Sad Movies are Addicting
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Sad Movies are Addicting
People love binge-watching sad films. They are almost addictive. Why?
Have you ever watched a tragedy film that cuts your soul in half and makes you wish you had never clicked the movie open—but then upon finishing the film you immediately go on to binge its sequel and the sequel of its sequel? That happened to me yesterday. I was watching A Chinese Odyssey Part 1, a tragicomedy that blends Stephen Chow’s top-notched humor with a real-life inspired tragic romance tale. I felt so shitty after finishing the first movie that I felt a weird urge to binge the Part 2 and Part 3. Very few movies could make me as enthusiastic to binge the sequels as that inexorable wistfulness that Chow’s movie left me with: I somehow became addicted to sadness.
It’s weird isn’t it. Tragic movies and TV shows are addicting. They thrust you into a furnace of emotional torments, but our subconscious minds somehow “like” it and oftentimes want more of it. We live the torment, yet we continue to watch the movie. We could, with a whisk of hand, slap the lid of the laptop close to snap out the sorrowful tune of the movie’s theme song—a simple action with a positive reward—yet our brain’s funky circuitry somehow discourages us against doing it. I consciously understood that I would end up in a terrible emotional state if I binge watched the movie’s sequels, but I did anyways. Usually humans’ brain circuitry is wired to avoid experiences that invoke a negative emotional response, but apparently not in the case of movies, TV shows, or books. In those cases, we love sadness, somehow!
It’s not actually because we love sadness, I think. Sadness feels shitty, and our conscious minds know that. It’s because the alternative to sadness is worse—that moment you finish a long novel, a TV series, or a well-executed movie, you feel an emptiness hollowing out your heart. That is because you had invested so much, emotionally, into the story of that book, show, or movie. You are immersed in it. The story’s world becomes part of yours. The story’s adventure becomes your adventure. And the characters become your friends. So, the moment you flip pass the final page of the book or see the credits rolling on the dark screen, you realize with a shock that the story is gone—part of your world taken from you, part of your life’s adventure just ended, and some friends of yours left you forever. That swelling emptiness underpins a sense of purposelessness and solitude. It’s worse than sorrow. So, prefer to keep binging, saving our place in this sad world that makes us feel shitty rather than breaking away from it.
That’s not all of it. I think we are more likely to become addicted to sad movies than normal movies. Sorrow has the unique power of eliciting empathetic responses from others. After all, that is why evolution developed sorrow—as a social signaling mechanism that whispers into the air, “I need help, love, care, …” It is designed to elicit empathetic responses from others around us, and sad movies play smartly into this. A tragic movie causes viewers to develop sympathy or empathy towards its characters (whichever characters that were crying into the camera). We become more emotionally attached to these characters than normal film characters. We become more immersed in their cinematic worlds and adventures. Hence, when the credits roll, it becomes harder to say goodbye.