An escape into heroic empowerment

By Ethan Gilsdorf - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News: "IF 1968 HAD its summer of love, then 2005 must be the summer for escape.

Think of the entertainments currently sucking the most bucks from America's wallets. The biggest money-making movie of the year, ''Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," to date has raked in three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide. When ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" goes on sale this Saturday, there is no doubt the book will be a top seller for both the children's and adult markets.

What do these two pop culture phenomena have in common? They're not ''Titanic"-style love stories, and they're not John Grisham courtroom thrillers. They're so-called ''escapist fantasy," and they ask us to depart this solar system for some alternate reality. And why not? Certainly the past year on Planet Earth has given us plenty of reason to escape: apocalyptic tsunamis, ambiguously undertaken wars, and, most recently, random attacks like last week's London bombings.

Of course, humanity has always yearned for escape, both into itself and away from the alternately humdrum and chaotic world. Wanting to transcend our material existence is as old as religion, spiritualism, literature, art, and sex.

But there's something particular about the flights of fancy proposed by J.K. Rowling and George Lucas. They want to immerse us in places so intricately mapped and planned that we'll suspend our disbelief and adopt them as home. They're fantastical, but somehow real. The destinations -- Hogwarts and Sith -- do recall probably the most elaborate fictitious universe ever created, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

It turns out that 2005 is a fantasy milestone year for another reason: Tolkien, the granddaddy who more or less single-handedly rescued the ''heroic fantasy" genre from oblivion, published ''The Lord of the Rings" 50 years ago. Borrowing from long-out-of-fashion epics, Tolkien reinvented the backdrop of magic and myth that Lucas and his ilk keep recycling. (Via special effects and marketing, the entertainment and publishing industries can deliver the fantasy to half the population the same opening weekend.)

Here's how the formula works: With swords, spells, and baroque dialogue, brave protagonists prove their mettle by saving civilization from easily identifiable villains. By association, thousands of readers -- and now, in the movie and digital age, audience members and joystick wielders -- get to feel heroic, too.

Given the distance we now live from primal, steel-on-bone experiences, it's not surprising our psyches feel deprived. Who wouldn't try their luck at a horde of orcs with a broadsword rather than pay the Visa bill and look for parking? We want to build our lives around deeds, not mundane details. We want to flex our Dark Age muscle. Forget flaming e-mails: Let's fight the ranks of middle management face-to-face, staple guns at 50 paces. Alas, in the realm of strip malls and ATM machines, the take-action aspects of our characters are so rarely required.

Video games have responded perfectly to meet this desire with first-person, shoot-'em-up, search-and-destroy digital adventures. The industry is good for $10 billion a year. World of Warcraft, a leading multiplayer online game set in a swords-and-sorcery milieu, sold 250,000 units -- in a day. The geeks have inherited the earth.

For those who say Harry Potter and ''Star Wars" are whimsical diversions, remember that their characters are burdened and world-weary, just like you and me. They make impressive sacrifices to do the right thing (i.e., to stop the apocalypse). A cloak of foreboding hangs over places like Middle-earth, just as it continues to blot out this planet. Besides, if by fantasy we also mean ''unbelievable," then the horrors of the evening news surely compete with the current events of any parallel dimension.

Ultimately, identifying with the adventures of lightsaber-wielding Jedis is not an act of disengagement from the world. When we line up at the cineplex or the cashier at the bookstore, it's not mind-numbing escape we seek in our purchases but a yearning for more clear-cut times: a relief from the 21st century's moral gray areas. We search for what futurist and science fiction author David Brin calls ''some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts, and were closer to the gods."

As with pagan worshippers and Morris dancers, wizards and Skywalkers seek to refute existence as we know it. Or, at least, to view it askance. And therein lies the genre's imaginative appeal. The attraction to these other worlds is a hopeful gesture: that we could live otherwise, by an honor code, or by slaying our demons in hand-to-hand combat, not in the mental space above our therapists' heads.

Of course, vanquishing the ''bad guys" would be a fantasy come true if the enemy of your choice -- abortion rights advocates, the radical Christian right -- had raspy voices, glowing red eyes, and dark, blood-stained helmets. Reality offers no such sharp divisions.

But delving into these black-and-white worlds can make our own conflicts -- personal or political -- seem more manageable. Vicarious derring-do can empower us. Even if outside the movie theater, the real terrorists slip through our fingers, at least in the dark pages of our imaginations, we can take revenge, act gallant, and feel like action heroes of our own lives."