Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of ‘surrealist disruption’ to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist political TV drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multivalenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control.

在不列塔尼关于超现实主义的著作之后，我们概述了对消费者的假设世界的意想不到的挑战将如何改变他们逃避现实的体验的潜力。我们引入“超现实主义破坏”的概念来描述本体上的不连续性，这些不连续性破坏了消费者通常使用的常识框架，并影响了他们中止怀疑并遭受自我损失的能力。为了促进我们的理论化，我们以消费者作为现实主义政治电视连续剧《纸牌屋》的观众的经历作为采访对象。在破坏性的现实世界政治事件的背景下。我们的分析表明，面对外部环境的急剧变化，从现实的转变中摆脱出来，从一种恢复性的，嬉戏的经历转变为一种以歇斯底里的焦虑，主体间感性认识和认识论社区建设为特征的不安，认真的体验。这将逃避现实重新概念化为比市场营销理论先前考虑的更具情感性的多面手，并且揭示了消费者在其控制范围之外的总体社会结构中的主体地位。