Traumatic media
Schroedingers Cat
Shipmate
OK, we have had films that make you cry, laugh, books that you re-read. This is the opposite.
Films, books whatever that produced a traumatic response in you, that you would never wish to see/read again, and nobody else should have to either. Not just really poor - more, really good that actually connect to you in a painful way.
Film - The Deerhunter. Do not watch it.
Book - Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Do not read if you have young children. When I finished, I went homs and had to hug my kids.
Films, books whatever that produced a traumatic response in you, that you would never wish to see/read again, and nobody else should have to either. Not just really poor - more, really good that actually connect to you in a painful way.
Film - The Deerhunter. Do not watch it.
Book - Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Do not read if you have young children. When I finished, I went homs and had to hug my kids.
Comments
I would advise against watching that because it's so long-winded and implausible.
I could MAYBE buy the idea that the Vietnamese Communists would force American POWs to play Russian Roulette. But for-profit nightclubs where Americans make a living playing Russian Roulette to entertain the locals? That's the sort of thing a screenwriter comes up during an all-night writing marathon after he's had too much coffee.
(If someone wants to prove me wrong about the mythical nature of Saigon suicide clubs, I'm open to being schooled. But I'm pretty sure we would have heard more about them, had they been real.)
Please could someone correct the speeling in the thred tittle? Tramatic makes me think of those who are allergic to trams...
Thx. Please carry on.
May I be forgiven, but I admit to having been fascinated by violent clips on YouTube from certain Quentin Tarantino films. Disturbingly graphic, yes, but there's a good deal of satisfaction in seeing the baddies (mostly) getting their come-uppance...
Seconded. (Though I think I could probably handle seeing it twice.)
My mum and I both had the same reaction to Thérèse Raquin - we didn't care about the people, but what happened to the cat was upsetting.
A neatly macabre touch by M. Zola, duly picked up by the BBC (assuming you mean the version starring Kate Nelligan?).
My father-in-law was rather more upset by the graphic scenes of decaying corpses in the Morgue...
Also, @Schroedingers Cat , you haven't asked me to correct the spelling of the thread title, but I think a lot of us wouldn't mind if I did that!
I can't think offhand of anything in particular - whether book or film - that has disturbed me to such an extent as @jedijudy describes, but obviously others are more receptive to such influences than I am.
I watched the entire thing behind a cushion. And the end!!! Still creeps me out.
I offer up a section of one of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who Auton stories. When one of the autons - in the form of a doll - came to live and strangled someone. I was tiny and learning to read. There are a lot of books aimed at that audience with toys as their main character. Terrified me then and had a similar effect when I saw it years later.
Thank you @jedijudy for fixing the title - I am on holiday, and so is my brain.
The Green Mile came to mind for me as well, reading other contributions. It is a very good film, but utterly dispicable in terms of the story.
@Lyda strictly speaking films that don't live up to their hype have been done. This is more films that well satisfy their hype and some. Most noted are really good films/books. Which is why they are intensely disturbing to finish.
Threads is disturbing, but I also found it properly informative and challenging.
Scary and disturbing, indeed.
Then you have missed a great deal of properly informative and challenging material. Your loss.
The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andric.
They are both great novels, but I did find them traumatizing.
SPOILERS for general story arc:
Do NOT read it if you are depressed, feeling lost, etc. Seriously.
I fail to see how you can say that when you have no idea as to what books I was refering to.
Therefore, if you failed to finish a book because you weren't enjoying it, you may have missed a great deal of informative and challenging material later in that book.
Simples. The exact book is irrelevant - I merely propound a principle.
I think that was the most depressing novel I've ever read.
And Martin Scorseses's Silence is a film I couldn't watch any further after seeing a Japanese Christian family burned to death for their faith.
True, as far as it goes. But if we assume that @Telford has a fixed amount of time that he devotes to reading, then by declining to finish a book that he's not enjoying, he creates the opportunity to read an additional book, which might also contain informative and challenging material.
Whether or not this is to his net benefit depends on whether material that would be beneficial for Telford to read is more often found in books he enjoys, or books he doesn't.
It's true that some people have only a limited time to devote to perusing the printed page, and there's certainly nothing wrong with putting a book aside if one feels it appropriate to do so...
Also Dumbo - the scene where the mother is separated from Dumbo.
Also avoid "Bambi vs. Godzilla". Said in all seriousness.
"You were dreaming about the bit where Cedric Diggory dies, weren't you?" asked my son.
"How did you know that?" I asked.
He rolled up his sleeve to reveal quite nasty bruising on his forearm. "That was the bit where you grabbed my arm."
It took a couple of days for the bruising to fade
I found the book a tad cold but still read engrossed. Lucky, I think it was called, is the author’s autobiographical account of her rape & trial. That was a tough read. Again cold, distant & flippant almost in the epilogue with references to impacts of the experience.
Film: Dancer in the Dark - good writing, weird, beautiful soundtrack, Bjork was captivating. But I wanted to stream so much at how “it’s not fair!” & there was one scene that just devastated me. Did, as US films, tv etc. with medical themes, make me appreciate our, somewhat shambolic but generally kindly so, NHS.
Book: 1984 - read summer after I’d turned 18 in spring & sat A-Levels in June, on a family holiday in North Wales. In full angst & anguish but jaded with turmoil & with freedom but still tied to bloody family!
Orwell created a system that there was no means to rally against. Since then I’ve read a lot of dystopian fiction from kid to YA to adult to classic, Clockwork Orange, Handmaid’s Tale, Alan Moore, etc.. but I just felt a definite absence of hope at the ending of 1984. Most dystopian fiction at least clings to Pandora’s box.
I’m not entirely sure of the title but there’s a book, possibly “Roll of a Thunder, Hear My Cry,” or “Let The Circle Be Unbroken,” with a lynching of a potentially/probably innocent black man for a dubious rape accusation. As a 15 yr old I was so irked at the injustice & awfulness of the situation I unintentionally tore the bound library book about a quarter of the way up the spine as a reaction.
There is an argument I've seen that the appendix to 1984, outlining the structures of Newspeak, is actually intended as a final chapter to the story, subtly implying that the party was eventually defeated. For example, "...the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050" makes it sound as if that goal never came about.
Oh, I know something you might enjoy.
I thought I could handle any account of events, until I started reading a book calle The Night Hamburg Died.. I have read accounts of Hiroshima, but this sounded worse.
There were fire-storms with 100 mph winds. The winds pushed the people into the flames. The bodies of people in underground shelters were so badly burned they could not be identified.
That cured me of reading graphic descriptions of war.
Dang, I loved this! What that says about me, well...
I'll nominate any film that shows a rape scene. I just.can't.handle it.
That would only apply to non fiction. I read plenty of non fiction but I would not open any book on a subject I was not interested in. I was refering to fiction and the times I have failed to finish are in fact quite few. The last time was " Sons and Lovers " by D>H> Lawrence. It became rather tedius.
The torture is in service of getting a glimpse of an afterlife, or confirming that there is one. The speech that sets out this metaphysical justification is such idiotic, non-sensical bilge. After sitting through the entire screening (there was a steady stream of audience members leaving - I can't blame them), that speech was the final stomach turning insult. Salò, at least, for all its onscreen outrages, has a definite socio-political argument that it pursues relentlessly.
The post-screening Q&A was the most vociferous, even amongst audience members, that I have ever witnessed. People were shouting and cursing at the director, others defending him. It was not your typically polite Toronto audience. Martyrs was really just a misogynistic torture porn wank. Great make-up department, though.
I got home at 2.45am and drank a bottle of wine. It didn't work.
The Help hits my personal triggers. Had I known about the bit where Celia has a miscarriage, I wouldn't have read it. OTOH I'm a bit ambivalent because I enjoyed the rest of the book. No way I'm watching the film though.
The Lovely Bones is a superb book. Hence proving that I do like really disturbing and twisted stuff really.
Is it wrong that this makes me want to read it?
1984 - interesting (and yes, it does end up incredibly dystopian as the system crushed Smith. The system wins). I have just finished reading "We" which was an inspiration for this, but it does end in a positive way that 1984 doesn't. I think Orwell had come to realise that happy outcomes are very rare - and take generations to dismantle state machinery.
Telford - S.T.F.U.
I was also traumatized by a serialisation of a Joyce Stranger book about a collie dog, which was on the radio just before I went to junior school one week. Normally, we left for school before the end of the episode, but for the last installment we couldn't tear ourselves away (me, little sister and gran who took us to school), so we arrived at school late and weeping because the dog died.
That's why I've never seen War Horse, too - I know the horse doesn't die, but the barbed wire scene.
I've read Felidae, too, with the cat torture - my mother-in-law passed her copy on to me. She was fond of cuddly mysteries, often involving a detective with pets, and thought that it would be something similar. She was quite shocked when she actually read it.
One or two of these stories were IIRC particularly gruesome physically - as opposed to, say, psychologically horrid - and I doubt if I would care to read them again now.
I can't say I suffered quite as nasty an effect as @Firenze, but I can see how at least some of the tales might result in sleepless nights and Unpleasant Dreams...