Pop Culture as Therapy
Pop culture may be slowly getting more academic and cultural respect – but there is still much of it that remains in the “silly stuff people watch/buy/read” mentality. Even within pop culture there is a divide between “prestige” shows – such as Westworld on HBO or The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu – and the rest of the stuff people watch. But that ignores what pop culture can do for us as people, act as a form of therapy or at the very least a salve for the difficulties of life.
Pop culture is our world reflected back at us through a distorted lens. What that distortion is varies from show to show, book to book, but it’s there. It’s why you can get news outlets writing pieces on how Game of Thrones – a Euro-centric epic fantasy series - is about global climate change. It’s our world, our problems reflected back through a lens.
This reflection allows pop culture to help us process and come to terms with the issues in our lives. I’m not talking about heavy-handed “special episodes” of ‘80s and ‘90s sitcoms where they deal with issue X. I’m talking about the meaning each of us imbue or take away from any given piece of pop culture, no matter how silly.
A friend of mine uses watching the OC with her boyfriend as a sort of couples therapy. Her theory is that the cartoonish versions of relationship issues provide a spring board for talking about things in the real world in a light-hearted way. The spoonful of honey that makes the point both palatable and stick.
For me, my main pop culture therapy over the past few months has been reading massive amounts of fan fiction. Whenever I have a particularly bad day, I flip to AO3 (Archive of our Own - major fan fiction site) on my phone or computer and read something. Mostly what I read are sweet, fluffy works about a pairing I’m particularly into at the moment – although I love a good “Sirius Black rescues and raises Harry” fic. It hits the same emotional spot for me that romance novels or rom-coms do for other people. It’s the emotional equivalent of a warm fuzzy blanket, and after a terrible, horrible no good very bad day, I honestly need that.
One of my favorite podcasters, the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour, has repeatedly referred to sports as “a way for men to discuss their feelings” (I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the general point). Which is yet another way pop culture effectively acts as therapy. Our culture tends to encourage a level of emotional stuntedness in men. But sports, one of the major pillars of pop culture, give men an outlet that they might not otherwise have for processing their emotions. A concept also known as therapy.
Pop culture hits everyone differently. Someone’s fluff is another person’s life-changing, or at least emotionally-resonant epiphany. It could be an entire sport, or it could be something as small as a song, that just resonates and soothes where you are with your life at that moment. The most recent song for me was hearing “Broken” by lovelytheband on the radio, but there are dozens of Top 40 songs that resonate with me emotionally, even more than a decade after they came out.
This is not to argue that pop culture is a substitute for professional help - I completely, 100% advocate professional help when appropriate. But life is more difficult and complicated than most of us want to think. Certainly it’s way harder than it looked when I was a kid, and I know I’m far from alone in that. We should seize all the tools available to us to process that world and become better people.
Pop culture, no matter how silly, can provide people that, at least sometimes. And that has value, to both the individual it helps and to society as a whole. Let us never lose sight of that value, no matter how much others might sneer at its source. For the true value in a cultural piece – be it movie, book, game, or song – is not its construction or pedigree, but what it means to the people who consume it.
