In Defense of Depressing Art
One fateful winter’s day during my ninth grade year, I decided to have a movie day consisting of only stuff I'd never seen before. So, without considering the tone of the films I picked, I ended up watching Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Tsotsi, and Requiem for a Dream. All for the first time. All in a row.
(It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Jaws landed somewhere in the middle, so not all of the movies were horrifyingly depressing or disturbing. Also, if the quarter I flipped at one point landed on heads instead of tails, I would’ve watched The Deer Hunter instead of The Conversation, so things could’ve been much much worse.)
All of this is to say that I have, shall we say, a higher tolerance for depressing movies than most people, and thus my relationship with sad art is somewhat warped.
Nevertheless, when I hear that one of my friends doesn’t want to see a depressing movie or someone blows off a TV show because it makes them sad, I can’t help but get a little annoyed. No art should be immediately dismissed. However, sad art, be it films or television or music or video games or whatever, has a specific value that lighthearted work simply cannot have, and I think a healthy engagement with heavier material is necessary and deeply rewarding.
However, before we get into that worth, we need to define our terms a little. "Sad art" is a wide umbrella that can cover a lot, and not everything is welcome to the party.
Genuine Emotion vs. Manipulation
When I talk about “depressing” art or “sad” art or “X adjective that alludes to despondency” art, there’s a certain kind of work I’m talking about and a certain kind I’m definitely not.
What I’m not talking about is manipulative art that preys upon basic universal sympathies that most human beings share, including yourself. (Provided you are, relatively speaking, an emotionally functional person.) I’m not talking about movies where the dog dies or that song where Air Supply’s all out of love or that book where little terminally ill Eva gives a lock of her hair to all the slaves before she dies.
Of course, you’re allowed to be affected by these kinds of moments. You are, after all, only human. But relying on that base threshold for emotional resonance is also what makes these kinds of works feel cheap and disposable. Lower hanging emotional fruit doesn’t need to be earned. You don’t need to try that hard when all the audience needs to feel is, “Oh no, something bad happened to that cute dog!”
The kind of art I’m talking about takes its time to fully invest you into what it’s trying to communicate. They earn more than an entry level emotional connection with their protagonists or their song narrators or whatever applies to the medium the artist chooses, and they don't simply rely on the fact that you are biologically capable of sympathy. The methods deployed to earn that connection depend on the medium, but the most straightforward and effective difference between cheap emotional art and worthy emotional art is, simply, effort.
Let's look at an example of a movie I think does sad well: Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 stop motion animated film Anomalisa.
The year is 2005. Michael Stone (played by the always incredible David Thewlis), a married man with a young son, is a guru in the customer service world on his way to give a speech at a convention. Michael has the most easily diagnosable case of depression in the history of depression. However, Michael never says it out loud, and Anomalisa never deploys the cliché film indicators of depression. (Sad music, crying, etc.) Instead, the movie has us see the world through Michael’s perspective, and in Michael’s head, everybody, regardless of age, race, or gender, quite literally has the same face and the same voice. (The voice being that of Tom Noonan, another actor who’s always incredible.)
He arrives at his hotel. He checks in. He goes about his routine. Eventually, he hears a voice that isn’t Tom Noonan’s and he's overcome with joy. He finds the owner of the voice, a woman named Lisa (voiced by the also always incredible Jennifer Jason Leigh). Lisa’s face doesn’t look like all the others either, and the two forge an intense bond. He tells her she’s beautiful despite the scar she conceals with her hair. He tells her that she’s an “anomaly” in the world, hence “Anomalisa.” He tells her things we can guess that he hasn’t told his wife in years. Eventually, the two have sex, and after a nightmare, he wakes up and tells her that he's going to leave his wife and child for her.
Then he notices a few ticks he doesn’t like about her, and her voice slowly starts to morph into Tom Noonan’s. He gives his speech. He looks out at the crowd. Now her face looks like everyone else's as well. He melts down on stage and abruptly leaves. Eventually, he goes back home, leaving Lisa behind, still incapable of telling anyone apart.
Part of what makes Anomalisa work is its clever storytelling devices. But gimmick or no gimmick, the main reason it’s so affective is because it takes the time to make you understand the characters and feel for them. (It's also small to call them "gimmicks" but you know what I mean.) Michael, to put it mildly, is a bit of an asshole. But he’s also profoundly lonely and sad, and he wants what we all want: A meaningful connection. Someone to take us out of our day-to-day ennui and bring us some form of long lasting happiness. Michael thinks he’s found that, and we the audience think, “Maybe we can too.” But it turns out Michael’s too broken and selfish to keep the fantasy alive, and as soon as Lisa doesn't live up to his expectations, she becomes disposable.
Of course, we can read this as “Michael tosses her aside once he has sex with her.” And that’s not inaccurate. In fact, it's explicitly text. However, despite his boorishness, I find myself pitying him, and his behavior makes me think about how joy and happiness can be ground down by time and the simple act of being yourself. And I find it profoundly sad.
Another example from another medium: Immortal Technique’s “You Never Know,” from his 2003 album Revolutionary Vol.2 featuring Jean Grae on the hook.
Rapping over a melancholic sample of fusion jazz band Spyro Gyra’s “Lost and Found,” Immortal Technique tells us a semi-autobiographical story of how he fell in love, and how that love was abruptly ended by circumstances beyond anyone's control.
There’s a latinx girl in our narrator’s neighborhood. The narrator is presumably Technique himself, but the girl is never named. She’s not interested in casual sex with any of the lesser men in her neighborhood and cold to most of the people in her life. The two strike up a friendship, and their relationship builds. She introduces him to books and encourages him to give up his criminal ways. The two spend more time together, and though the relationship never enters the physical realm, Technique falls hopelessly in love with her.
He tells her his feelings and she starts to cry. He can't find out the problem and eventually he leaves, their relationship effectively over. Time moves forward, and he goes to college. But then he winds up going to prison for a year. (True to Immortal Technique’s real life, stemming from multiple assault charges.) Once he’s released, he’s a different man with a harder outlook on life. Still, he decides to find her. He goes back to her home, only to be given a note by her mother. The note, from the girl, explains that she contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, and thus she kept herself emotionally and physically locked off. Until she met him. Learning of her death, Immortal Technique ends the song by saying he’ll never fall in love again, and that if you have someone in your life who loves you, hold them close, because you never know what could happen.
Of course the song deals in sad subject matters, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. But I would say the song earns our emotional investment beyond, “Oh no, they don’t wind up together!”
It’s not just a song about lost love. It’s a song about meeting someone who helps you evolve as a person and the joy that comes from attachment, as well as its consequences. It’s a song where two people help each other grow. He teaches her how to connect with people again, and she teaches him a way of living and thinking beyond petty crime and violence. The cruel irony is, of course, that he winds up exactly like her before they met. Unable to love because of the pain it could bring.
There are plenty of ways to make sad art that goes beyond narrative, let alone romance and connection. However, true emotional resonance must be earned. Don’t just make a story about a guy and a girl who don’t wind up together. Make a story about a guy and girl whose relationship is doomed by despondency or by the reality of growing up poor and trapped in a broken system.
That’s the kind of art that interests me. Art where I actually give a shit.
Why You Should Engage with Sad Art
If you’re reading this, chances are reasonably high that you’re a human being. And because you’re a human being, it’s just as reasonable to assume that you’re a little fucked up. Maybe you have some sort of chemical imbalance, maybe something happened to you that you’ve had a hard time moving on from, maybe you’re bored and that’s making you sad. It doesn’t really matter. Every person on this planet has a source of sadness, and though we’re not supposed to be happy all the time, we need to understand that sadness so it doesn’t ruin our lives.
How do we do that? I don’t know. But the one thing I do know is that you have to be able to access and engage with your pain. That’s easier said than done for most people, and that’s when sad art comes into play.
Ultimately, what sad art has to offer is catharsis. It allows you the opportunity to explore the full spectrum of your emotions, and thus you may be able to find some personal truth. It offers you the chance to relate to someone, or to sympathize, or at the very least, contextualize your own pain and comfort you with the knowledge that others have been through their own suffering, and yours is surmountable.
Let me give you a mild example from my own life. Towards the end of last year, I found out that I wasn’t getting into grad school, and I had to find a cheaper place. Finding affordable housing is hard enough in this day and age. It’s harder when you’re jobless and already feeling pretty low. It’s even harder when due to circumstance beyond your control, your calendar has been severely fucked with, and you have three weeks to find a cheaper apartment (no small task in Los Angeles) and move into it.
So out of stress or whatever reason, I started going to sleep and waking up at erratic hours. I also had to look at more and more expensive places as Los Angeles is a suffocatingly shitty city. (As far as housing, it's not Bay Area bad yet, but give it time.) Somewhere in between the legion of logistical nightmares that come from having to shed most of your stuff because the places your looking at are significantly smaller than the place you currently live in and cleaning and so on and so forth, things go quiet, and that’s when you’re free to dwell on your failures, the things that happened in your life that you wish could’ve gone differently, and the parts about yourself that you don’t like. You realize that there are millions who have it worse, but it’s hard to see past yourself. I was, to put it bluntly, fucking miserable.
So, every night, when it was time to go to bed/the air mattress I set up in my old apartment to clean because my actual mattress was at the new place I eventually found, I would watch BoJack Horseman.
BoJack Horseman, as you may or may not know, is incredibly funny when it wants to be. But it can also be one of the most profoundly sad shows imaginable. On the surface, it may seem like feeding sadness with more sadness. But I actually found it comforting. Despite the circumstances of my life not resembling BoJack’s in the slightest, I found myself with a deeper understanding of why I was feeling the way I was feeling. Or at least beyond the obvious, “You’re stressed out and moving sucks.”
Sadness is universal, and so is the need to explore and understand it. Sad art, when done affectively (or effectively) can be a portal to the aspects of yourself that you don’t understand and that you need to engage with. The most powerful experiences you can have with art can come from the breakthrough of sorrow. You just have to be willing to partake.
At the Very Least, Let’s Stop Using the Words “Depressing” or “Sad” Like They’re Criticisms
I was home for the holidays last year. My father and stepmother wanted to see a movie. I picked Manchester by the Sea. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I knew of its sad reputation, and I did warn them. But they were alright with it, and so we went. I thought the the movie was brilliant, and I’m pretty sure my parents recognized its greatness as well. Nevertheless, as we were walking back to the car on that frigid December night, my stepmother sarcastically said, “Well thanks for that, Garth!”
Now, again, my stepmother was joking. But I see her attitude reflected in a non-jokey manner in a lot of the ways people talk about art that tackles heavier subject matter. “That sounds so sad! Why do I want to watch that?” ask plenty of people who think of movies or art as entertainment first. (Also, in my mind, these people say “Why do I want to watch that?” in an insufferably whiny voice. Because I’m petty, that’s why.)
The short answer is this: You don’t. But the line between you and a work of art is invisible, meaning that your existence and your taste was not a factor when it was created. You can choose not to watch something that might make you sad (though you shouldn’t), but I draw the line at not liking something because it didn’t “entertain” you or it didn’t provide you with some sort of escape or it didn't function in a way it was never intended to in the first place.
Above all else, the purpose of art, I think, is expression. If sadness in your art rubs you the wrong way, then explore why. If you feel the art doesn’t adequately earn those feelings from you, that’s another matter and a perfectly respectable argument. But denying a work’s merit on the grounds that it’s darker or sadder by nature is a childish way of looking at art that needlessly limits the kind of experiences you can have.
Only engaging with sadder art is a fool’s errand, but in a more subtle way, so is only watching Disney movies and Parks and Rec for the trillionth time. (Note: I love Disney movies and Parks and Rec.) Sad art is needed because emotional maturity means balance. Emotions inform one another. Happiness needs sadness to exist. It’s alright if your cartoon show about an animated horse has lighthearted puns and animal jokes, and then follows them up with soul crushing melancholy. You saw Inside Out. You know how this works.
If a sad work of art doesn’t jive for you because it’s trying too hard or it makes you feel shitty for the wrong reasons, that’s fine. But don’t reject an experience just because it doesn’t exist to make you happy. Sadness is a part of who you are. Engage with it.
