In the face of current events, many writers, artists and filmmakers feel a sense of inadequacy. “What good is my work in times like these?” they ask themselves. We’re not doctors or scientists. We’re not saving lives, like they are. It might even feel that telling stories and entertaining people are irresponsible endeavors, akin to playing the fiddle while Rome burns. I see it differently, having survived a difficult childhood thanks to the necessary escape that books and movies provided. When I felt lonely and powerless in those years that I still remember as the worst of my life, Fred and Ginger saved my life as they waltzed in luminous black and white. Rita Moreno expressed some of my own disappointment with America in a swish of skirts in West Side Story. I learned about surviving much bigger disasters than verbal abuse and mental cruelty thanks to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cervantes made me laugh. Gogol and Chekhov took me to the Russian countryside.
I was stuck in a painful reality and all I wanted was to be transported to another time, another era, another place, and into someone else’s experience, someone else’s joy. So, don’t take lightly the ability to entertain and provide a rest stop, an imaginary shelter from life’s inescapably painful and terrifying moments. In the words of Joel McCrea in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”