Scenes That Are Almost Too Uncomfortable/Awkward to Watch

I hope it isn’t too late but I really wanted to add one to the record. It’s actually not an entire scene but it’s a moment. One very brief moment with a great payoff. It’s the first time I can remember being truly uncomfortable in a movie too and it’s a great movie so let me offer this one.

It was in the scene at the Grand Canyon in Lost in America.

[spoiler]After Linda had just gambled away their entire life savings ( over $250,00 ) and left them with less than a grand left they had an argument at the Grand Canyon during which she says to her husband David:

“If that’s how you feel about it we should just split the money in half and each go our own way. That’d be the fair thing.”
[/spoiler]

A lot of the examples in this thread are probably more uncomfortable ( and I’ve watched most of these movies and have put a bunch more of them in my queue ) but when I read the thread title this one came to mind instantly because I can still remember how I felt when I was a younger, less cynical person and I saw the classic train wreck moments before the engines collided.

Oh, and put me down in the embarrassing being more uncomfortable than just about anything else I could see.

Add my vote to:
Jerry Lewis movies - serious cringe
Gummo & Happiness - sad/sick
Also:
Fahrenheit 911 - only managed to watch 10 minutes of that - to depressing
Napoleon Dynamite - most scenes. About an alienated teenager who is bullied at school. I dont think the writers were trying to make the viewer empathise with the bullies, though thats how I felt by the end of the film.
The Office, Extras and Summer Heights High are brilliant. Satire, or ‘taking the piss’ is the most constructive form of comedy.

Oh that would probably be Carrie , having pigs blood poured on her at the prom.

Declan

I’ve been catching “The Office” reruns on TBS and, at times, find it painful to watch. Probably the worst one was when Michael outed (I think) this gay guy during a diversity meeting. Oops!

I’m going to get called on this, but has nobody mentioned Curb Your Enthusiasm yet? That show had some very awkward moments, where you just want to cringe behind the couch.

I’m not sure how long the clip you saw was, or how effectively you can capture the atmosphere of the moment removed from context on Youtube at all, but I think a lot of the impact of the moment comes from so many horrible things happening at once. The movie sucks you in so much that you don’t need to see the violence itself for it to be extremely powerful.

From the same movie, I’ll say…

Edward Norton’s rape scene. The rape itself is bad enough (he’s cornered by several huge men, and there’s nothing he can do about it), but what really gets me is when they smash his bald head against the shower room wall and then just leave him lying there. I believe they had been choking him with a towel or something, too. I’m not sure because I always have to look away during that scene.

He has a thing against actresses who develop swelled egos. Palindromes was originally supposed to be about an older Dawn Weiner but when director Todd Solondz approached Heather Matarazzo about reprising her role in the sequel, she demanded too much money and generally acted so diva-ish that the two had a falling out. As a result, Solondz rewrote Palindromes so it was about a completely different character and dealt with Dawn by having it mentioned she committed suicide after suffering another series of indignities and humiliations.

A tad spiteful? Yes, but it does show why you should never get a writer pissed off at you (especially if that writer is pretty much responsible for launching your career in the first place).

No, I don’t. Spoiler please.

Actually, I’d like to ask for spoilers for as many of these scenes as possible. Being oblique doesn’t help, especially since I don’t have direct access to many (most) of these movies and/or TV shows.

Cape Fear (the 1991 remake):

Max Cady is on the boat and is ordering the girl AND her mom to take off their clothes and get down on their knees. It’s almost as if the “pre”-rape was worse than watching the actual rape would have been.

Monk is silly for the most part, but when it gets to the scenes where Adrian is truly obsessing and can’t stop, I can’t watch.

For instance, there’s a scene where he takes an exam to get reinstated that he’s sure he’s going to ace. He’s alone in a room with one policeman, and is given several pencils. They’re not in order from longest to shortest, and he can’t bear to touch them, so he asks the policeman to rearrange them. And to put them together so the eraser ends line up.

When that’s finally done, he starts the exam, which uses a bubble sheet for the answers. He fills in the bubble for the first question, but some of the pencil markings get out of the bubble’s boundary. He can’t stand to see that the bubble isn’t filled in perfectly. So he attempts to erase the stray marks, but the eraser smudges it instead. He then erases the whole thing, but it makes things messier, and he eventually spends the entire time he’s alloted trying to make the the first answer bubble perfect.

Truly cringeworthy.

The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon, where he is talking to the girl in the park and asks her to sit in his lap. I was nearly screaming “STOP IT!” at him.

The basic plot of the film is that, in a complete role reversal, a young girl (15ish) traps a sexual predator and psychologically tortures him. After pronouncing him beyond redemption she decides to castrate him and makes him watch it via a video-cam. I defy any man watching that scene to not cross his legs and keep them like that for a long long time.

Huh. It didn’t even cross my mind that you were talking about that scene, probably because I’m not a man. It’s not that I’m unaffected by sadistic torture against men, mind you, but more probably because I’ve never owned my own set of nuggets.

Or – most likely that scene was overshadowed by the final scene on the roof.

Justified or not, the thought of someone being forced to put a noose around his neck and walk off a roof or be exposed as a pedophile/predator left me speechless for a good while.

Saying that pretty much the whole film after the first 15 minutes was a big old squirm fest. Kudos for Ellen Page for morphing so seamlessly from high intelligent but clearly a bit unhinged paedophile hunter to smart grungy but loveable girl in Juno.

It’s been mentioned before in other threads, but the stripper scene in True Lies makes me squirm in my seat.

You can sort of handwave the initial part, because Curtis’ character is getting to live out her fantasy (and she does start losing her inhibitions and enjoying herself, to the point that Arnold’s character drops the tape recorder).

But then he tells her to lie down on the bed and close her eyes… :frowning:

I always cringe.

If an episode of Friends is on, there’s roughly a 50/50 chance that I’ll have to leave the room. I can’t stand that show sometimes, but I think it’s brilliant other times.

I have no problem with The Office. Michael Scott is embarassing, but I’m surprised people think he’s more awkward than Dwight, or “purple is for whores” Angela.

This scene is a metaphor for America’s reluctance to enter into the war in a timely enough manner, and the consequences of that action. Upham represents America and of course you have the German/Jewish (Mellish is indeed Jewish) dynamic going on upstairs, just within earshot.

Also, you have it wrong about the identity of the German. The German that shot Hanks’s character, and was then shot by Upham was the same one released earlier. He even uses Upham’s name (that he learned while digging graves while Upham talked to him earlier). The one who killed Mellish was a totally different person.

It’s interesting that the first films that came to my mind were also Pan’s Labyrinth (especially the bottle scene) and American History X.

And I second Summer Heights High, but also Chris Lilley’s other series We Can Be Heroes (also called The Nominees in the UK). Especially Phil Olivetti.

Are you sure you have the right movie? He goes into the book store and uses the “be kind of a dick…be David Caruso from Jade…” approach and is quite pleased and surprised that it actually works on Elizabet Banks’ character.

I found the scenes where he was about to have sex and then freaked to be much more uncomfortable.

Yeah. Seems Carell has a decent skills for picking up women on bookstores.

I will have to echo season 2 of Extras. More painful, I think, than the UK Office which in turn is more painful than the US Office. After a certain point, my friends and I almost got pavlovian reflexes of hiding for cover when certain situations arose. Especially in the finale, when…

Robert DeNiro makes an appearance. DeNiro being the source of inspiration for Andy’s entire career and the one person he’d want to make a good impression on.

Tonight on Showtime, another Ellen Page squirmfest which I am sure I will take a pass on- she plays Sylvia Likens in AN AMERICAN CRIME.