Escape (not the pina colada song)

Last week I was in France, England, D.C., Vermont, and South Carolina. Or maybe just one of those places, where I landed on a very comfy couch and watched many movies that took me elsewhere. If there is a vicarious experience I enjoy more than reading books, it is watching movies. Sometimes I wonder if I should be troubled by the fact that escapism is my primary mode of entertainment. Still, I am not guzzling books or shooting films into my veins, or believing Dungeons & Dragons is real life, like the kid in that extremely scary 1980s after-school special, where -- maybe I dreamed this? -- he prowls around the sewer system in a trench coat, years before trench coats on young people were ominous. So there's that.

Let me simplify by combining all the films into one: an old maid (at age 27!) has been persuaded not to marry an unsuitable man, who of course returns to show her what she's missing (plus honor, valor, rank and status, etc. etc.), then the sister comes home from prison but we don't know what she's done until nearly halfway through, and everybody is gathered for their friend's funeral and some kitchen dancing, and a semi-mysterious corpse is buried, dug up, buried, dug up, and so on, for a variety of reasons that mostly serve to complicate the plot.

Now I am returned to the Unironic Heartland, where we wear our earnestness on our rolled-up sleeves. We (that would be me, royally) are probably better served by avoiding the DVD extras where actors and directors sit in their canvas-backed chairs and talk about how splendid everyone was to work with. Know what would be more splendid? If only we'd maintained the illusion that the world on the screen was real. If only we'd stayed in that dream state a little longer. A place where, venturing out between movies, my thoughts resembled something like this: