Essential Abstract A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered ‘essential workers’ during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time. Keywords Film/TV industry; essential workers; COVID-19; media production; cultural workers I remember reading the news in June 2020 when I saw Hollywood was back at it. Films were unshelved. Series revived. The standstill that so many cinemas, restaurants, gyms, theaters, and clubs experienced did not apply to studios. Instead, film workers came back busier than ever, because they were “essential workers.” That made me laugh. It was not a ha-ha laugh, the kind I politely feign to the knock-knock jokes my tween dusted off from her bookshelf. Nor was it a belly rolling outburst of the sort that gives way to tears in the corners of my eyes. Think of it as resigned sighs, followed by “heh heh,” and smiles. There was a kind of smugness that I wanted the post on social media, but I didn’t, because that would be unprofessional. It was a strange reaction for someone who has long studied the value of popular culture. Laughing itself is complicated. To the outside listener, laughter is sharing social meanings. It can be a way of performing the self or seeking group membership. Those memes and LOLs do a lot of work (Kien, 2019). To oneself, however, laughter still seems Freudian as an unconscious release. COVID had taken a million lives globally. Many more millions were unemployed, teetering on financial disaster. But we’ll have a new Bachelor season! Yay! My irony here, dear reader, is a form of critical thinking. Who is essential in a pandemic? The make-up artist and the actor did not seem more essential than the server or the musician. Somehow gaffers and grips were not essential at the opera or a musical, but were when crafting a movie set. Teachers were essential, but only to work online in some places, in-person in others. What industry is essential to be in-person? Other highly valued sectors that could have leveraged their strength to return to work did not become suddenly “essential.” The most unionized sector in the U.S. -- local and state governments -- instead furloughed a large swathe of their workforce as it was deemed “nonessential” in the face of a budget chasm. The only analogues to film workers at the time came under two categories elaborated by the Centers for Disease Control: frontline workers and critical infrastructure workers. The former category zeroed in on the most visible heroes and heroines of the pandemic: the doctors, nurses and hospital staff who were testing and intubating on our screens. The latter category we got to know as well in the many local profiles of bus drivers, garbage collectors, grocery clerks, and plumbers. Surely, they were essential, if only because they kept the hospitals running and their workers housed and fed. Later, this affectively warm sentiment would have to be maintained as essential workers were prioritized for vaccinations. Film was not on any governmental list of essential workers. Yet read the fine print. According to the CDC, essential industries were somewhat open to interpretation: Some jurisdictions may also face local factors that require the addition of industries not included on the CISA ECIW list. Jurisdictions have flexibility in weighing local economic and infrastructure needs, ethical considerations, and other equity factors in order to prioritize those working in industries in the CISA ECIW list for COVID-19 vaccine allocation (CDC 2021, emphasis mine). “Local factors” could be interpreted in any number of ways. In the US, 32 states, and globally countless territories, sponsor and incentivize Hollywood productions in order to ensure their investments in a kind of place-based creative class growth strategy (Mayer 2018). Whatever the economic justification, film workers would also, by the same logic, be ‘ethically’ prioritized to get an early vaccine. For the service workers on the frontlines of other creative sectors, being essential would seem inherently unfair and inequitable. Tut tut. And yet. My self-satisfied snickering surprised me. We (the kind of ‘we’ who would make a Popular Communication audience) all know the disparaging comments assailed popular film and television. Richard Dyer (1992: 6) characterized the popular as that “identified with what was not art, not serious, not refined…. Entertainment is hedonistic, democratic, vulgar, easy.” These binaries of that which edifies from that which entertains has separated Arnoldian Culture with a capital “C” from all other kinds of culture as crass. The use of terms such as ‘mass culture,’ ‘low culture,’ or ‘popular culture’ defines the consumer more than the genre or text. These modifiers on culture bleed into forms of class arrogance, as well as sexism and racism. Petro (1986: 6) comments, “It is remarkable how theoretical discussions of art and mass culture are almost always accompanied by gendered metaphors which link “masculine” values of production, activity, and attention with art, and “feminine” values of consumption, passivity, and distraction with mass culture.” It took half a century for the upper classes to reclaim Shakespeare as their own (Levine, 1988). ‘Public culture’ does not really index everything that is public so much as the formation of educated citizenry; think of the old PBS/public broadcasting appeal to ‘viewers like you’ (Ouelette, 2002). Meanwhile, Hollywood film and television had the burden of crass ideology. Nothing says opiate of the masses like a film with explicit product placements for beer and whisky (Panko, 2017). And yet. Film and television did seem essential to everyday life during the pandemic. Especially in the days of lockdown, escaping to the couch to stream whatever made the Netflix Top Ten for the moment became ritual. Like the romance novel or the soap opera, the immersion in a text took me away from the fact that I was cooped up in a domestic space that had become my primary workspace (Radway, 1984; Modleski, 1979), not to mention the school space for my daughter. The parade of procedurals at this time surely gave some outlet through which I could feel smarter. The detectives always could resolve ‘who done it,’ placing the individual above the institutions that seemed impotent in the face of indeterminable evidence about contagions and wet markets. How many of us wished we were on the side of the villains who took control of the narrative, reminding us of our own helpless? The ambivalent pleasure in melodramas that, day after day, never come to a resolution are in themselves a form of feminized resistance to closure in how to manage the seemingly endless tasks in that same space. See Tania Modleski (1979), whose rescue of the soap opera’s place in women’s everyday lives is worth revisiting in light of endlessly streaming programs. Make coffee. Turn on the ZOOM. Check the Google classroom. Wash your hands. Make lunch. Sanitize the mail and doorknobs. Shop online for masks. Make dinner. And so on. Where fandom and feminism converge is in the serious consideration of popular media as essential pleasures for their viewers. Fandom has been a strategy of the weak. It often acts as a stage for an identity politics among those who feel marginalized (Gray, Sandvoss & Harrington, 2007). Like music listening, films and television have the utopian promise of a pleasure that cannot be reduced to representations (Dyer, 1992). “Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized” (Ibid.: 20). Even hating on the dumb thing you just saw brings the pleasure of suddenly feeling important and ‘in-the-know’ (Wood, 2009). None of this is to say the ideological functions of media are erased. The blatant lack of diversity on screen as a feeble color-blindness in media are inexcusable. The importation and appropriation of storylines and formats to fit an America-first jingoism also must go. The ‘advertainment’ that has become congenital to all media culture led to our former authoritarian in chief (Deery, 2012). We should not forget that fandom is also a corporate strategy to deliver loyal consumers to advertisers across popular media. Still, I don’t how I would have survived those darkest days on novels and board games alone. Sometimes I needed to wrap myself up cozy with the next episode of whatever I was binging that night. In other words, I am thinking: Bless the crews that brought this to me. Bring me more. By the same logic of necessary pleasures in the pandemic, all culture workers are essential. Theater preceded film and television as the place for cathartic release of daily suffering. Carnival is the expression of pure jouissance to invert social hierarchy. Restaurants feed the soul, a hokey self-branding reinforced by the hospitality industry during COVID (Phinvawatana, 2020). Heritage foundations and museums preserve our cultural practices and arts even as the virus has felled our culture bearers both directly and indirectly, through the same health disparities that impact the elders in communities of color. Schools, hospitals, and prisons have long recognized the importance of cultural production to well-being through music and art therapy. We must imagine that those creatives’ identities distill down to some cultural essence and that we need as part of a nation, or even a planet (Chakrabarty, 2018). Strategic essentialism is, after all, a political project that can be leveraged against the colonizer (Spivak, 1987). In fact, and more directed to all cultural workers, Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter (2020) trace the importance of musical improvisation as a global response to colonial oppression and a font for revolution. Their exegesis connects cultural producers and consumers through the shared practice of meaning making under times of extreme duress and peril: [G]roups and individuals use improvisatory practices in compelling ways to make the aftermath of trauma, crisis, revolution, colonization, and inequality a site of emergent potential. Improvisation not only offers a means for coping with and responding to the impossible and unthinkable situations, but also an embodied strategy for analyziing the very structures of destruction and dominance that produce sustained misery and subject aggrieved populations to the implacable logic of violence and exploitation (Ibid.: 2). Maybe at a more elemental level than revolution, the arts give an aesthetic experience that departs from the ho hum of the everyday. Arts organize emotions into self-reflections and understandings. “Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms,” lectured John Dewey (1934: 106) a century before the affect theory craze. Affect, not to be confused with any embodiment or bodily shakes (see critique by Fischer, 2016), is instead social communication rooted in a shared environment. Culture is the forum for social interactions, for feeling connected in active and transformative relationships. Studies of the risk factors for COVID have made it clear that isolation and loneliness both increase the risk of developing serious complications. What if we had paid all cultural workers to boost our immunity to the disease? To fortify our weakened souls? It seems strangely apropos that a disease that robs people of their taste and smell deserves a homeopathy that stimulates the senses. Art, music, museum, theater, and film workers might just be the essential oils for what ails us. At a time of pandemic, most cultural workers offer another salubrious impact. Their social intermingling by-and-large happens locally. Part of this may be many culture workers can’t afford to put gas in the car, much less jump on a plane at whim. Whereas film and television workers tend to be among the most fleet-footed laborers, cultural workers, on the whole tend to be place-based. They migrate to places, usually drawn by the jobs they seek, and then they nest there, because they can leverage their expertise across different kinds of sectors (Storper, 2013). Think of a musician, who perhaps scores for advertisements, curates playlists at boutique hotels, and teaches lessons at a university, all in addition to the regular club gig. They get those jobs knowing people who live there, and also work in those sectors. Cities help employers by agglomerating cultural workers geographically through theater districts and art markets, though the well-heeled “creative class” they seek tend to be the ones who leave (Flew, 2010). Instead, the majority of cultural workers are not living a jet set life. The pipeline to their eventual labor pool begins with being in the same space, practicing and performing a craft together (Sennett, 2012). From the start, they meet other people who compliment their trade. They see them in meet-ups and networking sessions, not to mention service workers night at the bar. They recruit each other, recommend each other, and employ each other over and over again, because they are neighbors. So when the going gets tough, they get going, to each other. The number of mutual aid initiatives launched by cultural workers for their communities has yet to be tallied but safe to say they are visible in every city, from cooking and designing for free-food community refrigerators, to International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) sewing masks for their ‘extended family’ of neighbors (Fuster, 2020). As one painter of fine arts stated about her city, We have seen restaurants cooking a little extra for their family meals or adding pay-it-forward options to help keep the fridges stocked. We are also starting to see culture-bearers of the city like Mardi Gras krewes and the BIPOC artists… come together to make this uniquely New Orleans. Everyone has their part to play. Our hope is that movements like this normalize mutual aid. This is solidarity, not charity (Short, 2020). The porous borders between the civic and the familial, the professional and the amateur, and the establishment and the activist are indicators of already networked media ecologies (Robinson, 2018). As COVID came across urban and provincial borders in uneven waves, cultural workers were already embedded in the networks to be activated in keeping us going when our mobility was severely curtailed. This was also essential to controlling outbreaks. And yet. Suddenly a cynical snicker from this cultural worker seems the enemy of solidarity with others. This is especially true of an essential worker like myself, whose primary function during Fall 2020 was to get everyone (safely) back to class. What would it mean for all culture workers to be essential in a pandemic? For one, it might drive a wedge into cultural industries’ efforts to divide and conquer labor in their own houses. The politics that would have made film workers reject their privileged status as essential would have to overcome decades of managerial-employee consensus over the accepted discourse of talent. Industrial trade lore celebrates meritocracies and hyper-masculinity (Caldwell 2008), as justification for such vast inequalities between those with star power, those with talent, and the aspirant rest. Solidarity might not benefit just the principals on the set, in the studio, or at the home office, but also all of those apprentices, assistants, and interns in their peonage. Solidarity might also insist that all culture workers receive the same protections that the film industry did in the pandemic workplace. One of the truly amazing feats of the film industry was to develop their own production protocols seemingly overnight (Fortmueller, 2021). The unions, and in particular the Screen Actors Guild, standardized the ways business was going to get done to safeguard workers’ health while on the job. Not even airlines or nuclear energy plants were able to enforce workplace COVID protocols nationally, much less across global sites of cultural co-production. We could all stand to advocate for ways to protect all of our essential workers. And then, maybe, all workers are essential. The supply chains of cultural production depend on the global value chains that have provided our disposable masks, cheap plexiglass dividers, and all the other materials that let us go back to our jobs. An earlier argument of this sort can be found in Toby Miller (2016). Culture workers rely on service workers, rely on warehouse workers, rely on factory workers, rely on the recyclers forced to clean up the whole mess that the rest produced (Press, 2021). De-essentializing cultural workers and production is the counterbalance to only acting locally through those mutual aid moments. Removing a thin veneer of special essence from cultural workers puts their delocated labor into a global lifecycles of their goods’ production and consumption. Otherwise arguing that cultural workers are like an essential oil during waves of successive lockdowns is more like shilling for proverbial Goop. References Caldwell, J. T. (2008). 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