(Picture of Iago, NYJC Drama Night '07)I've always wondered why people are drawn to literary and theatrical arts even though they can be so tragic, destructive or inspire outright horror. It is clear that these arts have a dramatic dimension that distinguishes its plot from the humdrum of normal everyday living - and that is the point: I hypothesise that we are so drawn towards these arts because they engage by way of simulating experiences that we may rarely experience.
This simulative engagement captures certain wants or ideals closely linked to human desire. If we were to approach the issue by genre, we see that they commonly embody particular sentiments. Take romance for instance, a genre that rarely fails to captivate audiences. Whether it is a fairytale a la Disney or a tragedy of the Shakespearean sort, it centers around the human desire for romantic love. The movie Moulin Rouge has an epithet that captures this desire: "the greatest thing you can learn is to love and be loved in return". This reciprocal romance continues to find ready audiences from Victorian "classics" like Austen's Pride & Prejudice to the rather... er... 'low' art of the Twilight series.
Whether it is the hero of romance or the valor of military heroes, fiction only becomes aesthetically arousing through our empathic faculties. We do not understand characters' sentiments per se - characters do not exist. Instead, it is through empathic role-playing that we begin to feel what characters might be feeling. The impulse of romantic passions, the thrill of battle and the agony of tragedy only comes 'alive' when we place ourselves in the characters' shoes and enter into the aesthetic simulation that fictional arts provide. Of course, the aesthetic experience is not limited to this. We are often required to 'step back' and see the larger picture as well. From the Chinese tale of The Butterfly Lovers to Shakespeare's Othello, the tragedy is enhanced when we retrospectively appreciate the adversity facing the protagonists' struggle to love. Empathy, then, is not a sufficient condition for aesthetic attraction but a necessary one.
Another popular genre is war heroism. This often rests on an ethical system that puts the protagonists' faction of higher moral ground or, at least, hides their moral blemishes for only then can an audience be motivated to empathise with the plot. These genres may also be informed by history and have spawned now-famous titles of historical fiction such as the movie Flag of Our Fathers. The desire for simulative engagement actually finds greater evidence beyond the aesthetic realm in digital games. The now ubiquitous game of Halo for instance puts one in the shoes of a planetary hero fighting against hostile alien invaders: it gives players a heroic scenario that one cannot find in today's ordered and peaceful society where the primordial urge for martial superiority is suppressed and cornered into other outlets. Again, this is not an unlimited generalisation - most people do not desire war because of its devastation but the want of heroic status has an undoubtedly strong appeal nevertheless, an appeal that propagandists often utilise.
It is also plausible that simulative engagement is also sought after because of its distractive value, diverting our attention away from the throes of woes and vicissitudes of fickle fortune. Aldous Huxley wrote "we no longer buy entertainment, we buy relief". If true, simulative engagement does indeed temporary diversion from worldly concerns by plunging us into the depths of fantasy, dreams and imagination. The human condition is fraught with economic anxieties, social pressures and issues that all but the most ascetic monk are wrought with for "in our generation there is no great war, no Great Depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The Depression is our lives." (from the book Fight Club). The distractive value hypothesis also explains the general appeal of entertainment - aesthetic and otherwise - as a panacea for existential pains and in turn suggests that the human psyche is more at home in dreamland than reality.
In conclusion, aesthetic works and those with entertainment value are so desired because they are forms of simulative engagement that provides a distractive value. This value appeals to some of our most primordial desires and ideals that we may be hard-pressed to achieve in reality but, through empathic imagination, are able to artificially savour for a short time. One might arguably call it a form of delusion for fiction is ultimately a pseudo-reality created by the human imagination.
30th November 2009
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