In times of extreme stress, it's hard to avoid dwelling on bad news. For example: here I am in LA, sweating out the final couple of weeks of a long overdue book deadline, and all I can do is stare with horror at the stories on CNN. I've learnt that oil now costs more than plutonium; that New York's National Debt Clock will soon hit $9,999,999,999,999, and then run out of digits; that bankrupt homeowners are vandalising their properties after being evicted by their nearly bankrupt mortgage companies; and that a suicidal Britney Spears has run off with a paparazzo - surely the LA equivalent of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection.

And did I mention the Hollywood writers' strike? Ah, yes, the strike - which resulted in Sunday night's Golden Globes being about as much fun to watch as the annual meeting of the Cement Council of Bakersfield.

Thank God, then, for all those DVD movie “screeners” that have been sent to me by studios over recent weeks, as part of their thwarted awards-season PR campaigns. Because films take so long to make, all 2007 releases were conceived years ago, in happier, less economically fraught times. “So,” I said to my wife, as I settled down on the sofa on Saturday night, expecting some Hollywood escapism from the book-deadline blues. “What have we got to watch?”

First up was No Country for Old Men, a cheery tale about unstoppable evil and the meaninglessness of everything, starring an expressionless Spaniard who puts hydraulic cattle-slaughtering technology to imaginative use. Inhaling sharply, I put the DVD aside.

Next was There Will Be Blood - a heart-warming study of greed and misanthropy set in the 1920s oil boom, a timely reminder that the fuel for our profligate lifestyles is nothing but trouble, and might one day do for humans what asteroids did for the dinosaurs. Frowning, I shuffled the DVD pack.

Our remaining choices? Away From Her, a story of a marriage torn apart by Alzheimer's; Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis, the rock star who hanged himself at the age of 23; and The Lives of Others, about East German totalitarian oppression. Oh, and Juno, a film about unwanted teenage pregnancy.

In the end, we settled on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Surely you can't go wrong with a butterfly in the title, I thought. Oh yes you can. Turned out it was about a journalist at Elle magazine who suffered a terrible stroke and was paralysed from head to foot, and yet still managed to complete a book in record time using only a special code transmitted with blinks of his left eyelid. I probably don't need to tell you how it ends.

So there you have it: my Saturday evening movie-viewing somehow managed to worsen my book-deadline stress. I can only imagine what these films are doing to the rest of America's mood. One thing's for sure: if this recession lasts for one minute longer than expected, we all know what's to blame.

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