Politics & Power Quote by Fiona Shaw

America's bad mood, Fiona Shaw suggests, is being fuelled by its own entertainment diet: the movies deliver "an endlessly good time", and that endlessness is the trap. The line is funny in a dry, actorly way because it flips the expected story. Movies are supposed to be the pressure valve, the cheap holiday from politics, work, and loneliness. Shaw implies they function more like a mood amplifier: the more reliably pleasurable the product, the more grating real life feels when the credits roll.

The phrasing matters. "I think" keeps it conversational, almost offhand, like a rehearsal-room observation rather than a manifesto. That casualness gives the critique plausible deniability while landing the punch. "Disgruntled" is a deliberately unglamorous word for a culture saturated in glamour; it evokes customer dissatisfaction, not tragedy. And "endlessly" points to an industrial logic, not a single film: a pipeline of engineered dopamine, the theme-parkization of narrative.

Subtextually, Shaw is taking aim at a consumer fantasy America exports and consumes: happiness as a purchasable, repeatable experience. If your baseline becomes two hours of curated excitement, sentiment, and moral clarity, the messy ambiguity of civic life starts to feel like a defective product. In that sense, the quote isn't anti-movies so much as anti-escapism as a lifestyle. It's a warning about what happens when a culture confuses relief with repair, and treats pleasure as proof that nothing needs to change.