Writer, Rumpus editor, and funny woman Elissa Bassist has written an essay for New York about her addiction to frenzied television consumption on Netflix. It made me laugh out loud, three times. I have thought similar things before myself, talked about such feelings at length with other desperately confused people, and read similar essays before, and yet this deeply personal telling drove the idea home anew. What's the idea? This excerpt summarizes:
Auto-play seamlessly transitioned to episode twelve, to Tara saying to her friend, "I think I have a boyfriend," and my first reaction was, "You dumb idiot, of course you don't," because I knew, from life, a kiss does not mean a relationship.
Wrong! In the next episode, she introduces Ethan to her parents as her “boyfriend," and he doesn't flinch. For the next three episodes — while I ate lunch — they are a couple, and he's perfect and she'sperfect and they are perfect and at peace, and for the first time in a long time, I felt perfect and at peace, like I had love in my world. Watching television reminded me that living could be more exciting, more interesting than watching television. I had a lightness and a thrill in me as I waltzed around my apartment, washing my dishes. Of course I had to remind myself these feelings came from the Australian teen dance dramedy Dance Academy. My happiness was absolute and tangible and transformative, but it wasn’t real.
Although I don't go for shows like Dance Academy, I do find myself similarly affected at times. I am a sap, and have been known to cry watching dog food commercials -- which I don't see so much anymore now that I watch TV on Netflix or HBO GO.
Point is: I get it. Except Elissa's last point, because sometimes I wonder -- and this is where it gets metaphysical -- why isn't it real? Or, more properly, why can't it be real? We articulate our own internal emotional lives in relation to external narratives all the time. So, why not Dance Academy? Or Girls (for an obvious example)? Or Friday Night Lights? (Which features in one of the laugh out loud moments in this essay.)
I love FNL. The first season, anyhow. Unlike, Elissa, I was able to kick the compulsion and not move forward to seasons two and beyond because I'd heard that it was a disaster and I loved the show so much I didn't want to sully what I'd constructed in my mind as a perfect thing. And that brings me to weltschmerz, which is where Elissa lands in this essay. Somehow, I did not know until now, reading Elissa's story about Dance Academy, that weltschmerz describes the pain one has upon realizing that the idealized world in one's mind cannot be matched by reality. I speak German and somehow I did not know this. I thought, like most casual Weltschmerzers, that it just meant the pain of realizing that life, the world, maybe existence, is fundamentally tragic. But come to think of it, that's just a default state of awareness. The true meaning weltschmerz, the full Byronic sense, is for advanced lament.
And I guess that's the danger of opening yourself up to the joys of Dance Academy. (Making matters worse, not only do you invite weltschmerz, but it's a weltschmerz inspired not from poetry but from an Australian teen dance drama.) But why not open yourself up whatever glories can be found therein? If you accept that happiness derived from Dance Academy is not real, maybe it's a worse tragedy, because then you undo the idealized realm too. And without that, you are left with only the failings of reality. Sure, you don't have weltschmerz; instead, you're stuck with schmerz.