If you’re like most people, you’ve probably spent a lot of time watching escapist entertainment. But “escapist” doesn’t mean “pointless.” Every work of art has something to say, whether it means to or not. If anything, the art we make to calm our anxieties speaks volumes about what makes us anxious in the first place, if only by omission. Even the shallowest superhero movies imagine a world where justice is achievable within a couple short hours, and not just one possible outcome of a miserable bureaucratic obstacle course that’s designed to hurt more people than it protects.
And then there are romantic comedies like “Meet Me Next Christmas,” the latest in a long line of cheerful, often interchangeable holiday rom-coms, which imagine a world where we have the time, money and job security to focus entirely on finding true love in late December, instead of panicking over our end-of-year finances and navigating even more bureaucracies just to renew our health insurance.