ANYONE WHO GREW up going to school in typical fashion – that is, with a long vacation between the spring and fall terms – has primal feelings and memories associated with the summer season. It's a time when you're supposed to do nothing, and perhaps because of this, you're doing everything: going on vacations, meeting strangers, hanging out at the beach/lake/pool, falling in love, watching new movies, reading a zillion books, riding your bike, and creating a mental map of every building in your local area that has an air conditioner. Every year kids come back from summer vacation profoundly changed. And yet they've spent their summer doing nothing, leaving their "real" lives behind.

Summer is powerful because it's tangential. As adults, we never really stop thinking about summer as time out, even if we can't spend three months fishing anymore. And if you can't afford to go on a long vacation, you can still partake in the culture-industry frenzy known as summer blockbuster season. For me, summer continues to be a time when I ritualistically go to the movies and experience whatever cash-packed pop culture confection dominant culture has cranked out this year. The best way to do it is to go on a weeknight, as if you don't have work the next morning. When the lights go down, you leave your brain open to a pure, unmediated assault by mass media. Dear readers, sometimes it feels good to be manipulated by the whizbangery of the hero, the CGI-rendered skulduggery of the evildoer, the ridiculous market-tested plot, and the product tie-in cuddlebuddies.

Hollywood movies like Attack of the Clones and Spider-Man and Men in Black 2 – just a few of this season's capitalist pigdog flicks, guaranteed to line studio execs' pockets – are as ridiculously conceived as dreams themselves. They're simple and stupid and glorious to see. They're also a populist diversion: aimed at the broadest possible segment of society, there is no doubt that they work as a sort of everyperson's entertainment. Going into the fantasy world of Peter Parker and his alter ego Spidey is like going on vacation with millions of people across the globe who are taking the imagination trip with you. Yeah, you have to pay admission. Yeah, it's like sucking up to the Man. But once in a while you have to say: so what? Come out and play with the other kids. It's summer.

Annalee Newitz