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The Sunny Side of Life: Harry Potter, K-PAX, Bandits, and the Forces of Good in a Wicked World

Culture is the collection of the ways we use to deal with life. There are many different sides to this life with which we have to deal. As we are all now reminded by current events, there is a dark side. If we think that culture is important, then it has no more important task than coping with horror. After a couple of centuries of intensive multiculturalism in world history, we have settled on an understanding of religion as the part of the shared culture of a community that addresses this challenge. Sometimes that is the defining characteristic that allows us to recognize a religion in the midst of a bewildering collection of exotic ideas and practices found in the various cultures of the world. People turn to culture, especially religion, to sustain them when bad things happen, to comfort, to reassure, to keep things going. Karl Marx commented that religion is the opiate of the masses. Opiates, we know, are a means for handling unbearable pain. Marx was critical of this use of religion because pain that is assuaged can prevent the underlying problems that cause pain from being fixed. On the other hand, cultural pain relief is a standard way of dealing with problems until the doctor comes. Each culture has its own ways of providing that relief. In a multicultural society, those various ways are found in the same cultural arena. In a large, complex modern society, that arena includes popular culture and mass media. At the movies, as well as on television, in popular music, in best-selling books, in video games and board games, various genres offer distraction, solace, and escape to different kinds of people. The audiences differ in age, class, gender, ethnicity, residence, and family background. Not everyone, of course, has the same experience of life and that accounts for some of the difference in preferred genre. However, people also differ in how they have been culturally prepared to receive different genres. We have come to expect Hollywood escapism to use sex and violence, incendiary explosions and car chases, and surgically crafted nude bodies and promiscuous encounters as a way to attract and gratify audiences in the United States and around the world. In fact, the global culture is heavily based on such universally understood sights and sounds, and culturally distinctive features like language and social relations do not travel well. That is to say, they are not lucrative. For that matter, the conventional wisdom in the movie industry is that they are not much more profitable at home. Critics of Hollywood movie fare have been quick to associate the mass taste for sensations with the general need to numb the feelings of disappointment, isolation, and powerlessness that are the by-products of the global, corporate, anonymous contemporary world. However, it has not been proved that such appetites serve to kill pain, nor that those are the pains being deadened. Moreover, there have been different kinds of popular culture analgesics that were not as “edgy” as recent entertainments, not gruesome or cynical or vengeful like Very Bad Things (Cowan, Nabatoff, & Schiffer, 1998) or There’s Something About Mary (Beddor et al.,