect some real-world issues so that it isn’t just kind of pure, 100%... I don’t even know what pure, 100% escape would look like, honestly? How do have a narrative that doesn’t touch on the real world. Would it just be like soft shapes sort of nuzzling each other?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:19] I think you could try to create an escapist narrative that doesn’t have anything to do with the real world and it would probably just be very cartoonish, and very much like all of the issues in this are very abstract and very, just like, I want to be bad, I want to be good, we’re just going to fight. And like, it would be very cartoony and extremely simplistic. But I think even then the real world is going to creep in. I think the moment you have any kind of conflict, you’re dealing with some element of reality and it’s like this idea that people always bring up that stories shouldn’t be political. But in fact, the rebuttal to that is always, every story is political. Politics are always going to find their way into stories. And I think it’s really just how conscious you are of that going in.
[00:29:03] But I think that part of what makes something an escapist story is actually that you could deal with real world issues and conflict in your life in a way that’s less threatening and more benign.
[00:29:15] So the thing I wanted to bring up, actually, which is interesting to consider here is The Wizard of Oz, at least the movie version where she has these people in her real life who she has this complicated situation with. And then she goes… the tornado picks her up and takes her to Oz, and all the people from her real life are there but they’ve been transformed into these more cartoony versions that she can work things out with in a way that she maybe couldn’t work out with the people in her real life, and then she goes back and she’s like, you were there and you were there and you were there.
[00:29:46] I feel like that kind of, “You were there, you were there,” is, in a way, how escapist stories… it’s a metaphor for how escapist stories deal with real life stuff.
Annalee: [00:29:55] That’s such a great observation because I think that that is the hallmark of a really good escapist story. That it actually—it takes elements of our real world and brings them into a fantasy scenario and kind of highlights those issues in a way that makes it a little bit easier to deal with them, makes it feel safer. Because obviously the Great Oz is a metaphor for lots of things that were going on in L. Frank Baum’s world, such as industrial magnates who hid behind these curtains of power and sort of pulled all the strings and controlled people by giving them drugs or by promising them awesome stuff and then turning them into slaves. And so it’s this kind of fake utopia of industrialization that we see in the land of Oz coming from the Great Oz. So that was my lecture on capitalism and Wizard of Oz. That’s a great way of kind of framing when escapism is actually offering a lot of commentary while also giving you a chance to skip down the yellow brick road.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] And it is sort of like how we always talk about how Star Trek and other things are able to deal with really intense real-world things because they remove it from the context in which it feels most scary and pressing, and kind of takes it into a different world where it’s safe to kind of deal with it because, oh, it’s just aliens or whatever.
[00:31:30] To me, what’s interesting is how much of escapism is about having a place that you want to escape to, and how much of it is having people you want to follow on this adventure. I think that a good escapist story is often both. But I often think that the most escapist kind of story is the portal fantasy, where it’s like you’re in your ordinary kind of humdrum world and then a portal opens up or there’s a cupboard or there’s a tornado or there’s a blue box…
Annalee: [00:31:58] Or there’s a video game that you play.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:00] Yeah, and aliens show up and say, you play that video game so well, come win our war in space, or whatever. You get to go away to a place where you’re a hero and things are awesome, and you get to kick ass and then when you come home at the end, which you usually do in portal fantasies, you’re in some way transformed and you’re able to deal with the world that you couldn’t deal with before.
[00:32:22] I actually wrote a post-modern portal fantasy novel in the late 2000s, and back then everybody was like, oh, nobody wants ot read portal fantasies anymore, and there was this sense that portal fantasies were over because they’d been done to death but also because they were just too escapist. Or they weren’t kind of gritty enough, maybe? It was kind of the peak Game of Thrones time, I guess. Peak grimdark fantasy. And there’s been a resurgence of portal fantasies in the past four or five years with stuff like Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, and Sarah Rees Brennan published a portal fantasy recently. It’s… I think that there’s been a kind of resurgence of portal fantasy and there has been some deconstruction of it and obviously, The Magicians, also.
[00:33:04] But at the same time, I think people are just remembering how much they love portal fantasies in general.
Annalee: [00:33:09] Yeah, I think the thing about portal fantasies is that, a little bit like Wizard of Oz, they’re kind of metaphors for the act of escapism, and so when you go through the magical portal, whatever it is, and go into a new world, the narrative is like, hello. We are now going into… it’s kind of like the call to adventure. You get a clear signal and so it doesn’t feel subtle, and if you’re one of those people, those many people like mustache guy who thinks that escapism is just beneath me. You’re going to kind of feel like the book or the story is too dumb for you. So instead, you want Game of Thrones, which is a secondary world that never winks at you and says, here we go! It’s just like, here you are. You’re in a world and it’s really shitty and everybody’s dying and it’s not very escapist at all actually, but there are zombies and dragons. And you don’t… and so I think that the turn back toward portal fantasies makes me really happy because I feel like it’s, in a way, it’s very therapeutic to be admitting up front, yeah, we want to escape and that’s okay. And that’s actually important because when we escape to other worlds, we can reexamine ourselves in a safe place. And when we come back, we’re going to be reengaged, and we’re not going to stop engaging while we’re gone, with political problems or social problems. But we’re just going to be kind of chill about them for a little bit. We’re going to decontextualize them. We’re going to think about them in a different way. And that’s going to help us when we come back.
[00:34:53] To wind up here, we wanted to talk about how dark a narrative—
Charlie Jane: [00:34:58] DARK. DAAAARRRRK
Annalee: [00:34:58] —can get before it’s not escapist anymore. And, like Game of Thrones, for example, which I would not characterize as particularly escapist. But you brought up Star Trek, and I think it’s really interesting that the newer Star Trek series, like Picard, and Discovery, they’ve taken a show that was pretty much, especially during the Next Generation phase, it was almost portal fantasy level. Like, it was very… it’s very escapist. And it’s gone in this other direction, so…
[00:35:35] I mean, what do you think about that? Do you think Star Trek is escapist anymore?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:40] I think it still is escapist because, you mentioned Picard. Picard is… the arc of that first season of Picard really is bringing the family together and bringing together this team of—
Annalee: [00:35:51] That’s true.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:51] —cute people, including the cute Romulan samurai guy, Elnor and you know—
Annalee: [00:35:59] The cute murderous scientist who plays a cute murderous scientist in Devs, also.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:05] Yeah, and it feels, by the end of the first season, it feels like, okay, we have a family and we’re going to be a team or we’re going to go on adventures. Ditto for Discovery, which I feel like does have that kind of family feeling of you have Tilly and Michael and any time the two of them were on screen together, it’s really kind of joyful and…
Annalee: [00:36:26] Yeah, it’s delightful.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:27] There is that kind of, it does get a lot darker and a lot more intense and serious and there’s cannibalism and there’s scary shit and there’s… and I feel like everybody who’s [crosstalk]—
Annalee: [00:36:42] I mean, also, in Picard, I just want to sidebar that in Picard, the Federation is no longer the good guys.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:50] Right.
Annalee: [00:36:50] And it’s kind of the same thing in Discovery, too. And so, I think to me that’s… I mean, so, okay, yes, we have the work family which is very escapist. But we don’t have the world anymore. I don’t want to escape into that world. I mean, why… I can live in the United States in 2020 if I want to see longstanding political institutions go bad, right? Why…
Charlie Jane: [00:37:18] Right.
Annalee: [00:37:18] Why would I escape to Picard to, you know…
Charlie Jane: [00:37:22] I mean, I think the reason you escape to Picard in particular is because Patrick Stewart is just so loveable and he brings so much of that to the role and there’s… and I like I said. There are these relationships that are really kind of beautiful in that show. But I also think, yeah, it’s this thing where, and this is, I think, a Hollywood thing in general, and it’s a thing actually in kind of big pop culture in general, because it also happens in comics and books and TV, and everything. Is that when you have something that’s kind of a beloved, either genre or series that is kind of very escapist and very kind of happy and sugary and it takes place in a world that we really want to spend time in and be like—
Annalee: [00:38:03] And everybody gets a medal.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:04] —and lose yourself in. Everybody gets a medal. There’s always the thing of wanting to kind of mess it up a little bit and muddy it up and kind of ask the difficult questions that the people who created it were never willing to ask and kind of reassert human nature to some extent.
[00:38:20] And I think that process, like I said before about portal fantasies and about The Magicians and stuff, often it ends up reminding you of why the escapist thing was so pure and so crack-like to begin with. But I think that there is this process of kind of testing the line of how far can we go to mess things up before they’re not just fun escapism anymore.
[00:38:43] In superhero comics you saw that there was a long period of time when it was like, okay, well, if we have people getting raped, if we have really horrible murders, if we have atrocities happening and we kind of have to see them, are these superhero comics still the light, fun, escapist comics that we used to have?
[00:39:03] And there was a period, I think, where superhero comics did kind of cross that line where they weren’t really escapist anymore. And invariably they cycle back. And I think that part of what’s been interesting to see recently is on the one hand we’ve seen kind of a resurgence of just pure joyful, cartoony, light, sweetness and light with things like She-Ra and Steven Universe, and some other cartoons and some other live-action shows, too, like Legends of Tomorrow.
Annalee: [00:39:28] Like Vagrant Queen.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:29] Like Vagrant Queen, too. But also, those things will deliberately see how much darkness they can slowly introduce. Steven Universe goes to some pretty dark places. She-Ra… I just watched the promo for the final season, and it goes… it’s clearly going to go to some fairly dark places but then it goes there in order to reassert hope and sweetness and light and have those things kind of come back in a way that’s really emotionally satisfying.
[00:39:56] Which I think is very different than just being like, we’re going to delve into the darkness and never come out again. And you know, I feel like it’s partly how you end up.
Annalee: [00:40:05] So the happy ending rule kind of overrides maybe some darkness in the middle. It can remain—so you feel like it can pretty much remain escapist as long as we end with this reassertion of the light. We finally toss the ring of power into the volcano and go back to Hobbiton and it’s going to be basically okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:31] Yeah, and actually, spoiler alert, but I feel like it’s interesting to contrast Picard with the final Wolverine movie, which I guess was just called Logan. To talk about like, they’re basically the same story where Patrick Stewart is kind of starting to lose it a little bit. He’s no longer really in control the way he used to be and he’s kind of facing the end of his life and he has to protect this young girl who is like the future of everything. It’s basically the same story, but Logan makes some storytelling choices along the way that are basically like, this is not going to end well for him, it’s not going to end well for the other characters that you have come to love and it’s going to be kind of… there’s going to be hope, but it’s going to be really dark and bleak.
[00:41:17] And Picard, I feel like, takes a different turn. It takes a more hopeful turn and in the end it doesn’t—because they want to have a season two, I think that’s not a spoiler, we know there’s going to be a second season of Picard even if you haven’t watched the first. It makes some choices that make it possible for there to be a happier, shinier thing by the end.
Annalee: [00:41:36] I mean, I think we have to agree to disagree on Picard, at least, because I don’t think. I agree with you that the ending is obviously slightly hopeful, at least if by hopeful you mean, we can have another season because the characters are all still there. I feel like there’s a point at which, and this is the limits of escapism, where the worldbuilding in a story becomes so grim and in some cases realistic, that I may enjoy it, I may find it satisfying, but it isn’t escapist for me anymore.
[00:42:10] And I think about a show like The Expanse, which as many escapist elements. It’s a show that I really love. It’s super interesting and multi-layered. I wouldn’t call it escapist.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:23] Yeah, me either.
Annalee: [00:42:23] I would actually, I would say, in fact when I talk to people about it and I recommend it, I say like, this is actually like realism. I mean, it’s set in the future and so obviously there’s some hand-waving about space travel and stuff. But it’s dealing with politics as they really are and as they probably will continue to be.
[00:42:46] So, for me Picard is kind of in that territory, so that even though the characters that we like survive, which is similar to The Expanse. Generally, the characters there that we’ve liked are surviving. It’s not in a world that I’d want to be in and the world is getting even worse. Or it’s not really improving, or if it’s improving, it’s only incremental. And so, there’s not, again, I’m going to just keep picking on this thing about getting the award. There’s not that sense of of ever reaching a moment where this terrible thing has come to an end, we’re handing out experience points, everybody gets one. Everybody gets to go up to like—
Charlie Jane: [00:43:26] There’s gold coins, like, bing!
Annalee: [00:43:29] My D&D character just waiting to get to level 17 so I just keep thinking in those terms. I’m like, wait, okay, I’m going to get there one day. And so, I’m really not anywhere close. I’m like at level 14, FYI. So, I think that, to me, is the limit. And I think a happy ending isn’t enough to feel like it’s something that’s escapist. I think it’s a consistency in the worldbuilding, a sense that this is a world that has significantly changed by the end. Either the world’s gotten better or the world has been great and we just kind of kept it great by averting some kind of disaster.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:04] So, thank you so much for listening. This is Our Opinions Are Correct, and we really appreciate all of your support. If you want to support us more, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. We also are on Twitter at @OOACpod, and Facebook as Our Opinions Are Correct.
[00:44:23] And, thank you so much, you can find us where all… every place that podcasts are found, and if you leave a review, we will love you forever. We will come into your house and take you on a portal fantasy quest to find a golden egg. It’s going to be awesome. We really [crosstalk] support—
Annalee: [00:44:36] And you’re going to get a prize at the end.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:38] You’re going to get a fricking medal, we’ve got like a trunk full of medals. We just get rid of them.
Annalee: [00:44:43] Level 17.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:45] Yeah, you’re going to get to level 17, exactly.
[00:44:46] And thanks so much to our incredible, brilliant audio producer, Veronica Simonetti, and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks again to you for listening! And we’ll see you again in two weeks.
Together [00:44:57] Bye! Bye!
[00:45:00] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.