Exploring Tragedy in Media: A Personal Insight

I love when people’s comfort movies and tv shows are tragic. It’s like because we can’t or won’t allow ourselves to truly experience raw emotion, we seek it out in the media for our consumption.

And I don’t mean simply crying. I mean the screaming, the chaos, the destruction, the horror. We watch characters go through such traumatic experiences and enact them as well and find ourselves rewatching it over and over.

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For me personally, my comfort show is Interview with the Vampire. No one’s surprised. I think it has something to do with watching a character fully react to something happening to them. Once again, I’m writing it out to try and understand myself but maybe someone else needs it too. Feeling like you can’t react to something that happened to you leaves a sort of numbness that only seeing it reflected on screen can undo.

And that’s why I love art so much. You can take all of your pain, rage, conflicting emotions, onto something outside yourself. You are allowed to create characters whose lives are harsh and have them respond to situations in a manner that society wouldn’t deem acceptable. You are also able to explore topics without having to feel guilty or ashamed. Specifically with IWTV, at least with the show, the creators get to take a beloved series full of tragic, toxic characters and bring them into a different decade. Thus exploring more contradictions and “taboo” topics such as abuse and even mentions menstruation for a brief moment in the second season. That’s something shows don’t particularly like showing because it’s considered “dirty” or “unclean” but I’m happy that a gothic horror show managed to do the seemingly impossible.

Anyway, back to the tragedy. I think my love of angst and tragedy stems from reading Greek tragedies in high school and even getting the chance to act them out (shout out to The Trojan Women). I could put everything I was feeling into the performance or the words and feel so much lighter afterwards. Another thought I had is that people enjoy tragedy more often than not because society tries to make us delusional in a way. I mean how many times have you heard the phrase “love and light” or that negative emotions are low vibrational? Or even that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, insinuating you have to “suck it up” and keep it moving? No. I don’t want to ignore all of the horrible things I’m feeling or push them down until one small inconvenience causes me to explode. I want to let them exist and move through them. However long that takes. And if watching Louis rip a man who keeps calling him “boy” apart is what helps me release then so be it.

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