I don’t mean that it gave you a few thrills and chills that were over a few minutes later, or that it sucked so bad that you were unhappy about wasting your time.
I mean the kind of upset that comes only from seeing something happen that hits a little too close to home–e.g., a crime is shown and you were the victim of the same sort of crime; or someone dies of an illness that you recognize all too clearly; or a relationship goes south and you know exactly how it feels, etc.
I don’t have cable, so I watched Six Feet Under on DVD. The last season was especially hard for me to watch, because Nate Fisher died from AVM,
which is what my older brother has as well.
Not to be too morbid, but the hard fact is that it’s impossible to know how long a person with this condition will live (then again, we don’t know how many years we’re going to have, do we?), despite all the surgeries and treatments. It’s quite unpredictable, difficult to treat, and can cause trouble for years.
All I can do is tell myself that at least my bro has lived more than ten years longer than the character in question, and at least his kids are grown.
Excellent series, and the finale is stunning. Still, it was pretty unnerving for me.
Got any such experiences you are willing to share?
A very close friend of mine died of AIDS in the early 90’s. It is very difficult for me to watch the movies Longtime Companion and Philadelphia because they make me think of my friend. Especially these scenes:
In Longtime Companion, it is the scene where Bruce Davison makes the nurse leave the house, closes all the doors, sits down holds his lover’s hand and whispers: “It’s OK…you can go, let it all go…” ::tearing up just thinking about it::
and
In Philadelphia, it’s the scene where Tom Hanks describes the meaning of the opera to Denzel Washington. (sorry can’t remember character names). That scene is touching to me because my friend had a deep love of classical music and opera, he was a classical pianist and organist himself. The way the character conveys his love of the piece and describes it to someone who neither understands the language nor the music is truly moving.
I found the kidnapping/hostage episode involving David in Six Feet Under extremely traumatic and it stayed with me very vividly for days after seeing it. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, but it’s pretty much my worst nightmare come to life.
Living in Columbia, SC, made watching Special Bulletin kind of nerve-wracking, even though I knew what it was and what it was doing. It was still nervous-making.
This goes way back to when I was young enough to have it affect me much. In the early 60’s, while JFK was still alive, there was a documentary with a title something like We Will Bury You which had as its main theme the Communist Threat to world peace.
Among the scenes was the execution of Batista’s guards in Cuba. They brought out this guy in a white suit and tied him to a pole. He was animated, laughing or protesting or otherwise making a lot of movement. Suddenly the shots rang out and his skull was split right down the middle and one half of it drooped down onto his shoulder. I almost puked right there in the theater.
Until that film I had not see a head shot. Movies didn’t have much blood and the documentaries were much tamer. I had until that time a real sacred regard for the head and thought the ultimate degradation would be the damage to the brain.
After that movie I was to be exposed to the Zapruder film and the gore associated with the JFK head shot.
It took me years of exposure to Hollywoodized head shots and brain injuries to become desensitized to it. But even then in one of the Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop things (the first one I believe) there was a particularly grisly scene with a goon holding another guy by the hair with his gun to the back of the head and splattering his brain all over the wall.
Pretty much anything showing somebody being raped. It’s happened to friends of mine and I just can’t sit through it; I’ll get up and leave, change the channel, etc.
Did you watch it on DVD? Man, that episode left me shaking, and I remember thinking that I would have actually appreciate commercial breaks, just to escape the relentlessness of it all.
Especially when the guy doused David in gasoline. My stomach was in knots.
“The Accused” was tough for me. Friends helped me walk out of the viewing to catch my breath and recover. Reading reports about the filming, it seems that Jodie Foster didn’t even remember the assault scene afterwards, and also ended up comforting the actors who played her rapists. I can believe it.
There was an episode of CSI that tore me apart. I won’t spoiler box this, because it’s a pretty old episode.
It involved a teenage couple who had a baby, and decided it was all too much for them. They decided to commit suicide in the desert. They entered into a pact and took a bunch of pills to kill themselves. At the end, it was revealed that the girl’s mother was involved in the suicide pact, and had driven them out into the desert. There was this one scene where the mother had left the girl and her boyfriend and was walking back to her car. The girl stood up and started to follow her, saying something like, “Wait, Mom! I’ve changed my mind! Please help me!” The mother just kept walking to her car while her daughter stumbled after her growing increasingly slower from the overdose. In the end, the mother said something about how the kids could never have raised the baby themselves, and things were better this way.
That episode REALLY got to me. I’m even getting a little choked up just typing this post.
I don’t know the film - I saw the following while flicking through channels with the sound off, late at night. I love playing ‘Guess the Film’, so when I arrived at a movie, I stopped for a bit. A woman got on an elevator, interior shot showed her pushing a button. Elevator goes down for a bit, then stops. As the woman starts to panic, a panel in the ceiling opens, and a guys pours gasoline all over the interior of the elevator, then as the woman screams, he tosses down a lighted match. Close up of woman screaming, falling to her knees, fade to black.
I turned the TV off, and had to steady myself for a time. What disturbed me most was that I found myself thinking ‘If only I’d had some context, that scene wouldn’t have been so disturbing. Maybe she was a horrible person who deserved that, maybe the bad guy was some kind of ultra-bad guy and this was the writer and director’s way of showing me how bad.’ But all that rationalization also made me think ‘You’re way too used to seeing people killed in films without being shown how horrible it is.’
No idea what movie this is, no desire to find out.
My bugaboo is the character of Jud (played by Rod Steiger) in the movie Oklahoma, which I saw when I was 11 or 12. Steiger doesn’t bother me in any of his other roles, but his lustful stalking of Laurey, and Laurey’s helplessness, and everybody just letting it happen – it was powerful stuff for a little girl. The movie made it seem like women had no power at all.
I haven’t been able to watch the movie since, even though I love the music and the actors. Maybe if I saw it now, I’d think Jud was just lovestruck and I’d have some sympathy for him. But I don’t think so.
Recreational wifebeating always freaks me out; my dad was a real prince. For this reason The Quiet Man is always a difficult watch for me. And the scenes in Into the Wild, where the parents were beating on each other while the kids looked on helplessly, same panic-attacky flashbacks.
