Serious Entertainment

D. Brent Laytham suggests that entertainment falls into the biblical category of a “power,” a good aspect of creation designed to “give, sustain, and enrich life” but one that, in a fallen world, tends to “turn away from God, becoming self-referential and self-aggrandizing” (iPod, YouTube, Wii Play, 27). A power is supposed to be subordinate, but it continuously strives to dominate. 

Entertainment is such a good that can provide genuine “pleasure and enjoyment, beneficial rhythms, excellence worth attending to, forms of belonging, and freedom to play” (28). Film for instance can give us a fresh sense of the senuous beauties of the world. But like other powers, it’s not satisfied serving heaven: “the very nature of modern entertainment seems to be its constant pretension to be more important than it is” (28). 

The key Christian response is to deflate, to treat the trivial goods of entertainment as the trivial goods that they are, confident that “God gives us trivial pursuits that free us from false claims to ultimacy” (29).

Absent these efforts to put entertainment in its place, it can have serious consequences. As Laytham points out, entertainment has to do with pleasure and fulfillment. which are not “trivial or peripheral matters” (11). Entertainment involves use of our body, a certain kind of rhythm; it’s rooted in “our capacity to give attention to something or someone” (14); it takes time and provides a calendrical structure of holy days; it’s social activity, but tends to produce a certain form of sociality, “communities of affinity . . . whose bonds of united are experienced and treated as more real, valid, and powerful than are the bonds of mutual presence (family), common activity (coworkers), and shared geography (neighbors)” (17).

Ubiquitous iPods, for instance, change our relationship to music, turning it from a “performative event in which we participate to a commodity we consume and manipulate at will.” We might listen to more music, but our relationship to the music has changed: “We are richer in musical recordings, but poorer in musical relationship” (39). iPods offer the possibility of “regardless power”; we can tune in and turn off everything else around us. But this runs the risk of cultivating a habit of disregard (40-41). iPods are part of music’s modern journey – “from performance to passivity . . . from social to solitary . . . from communication to consumption” (43-44). These aren’t simply trends in music, but, given the nature of music, trends in the nature of the communities we form and that form us.

One of Laytham’s most illuminating chapters offers an analysis of play’s imaginative, free, autotelic, and social qualities (74-79). In many of these respects, play, while entertaining, does not have the same contours as entertainment. Not entertainment but “free, freeing play is the gold standard. . . . ‘Let’s play!’ becomes a kind of holy invitation, as well as an effective countermeasure to ‘now watch this!’” (80).