When the "grief" of spectators overshadows the event itself.

TRANSCRIPT
Hello everyone, and welcome to Elsewhere with G. Today, I’d like to talk to you about the place that emotional performances take us when we view them in a group. When I was growing up, I hated watching melodramatic, or simply dramatic, or otherwise sad movies with anyone. When I watched them with my parents or even with my friends, I always felt like I had to make a joke, or downplay what was happening, or make a comment about how it wasn’t realistic or how it was exaggerated. I remember feeling very irritated when the people watching the movie with me showed emotion, teared up, or made comments about how terribly sad it all was.

I was thinking about why it bothered me so much, because it’s not that I don’t like emotional movies, emotional performances. In fact, if I watch them by myself, alone, I’m quite likely to tear up. It’s when I’m watching them with a crowd, and there’s a certain expected reaction that I close myself off, that I can no longer be influenced by the emotion, that I can no longer feel what the performer wants to transmit.

And I think that in a time when many tragic, or simply sad events are experienced publicly through social media, you know, with people sharing, re-sharing stories, videos, pictures, and giving their take on the event, I think that some people, including me, have become numb to the tragedy, and instead of feeling emotion that we might feel if we read about the event, and not so much the reactions of others and how much it’s affected them – and by others, I don’t mean victims, I mean bystanders, or people who weren’t even there but who saw what happened afterwards, through pictures, videos, or simply heard about it. 

So, I think the problem is that there’s so much focus on how the event has affected witnesses – far-removed witnesses – that it’s all about the performance of a reaction, all about how we’re supposed to reaction, the appropriate amount of emotion and sadness that we’re supposed to feel, and for me anyway, it has quite the opposite effect. Instead of feeling sad, I feel irritated by what I’m supposed to feel, and by what I consider to be faux-sadness. Sadness that’s not real, that won’t last beyond the catastrophe, that’s more for show, for approval from others, for social identity, than about a genuine engagement with the trauma of the event.

Anyway, I know that’s a controversial opinion, and I’ve read all the articles about how we shouldn’t shame people for being affected by something. I’m not shaming people for being affected. I just don’t believe that most people really are affected; not to the extent they claim to be. And I wish we’d be more private in our sadness, because I think it would be far more genuine.

The shared experience of emotional performances (click here for the transcript)

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