Politics & Power Quote by Adam Arkin

Arkin is quietly refusing the oldest scapegoat in American culture: blaming the art for the audience. The line lands with an actor's plainspoken logic, but it’s doing sharper work than it pretends. By stacking romance, political paranoia, and horror, he collapses the usual moral hierarchy that treats some genres as “healthy entertainment” and others as suspect. Love stories can be addictive. News cycles can be intoxicating. Fear can be a hobby. His list is a leveling device: if obsession shows up everywhere, the problem can’t be pinned on one “dangerous” kind of content.

The intent feels defensive in a specific, industry-aware way. Actors spend their careers watching projects get blamed for what viewers do with them: violent films “cause” violence, conspiratorial thrillers “fuel” paranoia, horror “warps” kids. Arkin pushes back with a craftsperson’s pragmatism: subject matter is raw material; obsession is a relationship the consumer chooses (or slips into), shaped by temperament, loneliness, community, and whatever rewards the culture is handing out at the moment.

There’s subtext here about our hunger for narrative as anesthesia. Romance can offer a loop of longing and payoff; paranoia offers a sense of mastery; horror offers controlled dread. Each can become compulsive because each promises emotional regulation. Arkin’s phrasing - “I don’t think” - matters too. It’s not a grand manifesto; it’s a modest, skeptical shrug aimed at moral panics, inviting accountability without pretending we can police desire by censoring the menu.