ABSTRACT
Richard Dyer notes that ‘two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as “escape” and as “wish-fulfilment”’ point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism’ (Dyer 2002: 20). Dyer is quick to note the oversimplified nature of such descriptions, far removed as they are from any traditional notion of cultural production which encompasses the utopian, but he rightly claims these loose terms as reflections of the fact that the ‘utopianism’ present in mass entertainment per se, ‘works at the level of sensibility’, presenting possible other worlds in a general sense rather than one which outlines ‘ideal’ worlds and how they might be organised (Dyer 2002: 20).
