But inner survival in times of darkness is a human art. It is, in fact, art — and music. And movies, TV. Books.
In a world that grows increasingly dark and dissected, the ability to slip free of its grim logic and into a realm of uncharted delight, even for a little while, becomes less a luxury and more of a necessity. Is it “just” escapism? Maybe. Who wouldn’t feel better after a couple of hours in “Barbie”’s pink-confected world, with a villageful of Barbies dancing the night away while Ryan Gosling mopes through his “I’m Just Ken” power ballad? Or a night or two of bingeing “Only Murders in the Building”?
“Escapism” has a dismissive ring to it, though, when escape is more than just hiding. My arts colleagues at the Globe know this.
“I’m reading Stephen King’s ‘IT,’” assistant arts editor Brooke Hauser wrote in a recent email. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of daily horrors and outrage surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, she wanted “something that, at the end of the day, would keep me from checking my phone and relentlessly doom-scrolling.”
Why pick a 1,000-plus page tale of a killer clown who lives in the sewers of fictional Derry, Maine, as a respite from the world?
Because it’s “a horror story that isn’t real,” she said.
For political anxiety, staff writer Mark Shanahan’s (momentary) balm of choice is the first four seasons of Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing.”
“When I’m freaking out that a former president who’s been indicted for trying to overthrow the last election is the favorite to win the next election,” he told me via email, the show — hopeful without being saccharine — is “an antidote.”
How things could be, should be: Alternate realities may be only a theoretical concept in physics, but in the arts world, they’re the coin of the realm. Sometimes that alternate reality is literal (see ”Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse”) and sometimes, as in Andrew Leland’s “The Country of the Blind,” it’s a shift in perspective that makes the world anew. Sometimes the break in the reality of your everyday life is huge — ask your favorite Swiftie — and sometimes, if you like woodcarvings from the 16th century, it’s small enough to fit inside a bead.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a movie, a concert, or a tiny, perfect carving inside a prayer bead is going to make any global or personal problems go away. The arts are not government, not policy; they’re not even your therapist. They’re not useful in the way that STEM is useful; they most certainly will not cure cancer or stop climate change.
But they do offer something as momentous, perhaps more so, especially in times of trouble, and that’s connection. Not the kind of connection predicated on likes or self-presentation or ideology, but the kind that makes you feel, well, connected: grounded, understood.
Sometimes that connection and its attendant hope can be found, paradoxically, in a space designed specifically for sorrow.
“If you are in a place in life where you are suffering for one reason or another,” staff writer Devra First wrote via email, “I recommend visiting a beautifully designed cemetery daily after work. You can pace the grounds in unfettered agony. You can cry on the grave of a different stranger each day. Some part of you will notice the trees are budding or turning color, the squirrels are digging up food or burying it. Some part of you will take an interest, if not now, soon.”
And sometimes, as for music critic A.Z. Madonna, who lost someone close to her in an accident earlier this year, the connection has no physical dimension.
“In the days and weeks afterwards, I listened to Agnes Obel’s ‘Familiar,’ I don’t know how many times,” she wrote in an email. “It was one of the only things that simultaneously quieted down the noise in my head, let me feel the grief of the loss, and allowed me to gather my gratitude that the accident only took one life.”
Last week, I took my kids to see Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron.” We’ve loved all of his movies — their beautiful textured art, the crazy spirits and creatures who populate his folk Japanese dreamscapes — and this one, with its army of murderous parakeets and bubble-like warawara, did not disappoint.
What I was not expecting was the sudden sadness that welled up in the dark as the film’s boy hero, Mahito, headed off into another world to find and save his mother, whom he lost in a fire in Tokyo during the war.
My own mother died in 2021, at the beginning of the end of the pandemic. My sadness for her has always been tempered by relief — her last years were terrible — but Mahito’s story, compassionately haunted by the guilt of a child who believed he could have saved his mom the first time around, allowed me the full 360 degrees of grief.
Sitting in row G at the Cinemark, clutching an overpriced package of Sour Patch kids, I cried, and was both the happiest and saddest I’d been in a long time. Because there, up on the screen, through the magic of ink, watercolor, and artistry, was someone who understood, and I was not alone.
Francie Lin edits the Books section of the Globe.
