There is a reason certain stories hit differently depending on what is happening in the world around you. It is not a coincidence. It is not accidental. Look how people are enjoying Amazon Prime “The Boys” so much, they can see how the media is portraying world events into art and media. The greatest art is always the one that makes us feel something. Whatever it is, anger, happiness, sadness, whatever it is. If it makes you feel something, then the artist did something right . And right now with all the craziness happening all over the world, I don’t think we’ve ever been in more need of this, those conversation are louder than ever before.
Entertainment has always been the safest place to talk about the most dangerous things. When a society cannot have a direct conversation about something, artist create art to pass messages. Sometimes through riddles or codes that they hope will resonate with their loyal audience. Because it is too painful, too politically charged, too divisive, too dangerous… It finds a way to have that conversation through story and art. Artist always a way to have their message heard. Through characters that are not quite human, they are not perfect, not black and white but grey. A bridge in between worlds. Through worlds that are not quite ours, through allegories that give people just enough distance to feel something they might otherwise shut down or wouldn’t be able to understand if someone explained it to them. That is not an accident of culture. That is culture doing exactly what it was designed to do, influence and inspire the masses.
Take Wicked. On the surface it is a story about two witches in a magical land. But what Wicked is actually about is what happens when a society decides that a group of people are different, labels them dangerous, and builds an entire political system around that fear. Elphaba is not just a green girl who gets rejected. She was labeled as a “Witched Witch” since she was a child just for the fact that she would refuse to let others dictate her truth. She is anyone who has ever been told that the way they were born makes them a threat. The story of how Oz turns her into a villain, not because she did anything wrong, but because it was politically convenient, is not a fantasy. That is a blueprint. Broadway understood something that a lot of people are only now starting to talk about openly, and it put it in a musical with show-stopping numbers so that the message could reach people who might have walked out of a political speech. And then later a Hollywood hit that everybody enjoyed a lot, myself included.
Hamilton does something similar but from a completely different angle. Here is a story about the founding of America, told entirely by people of color, in the language of hip hop and R&B. That is not just a stylistic choice. That is a statement. It is saying that this history belongs to everyone. That the people who built this country looked like everyone, not just the portraits hanging in government buildings. Hamilton made people feel included in a narrative that had spent centuries excluding them, and it did it through music, which bypasses the brain and goes straight to the chest.
Game of Thrones, at its best, did something similar with power. The show was never really about dragons and knights. It was about how power actually works. We’ve all seen those famous edits on TikTok, “Power is a curious thing my lord, are fond of riddles”. How it corrupts, how it is inherited rather than earned, how the people closest to it are destroyed by it, how systems that seem permanent can collapse overnight when the wrong pressure is applied to the wrong place. The Red Wedding was not shocking because it was violent. It was shocking because it violated the unspoken contract that stories have with their audiences, that the good people survive. When HBO killed the main character Ned Stark at the end of season one, and when they did it again at the end of season three with the red wedding. They showed the world that a story it’s not only about one character, that it can survive. They changed the game of storytelling forever.
The reason stories like these resonate so deeply is not because audiences are looking for political lessons. And more than that personal satisfaction. Women that crave being love watch romances all the time dreaming about how their perfect relationship would be like. People like me that dream of outer space watch movies about space cause it makes me feel connected to something that I crave and cannot have. Most people sit down to be entertained. But the best entertainment meets people where they are and quietly shows them something true about the world they are already living in. When someone watches Elphaba be persecuted for being different and feels something move inside them, they are thinking about how they relate to those stories. They are feeling something. And feelings are how people change their minds, not arguments.
Music has always known this better than any other art form. Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit in 1939 and described the lynching of Black Americans in the American South in language so oblique and so beautiful that it could be played on the radio while carrying one of the most devastating political messages ever put to song. Bob Dylan made an entire career out of hiding the urgent inside the poetic. Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize for an album about what it means to be a Black man in America, and he did it through storytelling so vivid and layered that it worked as pure art even for people who did not fully understand every reference. And even made a brilliant performance in the super bowl last year. That is the power of the form. It gets inside you before your defenses go up.
What all of these works have in common is that they understand something fundamental about human beings. We cannot always process reality directly. It is too much. The world changed. And it changed forever. Before the richest man in Europe didn’t had access to thousands of women and men naked online, now everybody has access to all kinds of things not even rich people could access centuries ago. The world changed forever. The news cycle is too fast, the issues are too complex, the divisions are too deep. But give someone a character they love, put that character in an impossible situation that mirrors something real, and suddenly they are feeling things they could not access before. Suddenly they understand something they could not understand when it was presented to them as a statistic or a headline. They now understand the emotions they’ve been feeling this whole time cause someone made art from it.
The entertainment industry at its best is not escapism. It is the opposite of escapism. It is a way of running directly toward the hardest parts of the human experience, with enough beauty and craft around them that people do not flinch away. The world heals slowly, and it heals in pieces, and a lot of those pieces are stories. Stories told on stages in New York, on HBO, in albums, in movie theaters. Stories that say you are not alone in what you are feeling, that what is happening to you has happened before, that other people have survived it and so can you.
That is what the entertainment industry is for. And right now, it has never been more necessary. I’m excited to see what new projects will the artist of tomorrow bring to help us heal the world. We all need a lot of healing definitely.
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