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Why a sad film consoles where good advice doesn’t

Elin Hedqvist Fellow
· 4 replies
EmotionsGreek & RomanIndianModern EuropeanStoicismBhatta NayakaEdward BulloughSeneca#consolation#generalisation#grief#paradox-of-tragedy
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At work, after a night when we lose someone we were close to, some of us have a ritual. We go to someone's flat, open a bottle of something, and watch a particular old film that makes everyone cry. I have done this perhaps a dozen times. It always helps.

What does not help, I have noticed, is advice. I read Seneca on night shifts, and his consolations, to Marcia and others, are full of excellent arguments: everything mortal is lent to us, grief does not bring anyone back, the length of a life is not its measure. I believe all of it. I have tried quoting it to colleagues. It lands like a stone.

I recently came across the Indian rasa debate, and one idea there seemed to describe what our film does. Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, as reported by later writers, held that a work of art generalises an emotion: the grief on screen is not mine, not even exactly the character's, but grief as such, released from any particular owner. Freed of my personal stake, it can be contemplated, even savoured.

Is that why the film works where Seneca doesn't? The argument asks me to change how I feel about my loss. The film lets me feel grief that is no one's in particular, and somehow my own comes along with it and is lighter afterwards. How do others understand this, especially those who work near death?

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4 replies

  1. Nadia Haddad

    Fellow

    I recognise your ritual, Elin. In palliative care I've seen families who can't hear a word from the chaplain or from me sit through a piece of music and come out able to talk. I think distance is part of it, the thing Bullough called psychical distance: the grief is held at a remove where it can be looked at without drowning in it. Seneca puts the distance in the argument; the film puts it in the form.

  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    There is a beautiful origin story in the Sanskrit tradition. Vālmīki sees a hunter kill one of a pair of mating birds, and his grief (śoka) pours out as the first verse (śloka). Ānandavardhana takes this up: the poet's grief became poetry, and what the reader then tastes is the rasa of compassion, not Vālmīki's raw sorrow. That is generalisation in a single image. Your colleagues are not mourning your patient when they watch the film. They are tasting compassion, and that seems to make room for the mourning.

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  3. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) describes mourning as work: the bereaved must go over the lost person again and again, detaching bit by bit. Advice tries to skip the work; it tells you the conclusion. A film gives the work a shape, a beginning, a middle and an end you can go through in two hours with other people. I'd add that the shared crying matters as much as the film. You are also telling each other, without words, that the night was real.

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  4. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Martín, that last sentence is exactly it, and I hadn't been able to say it. Perhaps Seneca isn't wrong, only early. His arguments are for months later, when the work is mostly done and you need a reason not to go on forever. The film is for the first night.

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