Our Observation

While the Casey Anthony trial was pulling in millions of viewers last week, a small stage at a high school in Winter Park was quietly making beauty that our creeping voyeurism would threaten to take away.

Will plays ever again eclipse the popularity of reality television? What the theater lacks in allure, it certainly makes up for in staying power. When you look at the timeline between the two, the multi-millennia run of drama atop the stage wins by a landslide, but television didn’t exist until the last 70 years or so. While the widespread popularity of plays has been on the decline versus television viewership in general, reality TV has caught on fast.

Whichever form of entertainment you choose, you may be making a deeper choice than you imagine: Are you reveling in the beauty of the human mind, or celebrating that you’re merely not the worst of us all?

We are not Casey Anthony — but the allure of the idea that a pretty young woman could somehow allegedly kill her own baby is so captivating that we can’t turn away.

Why? We’re glad we’re not her. We tune in, in droves, to watch the possible downfall of somebody who looks like us, but is not us. We want anyone who kills their child to be a monster, because we don’t want to think, “That could be me.”

What we overlook is the societal implication behind the popularity of watching an accused murderer squirm in her seat, rather than watching Shakespearian quips on stage; when we tune in to salivate over Anthony’s downfall, we’re tuning in to see the worst in ourselves.

Whatever worst-case scenario plays out in that courtroom could be the stuff of our own nightmares, but we already have the luxury of knowing we’ll wake up in our beds the next morning rather than a jail cell.

We do it from the comfort of our own homes, as we while away lazy afternoons, hopefully after a productive day’s work is behind us, and as we sloth our way into Memorial Day weekend looking to be entertained when we’re supposed to remember those who sacrificed to give us the gift to achieve as much — or be as lazy — as we want.

Where non-murderers are placed on the hierarchy of morality is a big gray area, and subconsciously we love to exploit it. We love even more to do it passively. While Anthony nervously reacts to testimony from the witness’ stand, viewers at home get to breathe the sigh of relief that “at least we’re not that bad.” Whenever we’re given the gift of an ego boost, we’re seldom wont to reject it.

When it’s all over though, what do we feel? Watching Casey Anthony leave the courtroom in chains or as a free woman may give us something to talk about at the water cooler, but it has no real impact on our lives. What happened in that courtroom doesn’t move us, or inspire us or ask us a question that only we can answer.

Walking out of the theater, we can be moved, we can be inspired and we do have questions. When entertainment is merely entertainment, it needs to serve no purpose. When entertainment becomes art, it shows us something beautiful about our world that we may not see without it. When Picasso said “Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth,” he wasn’t telling us anything; he was asking us to see the world’s beauty for ourselves.