Critics are always praising works of art for being urgent, challenging, disturbing, provocative and so forth. But is that what people actually want from the arts? Is it what I, personally, require?
Apparently not, or not always, because I've recently watched the following films: La Reine Margot, The New World, Jeanne la Pucelle and Lancelot du Lac. What they have in common is that they are escapist historical romances, far removed from 21st-century life. Like most people, I don't want art to only rub my nose in modern reality. I want it to take me to other places and times, from the lurid Renaissance world of Queen Margot to the fabulous futures of science fiction.
This is also how people read novels: Hilary Mantel seems more the thing than Martin Amis. The other night I read The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. What a masterpiece – what a thrill ride.
But, of course, this is where the argument turns upside down. Is The War of the Worlds really escapist? Well, its vision of the Earth invaded by Martians is exciting and awe-inspiring, but its analysis of human behaviour in this sudden crisis is anything but cosy. London can't take it; the entire population flees the capital. There are grisly details about refugees fighting each other for survival – far grislier than any filmed version of the story has dared to dramatise. As for those films I've been watching, Queen Margot inhabits a world of religious hate, Machiavellian politics and macabre murder; and Joan of Arc ... well, she didn't have a happy ending. Even the myth of Arthur ends with everyone dead in a battle.
For art is complex, as human beings are complex, and only in a completely crass view of culture is the realistic necessarily real, the contemporary necessarily urgent, the historical or fantastic escapist. Art is an escape – but not a "mere" escape.