“I suppose,” said my friend with the faint air of disdain which is so much a feature of my interactions with others that I should probably attend to it at some point, “you won’t want to come and see Hamnet with me, will you?”
“Correctamundo, dude!” I said, beaming (either element of which response, it occurs to me, may not be wholly unconnected with the faint but pervasive disdain noted above). She sighed and shook her head. “This can’t go on, you know.”
“Ah,” I said, still beaming. “But it can! And it will!”
Hamnet, you see, is a sad film. An absolute sobfest, by all accounts, as you might expect from a story about the death of Shakespeare’s son at the age of 11 and its effects on his mother and father. And I do not watch, read or attend plays about sad things. No, thank you! Not since 2004. That was the year three people I loved died in quick succession and I have felt myself to be quite schooled enough in the matter of misery ever since. Therefore, though there have been occasional accidental sightings or professional obligations (I have another life elsewhere as a TV critic), I haven’t deliberately consumed…let’s call it “emotional matter” in over 20 years.
And I look with serious suspicion upon those who do – particularly those who seek it out, for whom it is the preferred diet.
To me, this means one of two things. In the best case scenario, it means that you have not suffered very much in real life and know yourself at some visceral level still to be in need of preparation for it. That’s okay. I mean, I envy you to the point of hatred (you’re likely young and clear-skinned too, so it would be foolish not to), but it’s okay. That is what art is for. To teach us. To give us tasters of what the future holds. To develop empathy and sympathy and show us that whatever life holds, it has held it before and will hold it again and that we will never be alone in any of it. When misery and loss are abstract concepts, absorbing depictions of them makes sure you are not absolutely blindsided and crippled by their force when they arrive. Lovely.
The worst case scenario is that you are a monster. A vampire feeding off the retold, retooled misery of others when you can’t get enough of the real stuff. Not lovely.
Past a certain age – or, perhaps better put, past a certain level of experience – you need to learn to protect yourself. Too much connection will kill you. To read a book or watch a film or see a play or listen to music too often that evokes past unhappiness and reminds you of terrible experiences rips off scabs rather than applying soothing balm. Instead of building resilience, it begins to erode it. The world and its horrors are already too much with us. We don’t need more.
So I have, for the past two decades, refused to admit more into my life than my stupid life (which has refused to stop admitting death into it, let alone the myriad smaller sorrows of existence) forces me to. It’s not that I read or watch only romcoms or sitcoms (though I do do both). There is plenty of stuff out there that is not built around explorations of grief, and I don’t mind any number of gruesome murders in thrillers and so on. But the minute it Gets Real? Yeah, I’m out.
Is it selfish? Is it immature to protect myself this way? Probably. Am I going to continue? Yes. Do I recommend it? Also, yes.
We are, these days, over-connected. To each other, by the internet, and to ourselves by the constant urge to feel and deal with our emotions – every single one, to the fullest possible extent, every single moment of every single day. But just as we were never designed to cope with knowledge of the ills of the entire world falling upon us in a relentless cascade of headlines, videos and social media posts, so we are not really designed to be so ceaselessly in touch with our feelings. No man is an island, but nor are we meant to cram our inner or outer landscapes with high-rise tower blocks either.
To survive life, you must learn to compartmentalise. And to wait until you have a bit of time and space to peer into one of the compartments and deal with whatever detritus you find there properly. It’s not repression. It’s an orderly unpacking. You can do it with a therapist on hand or a glass of whisky and it is not for me to say which way might do you more good. But slainte! Here’s to those we’ve loved and lost and the griefs we will deal with in our own time. And not, I think, in a cinema seat.
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