Cinema Between Escapism and Misery: Why Do We Watch Sad Movies?

 

Let’s paint an ever so familiar image, you watch a piece of media and it makes you feel sick, depressed, sad, and empty, a couple of hours roll by, the thoughts marinate and here it is being proclaimed as one of the best things you’ve ever watched, but it’s actively trying to make you feel bad, one can assume that we are indeed seeking out a little bit of artificial misery in our lives, but is that all there is to it?

The first half of the 20th century championed the idea of cinema as a tool that has great influence on the common folk, you put a couple of frames together and here you are not only presenting a story, but offering an idea, the Soviets were one of the first to be alert to the power of montage through the likes of Vertov and Eisenstein, so that juxtaposing scenes wouldn't only be considered a storytelling device, but an essayist one too, the crying lady can be a powerful scene, but splice it and add a couple of dying children and flying rockets and you elevated it from powerful to meaningful, Eisenstein and co. got the desired reactions at first from the powers that be, with cinema being an emerging art, and the common-folk art so to speak, which somewhat resulted in simple and effective stories that are essentially “you see how the main character here is so happy and heroic, well he is because he believes in a one-party totalitarian police communist regime”, what I’m trying to say here is that the weird mixture of feel good and spreading ideologies isn’t really a new thing as many would like to believe, it’s even arguably what made cinema art, but the distinction of making art with political undertones for the average person requires something much easier to process than your prototypical Dadaist art project, although that too started happening in cinema during the same decade, with the likes of Dalí, Richter, Duchamp dabbling into the world of cinema, creating this dichotomy between the arthouse and the commercial.

The politicization of cinema was already in full gear by the time we reached the 1930s, and the Great Depression, as well as the precursors to WWII, really accentuated that, but not in the way that you’d expect, the stereotypical nonconformist retrospective breed of political cinema is more of a post-WWII thing, and although I’m not denying its existence pre-WWII, 30’s cinema promoted more of an escapist point of view, in Hollywood for example, we saw the emergence of screwball comedies, musicals, monster movies, etc., but is this political? In short, yes it is, because it served the political purpose of reshaping public opinion towards tolerance of the status quo, and it worked, people loved the spectacles and bought the tickets to the point where some of the highest-grossing films of all time were made during that decade (see: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Gone with the Wind’), the Hays Code is also an indicator of the political nature of the films of that decade, as it ensured that every film should be a clean-cut depiction of the American citizen devoid of anything that could “lower the moral standards of those who see it”.

Remember that thing about “the nonconformist retrospective nature of political cinema” being a post-WWII thing? It’s interlocked with what we just mentioned previously, as cinema gained more influence over the people during the war, all sides started cashing in on it to promote their side and antagonize the other, which lead to it acting both as a financial and ideological force, that went on even in the few years after the war, with the winners somewhat still reveling on their success and economic booms, but that joy quickly started to fade out as people started to grow disillusioned with the aforementioned spectacles, so that when we reached 1948, there was a fundamental shift in what people wanted to watch, small-scale dramas such as noirs became more prominent because they confronted the viewers with the truth, taking enough distance from classic romanticism and reaching towards a more postmodern attitude, the losing side of the war reached that conclusion way earlier, with Italian Neorealism and Japanese cinema accurately documenting the post-war fear of authoritarian regimes and nuclear weapons respectively, but it’s still undeniable that significant portions of the filmgoing audiences still wanted escapist films regardless.

Using the most traumatizing event of the 20th century helps us better understand the notion of escapism and political cinema, but how does it tie into how we perceive visual media from a 21st-century standpoint? and we’re not just switching timeframes here, let’s move from the grand contemplations of history and politics to the more grounded visceral experience, because more often than not, people watch films with no intention to investigate their political undertones, but it’s still undeniable that so many people gravitate towards art that makes them feel sad, and that’s a tale as old as ancient Greece itself, we love to watch or read something that makes us emotionally moved, and that works on every side of the spectrum, even the stories we hear about most well known artists tend to be more on the bitter side, like a Van Gogh or an Elliott Smith, and their works tend to express that and move us with them to these territories, because what can be better than converting your existential pain to meaningful art? from the anxious awkwardness of Charlie Kaufman to the repulsive hallucinations of Gaspar Noé, films can access pretty much every emotion on the palette, and one can use them to reflect on what they’re going through or even feel something very different than what they’re actually feeling in order to balance their emotions, which means that consuming sorrow art isn’t always a negative sign but quite the opposite, it means in fact that you are able to control or express emotions with ease.

Our emotions are distinguishably more memorable when they’re intense, and it doesn’t matter which side of the happy/sad spectrum they fall, films and art generally offer so many intense emotions because that’s the point really, the metaphorical punch that makes you relate to what’s being presented in front of you and connect the dots —consciously or not— to your personal experiences, and that’s where a film’s strength may reside, it is the driving force behind all these screengrabs you see on social media from movies and series, because sometimes, indulging in misery is appealing, and we’ve seen many people over the years try to aestheticize sadness even if it’s not necessarily what they feel, due to that guilt and fear of being basic that makes people seek the illusion of being sad, for better or worse, it’s also the fabricated sense of superiority that people get when they claim that they’re more miserable than the average person, and that’s not always badly motivated, in fact it rarely is, the main motivation, I think, is the idea that we should be sad in order to be profound and wise, which makes us generally seek sorrow in our lives, possibly through films, because they make it digestible, artistic, and pretty, depressed film characters always carry these deep reflections on life ready on the spot accompanied with a melancholic score in a meticulous frame and with adequate color grading, no wonder it’ll make people feel something, no matter what their frame of reference is, films have the power to make you enter the characters’ psyche and make you feel what the director is trying to convey using all your senses, and maybe that can cause you to self-reflect and contemplate as you examine your persona through these foreign adventures, and that’s sort of escapist in itself, because as long as you feel it despite the fact it’s not your personal experience, it is an escape by definition, is it a needed one? To many people, yes, because art’s job is to reassure you of pain’s unavoidable status in the human condition against the false optimism of a commercialist society.

article by : Taha Louafi