Happiness is Being Unhappy

The paradox of not-nice stuff

In real life, I’m a total fraidy-cat when it comes to physical injury. Sometimes an online friends posts a video clip of someone getting hurt—often by having done something stupid—and I never find it funny. It just makes me wince. I can’t stop thinking about how much it must have hurt. If I hear that one person out of a million suffered serious injury (not to mention death) for having participated in a sport or daredevil stunt, I add this activity to my list of things I will not do. I avoid watching ski jumping or trampoline gymnastics for my fear that something might happen to the athlete.

On the other hand, there is my writing. I remember the first time I tried to compose something meant to be a story. I was probably eight years old. It was about how in a duel someone got stabbed in the eye, and the blood and ooze that came out as the eyeball shriveled. I proudly showed it to my mother, who for some reason was less than enthused. “Write about something nice,” she advised, handing me back the piece of paper with a slight shudder.

Anyone who knows me knows the best way to get me not to do something is to suggest that I do it. The term, “reverse psychology,” should be carved on my tombstone. All of my fiction over the years has contained at least one murder if not several, with characters who often are not the nicest people in the world. If something nice does happen, I make every effort to un-nice-ify it. I add a healthy dash of vinegar, if not a gallon. Sometimes I even try to make these not-nice things funny. If you have read my fiction, you can blame my mother.

As a reader, I can handle stories, poems and non-fiction on the creepiest, most depressing, biggest downer subject matter. So I guess you can say I give as good as I get.

When it comes to movies or TV shows, I never turn away. I can munch my popcorn and slurp my Coke through the goriest of gore. Even true crime shows are distant enough for me to enjoy. I think to myself: “Wow, a new documentary on Al Capone—what fun!” I am not flippant towards programs about genocide or other forms of sadistic torture. And some real-life murderers or highly disturbed people do upset me. Yet I am drawn to knowing about these things and not avoiding them.

The biggest exception is anything to do with the torture or killing of animals. I have an easier time watching a hundred thugs get machine-gunned to death than seeing one dog get accidentally stepped on. I’ll swat a fly, but if a bee flies into the room I carefully pick it up by the wings and release it to the outdoors.

I know some people say that violence in movies, TV shows, or even songs make people—especially children—more violent. And as a social scientist myself, who am I to discredit studies and experiments that have shown this to be the case?

Yet I have wondered: If exposure to violence de-sensitizes people to violence, why would the same not be true about exposure to niceness? What if every TV show was like Touched by an Angel or Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman? Would we start to shrug at kindness, just as we do at violence? Would we devalue goodness even more than we already do?

What if every movie was like Mary Poppins? In fact, even Mary Poppins is not like Mary Poppins. It’s actually a sad story in many ways. I cried at the bittersweet ending when I saw it as a kid. (And okay, I got a little misty-eyed when I watched it as an adult, too. Are you happy now?) Disney makes many films with unsettling overtones, and even its classic animation features are not all sweetness and light. For all of its “wholesomeness,” The Sound of Music ends with the Nazis muscling in to Austria. The appeal of Forrest Gump escapes me, but apparently it is considered a feel good, wholesome movie, even though it includes such pleasantries as the Vietnam War.

For that matter, there is a new genre of Christian fiction in which the murder mystery and horror story are interwoven with religion. I know little about these books. But it would seem that pretty much everyone agrees that a spoonful of sugar is quite enough, thanks just the same.

What if there were no sad songs to listen to the next time your heart breaks or you get yelled at by your boss? What if you saw Romeo and Juliet, and it ended with the parents blessing the marriage? Or Hamlet makes peace with his uncle, or Hannibal Lecter says he was only kidding?

Somehow, we need to touch base with the tragic, the scary, the disturbing. And judging by popular tastes, we need to do so at least as much as we visit Pleasantville. If all the negativity, violence and unfairness were removed from the Bible, it would be a much slimmer volume. My dog loves to be petted, but he also loves to be chased and play tug of war with his treats. Maybe we humans are not so different.