“IF Elizabeth Khinda, a 28-year-old algebra teacher, had her way, she would live in a world of pink ruffles and floral-patterned pastels, a place as frilly and feminine as the inside of a jewelry box.

‘When we buy a house,’ said Ms. Khinda, who is engaged to Thomas O’Donnell, 32, a telecommunications worker, ‘I’d like to have a very girlie room with a vanity and a very feminine chair and lots of pinks and florals.’ ” [1]

“In cinematic hard core we encounter a profoundly “escapist” genre that distracts audiences from the deeper social or political causes of the disturbed relations between the sexes; and yet paradoxically, if it is to distract effectively, a popular genre must address some of the real experiences and needs of its audience. Writing of the utopian function of mass entertainment in general and the movie musical in particular, Richard Dyer (1981, 77) argues that although mass entertainment offers an image of something better to escape into, it does not necessarily fashion an entire model of utopian society. Instead it is content merely to suggest what utopia would “feel like.”

Dyer (pp. 180-185) goes on to construct several categories of the movie musical’s utopian sensibility, each of which offers a solution to various real inadequacies in the social realities it addresses. Energy, for example, is the solution to exhaustion, abundance to scarcity, intensity to dreariness, transparency to manipulation, and community to fragmentation. In Dyer’s view, entertainment does not simply give people what they want; it also partly defines wants through its orientation of problems. Abundance, for example, is often interpreted narratively as mere consumerism, energy as personal freedom. In order to be satisfactorily resolved, the real social problems that these categories of the utopian sensibility point to must first be aroused. Dyer calls this arousal “playing with fire.” His point is that utopian entertainment only plays with those fires that the dominant power structure—capitalism (and patriarchy)—can put out. And so the problems that mass entertainment tends to avoid are usually those most stubborn and fundamental problems of class, sex, and race.” [2]

“Just as the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan rotates the design of its menus and its waiters’ uniforms to reflect the seasons, so Ms. Khinda adjusts the decorative accents in the apartment. In autumn and winter, the color scheme is cream, green, orange and red; the filmy curtains in the living room are cream, for example, and the throw pillows on the sofa ($16.95 each, on sale at Pier 1) are green. Come spring and summer, the palette for the pillows, curtains and the like shifts to blue.” [1]

“Mr. O’Donnell’s dresser is small and bare except for a tiny television monitor. Ms. Khinda’s dresser is twice the size and topped with an assortment of jewelry boxes, including one with a twirling ballerina that she received when she was in the third grade.

Mr. O’Donnell can live with these discrepancies as long as no one messes with the 46-inch flat-screen television in the living room.

‘When we buy a house,” he said, “that TV will definitely be on the wall before the couch goes in the door.’ “

INTERIOR IMAGES AS TAKEN BY TINA FINEBERG FOR “HABITATS”, THE NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 30, 2009; COMMENT IMAGES TAKEN FROM DECORNO; TEXT [1] TAKEN FROM “DON’T LIKE THE DECOR? WAIT A MINUTE” BY CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM, NYT; [2] TAKEN FROM “HARDCORE: POWER, PLEASURE, AND THE ‘FRENZY OF THE VISIBLE’ ” BY LINDA WILLIAMS; IN-TEXT CITATIONS [2] TAKEN FROM “ENTERTAINMENT AND UTOPIA” BY RICHARD DYER