Michael Chabon speculates on why we’re suspicious of entertainment, whether it’s deserved, and how things got this way.
Entertainment has a bad name. [...] The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. [...] Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe… the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.
What’s amazing about Chabon is his ability to evoke Street Fighter in one breath and the Lacanian parole in the next, without coming off as a poseur or a slumming intellectual. He’s telling us to demand smart junk!
Smart Junk! That oughta be a magazine. I’d subscribe.
Tags: michael chabon, on writing, smart junk