Proselytizing despair

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Pop culture started down a dark path in the early 2010s with the rise of shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, which have dominated the TV industry for more than 10 years with their myriad spinoffs and the indelible marks left on the projects that came after. I’ve tried both shows — as well as too many of those they inspired — and discovered within a few episodes that they’re little more than multimillion-dollar productions made to traffic in trauma and proselytize despair.

I love tragedy. When it’s well-written, tragedy is cathartic and gives its audience the opportunity to be vulnerable and experience otherwise devastating emotions in a safe, controlled environment.

In famous tragedies like Saving Private Ryan, death fits seamlessly into the narrative because, paradoxically, it’s both inevitable and avoidable. Therein lies the crux of tragedy — hope. The audience can always point to one or two decisions when if the character had just chosen A instead of B, everything would have turned out alright. But this character, with all their vices and virtues, was always going to choose B because that’s who they are.

So when Wade or Gavroche or Bruno dies (and, in case you don’t recognize those characters, I won’t name their films), the audience can sob their eyes out; experience the fear, pain and loss; and feel cleansed afterward. It’s a hard emotional reset.

Violence-laden trauma porn like Game of Thrones — or now its spinoff House of the Dragon — doesn’t complete this emotional cycle. The depictions of death, mutilation and rape are so frequent as to become meaningless, so viewers are left desensitized with only a pervasive, hollow sadness. It’s all the pain with none of the benefits.

These stories embrace nihilism to such an extent that their overarching message is not only that caring for one another is pointless, but that the only constant in the world is senseless and insatiable cruelty. HBO spent $15 million per episode to tell audiences to give up and give in.

When I think about the glorification of despondency, one scene in particular comes to mind from The Walking Dead — whose tenets are, I’m sure, reflected in its six spinoffs. At the beginning of one episode, the main characters drive down a deserted road laden with zombies. An unnamed man walks toward them, elated to see other human beings, and begs to join them. They drive past without stopping or acknowledging his presence. Hours later, the characters retrace their steps and find the man’s mutilated body. They pull over, shoot the zombies feasting on him in a matter of seconds and loot his corpse.

The scenes had no plot relevance and, as far as I can tell, were never addressed again, yet they left me with a harrowing sadness that followed me throughout the day without giving way to a cathartic release. It left me hollow.

The “heroes” could have easily saved him, yet they viewed him as a resource, rather than a human being. The theme is obvious: there are no heroes. Humans are inherently ruthless, callous and self-serving, and life is worthless unless it’s your own.

These pessimistic narratives feed on and perpetuate the ideology of survivalism, spawning the doomsday preppers who hoard guns to shoot their neighbors rather than plant gardens to feed them. At the same time, they give us permission to be selfish — to refuse to wear a mask or provide free school lunches — because these narratives tell us that there’s no such thing as benevolence. People only care about themselves, so why bother caring about them?

Stories like these aren’t worth the effort it takes to digest them, nor the temporary surge of dopamine they provide. Media doesn’t have to pretend that everybody lives or that good people always meet good ends, but let there be hope alongside pain. We are inundated with enough tragedy in our lives, we don’t need invented stories declaring that that’s all humanity is.

Media needs to stop feeding this bloodthirsty narrative, and viewers need to stop consuming it like it’s a life lesson or universal commentary on human existence. Our current political landscape makes it seem like it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to care about one another. Keep throwing multimillion-dollar nihilistic, paranoid fantasies into the mix and we’ll allow reality to careen into the grizzly world that only exists (for now) in fiction.