Uncomfort in Media
- Angela Sanford
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
by Raegan Densmore
If you are faced with confusion or hatred while reading a book or watching a movie, there is a high chance that it is not a bad thing, even when you think it is. Sometimes it is intentional that you are confused or uncomfortable when you believe it is bad writing. I have grown to enjoy hearing these views and being able to understand how people take in a story differently, and as a writer, I have learned that writers intend for this to happen as well.
Severance by Ling Ma was the last book we read in my English class. The book is excessive, including random information that seems useless or a waste of space. The narrator would talk about her past but more so about the other background character’s pasts, and their feelings more so than her own. When we met in our tutorial to talk about the book, my classmates did not like this story for those reasons; “Why does she talk so much about Steven Reitman?” or “why are so many name brands or items mentioned?”. I was quite disappointed with their view at first as I found this excessiveness served a purpose; the overload of name brands was intentional and a representation of modern society and consumerism and the “unnecessary” information on background characters felt like a representation of how she lived her life through other people, more specifically, their nostalgia. But now I believe their interpretation serves a purpose as well, this story is supposed to make you feel confused like this, it is supposed to make you ask “why?”.
Recently I watched my first David Lynch movie, “Blue Velvet”. This movie is quite disturbing and uncomfortable, ending in a way that is supposed to seem happy but I could not help but feel this deep uncomfortableness inside me, it seemed phony. It seemed as though the main character, Jeffery Beaumont, gets to live happily ever after, while Dorothy Vallens has to live her life with deep trauma and the loss of her husband, despite being reunited with her child. The story depicts Jeffery as someone with good intentions, to “solve this crime”, but as the story progresses his intentions don’t seem actually that great, and that everything he does seems to be for himself, for his own wants and satisfaction, becoming deeply disturbing. Later he is confronted by this, with the antagonist telling him that he is “just like him”. Jeffrey reflects on this the next morning, but does that mean he is good at heart and being led astray by the circumstances, or now that everything is starting to negatively affect him, he is becoming hit by reality and this scene shows how he becomes conscious of his decisions, but continues to make them.
I saw a video of Simon Pegg talking about how he showed his daughter this movie. He described how she hated it as it made her uncomfortable, but how she would not stop talking about it the next day. He stated that she hated it for exactly the same reasons that David Lynch wanted people to hate it. That he throws so much information at you and that it is your job to decipher it. There are many reasons as to why one would feel this way and this strong emotion can really make you think about what you just watched, to pick it apart piece by piece, just like how one would do when they absolutely love something.
I am not arguing against people’s interpretations, but rather stating every interpretation is valid. These stories are made for you to feel something and it may not always be good. Sometimes, you are meant to feel confused or uncomfortable and even hate what you are consuming and whether you discover that feeling further is up to you. I believe that you should accept people who only see stories at face-value or maybe see it further but absolutely despise it because writers are artists who create intention and pieces to interpret. Not everyone interprets things the same and that is the intention.
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