Cinema Non Grata

Scott Hardie | March 3, 2020
Is there any kind of movie (such as a genre) that you refuse to see, no matter how good its reputation is? Why do you feel that way?

Erik Bates | March 3, 2020
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Samir Mehta | March 5, 2020
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Erik Bates | March 5, 2020
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Samir Mehta | March 5, 2020
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Scott Hardie | March 7, 2020
I have trouble watching horror too. I'd like to see more horror in general, but I'd like to do a lot of things in general; it probably isn't going to happen.

I could stomach horror in my twenties. In fact, back then I had a comforting Friday night ritual of getting a pizza and watching a horror movie. A friend asked how I could find horror comforting, and I said with a smile, "No matter how bad my week has been, at least I'm not being chased by vampires or terrorized by ghosts or whatever. It makes me feel better." But then Kelly came back into my life, and she is almost never willing to watch horror, and I have found that I have little interest in watching it on the rare occasions that I see a movie alone.

Part of the problem is that horror movies are so often bad; jump scares are cheap and easy and plentiful and worthless to me, while good horror, the sort of creepy and unnerving psychological horror that drive classics like The Shining, that's really hard to pull off, and infrequently attempted. But honestly, even when a horror movie has a stellar reputation like Get Out, I'm still loathe to see it, because I don't enjoy the feeling of dread any more. I gave up on Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot because even in the most innocuous episodes, there was still a constant unpleasant feeling of danger like something was going to go terribly wrong at any moment.

I have also developed an aversion to costume dramas, specifically ones set in Europe in the 1700s or 1800s. I saw a few movies in the Merchant-Ivory mold when I was young and they bored me to tears. I have no doubt that these movies are often good, and I have liked a few. But I don't care how good the reviews are; I just can't bring myself to watch them.

Samir, "lifestyle fetishism" is a great term for that. With the rise of Instagram and Pinterest, we're all living in an era of performative lifestyles. We're expected to show off constantly, even at risk of death, while acting casual about it as if it's no big deal. Even our main celebrities these days, the Kardashians and their kind, exist in a sort of lifestyle brand space rather than any traditional route to fame. It's a weird and unhealthy place for our culture to be. I'm with you in being turned off by most of it.