Now, see, I don't even remember the Portman scene — it didn't intersect with my demons. But I sure as hell remember the scene in WALL-E that devastated me, and I remember the scene in Grosse Pointe Blank that I'll never be able to watch again without feeling a fierce wrenching sadness. It's weird how art randomly finds you when you least expect it and perhaps most need it, and draws out some of the poison.
One proper use of a 'trigger warning,' now that I've thought about it some, might alert a reader/viewer if the treatment of a potentially traumatizing thing trivializes it. The Heat scene was, for you, a well-crafted and serious handling of a suicide attempt, but what if you'd wandered into a movie that depicted a suicide attempt in an offensively comical fashion? Or, what if you'd happened across a TV airing of Harold and Maude with all those jocular suicide attempts -- would that have struck you, in the frame of mind you were in, as disgusting or weirdly cathartic? It's a rhetorical question, obviously, since you can't literally send to know how you would've reacted; what I'm fumbling for, perhaps, is to think about a work that dredges up feelings sort of pointlessly and thoughtlessly, instead of what Heat did for you. And it occurs to me that a lot of fanfiction carries trigger warnings, and a lot of fanfiction is pretty poor and falls back on, say, rape as a go-to plot device rather than treating it with any sort of thought; so perhaps some 'trigger warnings' might keep a reader from being pissed off in the wrong way, or a non-constructive way — i.e. pissed off not because the story features rape, etc., but because it handles it badly — rather than being wounded in some way.
So if I'd known you in 1995 and I was aware of some sort of clownishly handled suicide-attempt scene in some movie you had a chance of wandering into, I might want to give you a fair warning — not because the scene would break you in some way, but because it would seriously annoy you the same way a Sarah Palin speech would, and who needs that kind of annoyance when life provides no paucity of annoyance all by its lonesome?
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Date: 2011-07-13 07:32 pm (UTC)One proper use of a 'trigger warning,' now that I've thought about it some, might alert a reader/viewer if the treatment of a potentially traumatizing thing trivializes it. The Heat scene was, for you, a well-crafted and serious handling of a suicide attempt, but what if you'd wandered into a movie that depicted a suicide attempt in an offensively comical fashion? Or, what if you'd happened across a TV airing of Harold and Maude with all those jocular suicide attempts -- would that have struck you, in the frame of mind you were in, as disgusting or weirdly cathartic? It's a rhetorical question, obviously, since you can't literally send to know how you would've reacted; what I'm fumbling for, perhaps, is to think about a work that dredges up feelings sort of pointlessly and thoughtlessly, instead of what Heat did for you. And it occurs to me that a lot of fanfiction carries trigger warnings, and a lot of fanfiction is pretty poor and falls back on, say, rape as a go-to plot device rather than treating it with any sort of thought; so perhaps some 'trigger warnings' might keep a reader from being pissed off in the wrong way, or a non-constructive way — i.e. pissed off not because the story features rape, etc., but because it handles it badly — rather than being wounded in some way.
So if I'd known you in 1995 and I was aware of some sort of clownishly handled suicide-attempt scene in some movie you had a chance of wandering into, I might want to give you a fair warning — not because the scene would break you in some way, but because it would seriously annoy you the same way a Sarah Palin speech would, and who needs that kind of annoyance when life provides no paucity of annoyance all by its lonesome?