yOU has had a romantic relationship with trauma, just looking at some of the biggest stories of the past decade, in order to realize popular culture from the late 2010s. Online there was a personal essay boom that held websites such as BuzzFeed, Jezebel, and Australia’s own Mamamia Afloat. In publishing, everything from spoiled (Prince Harry’s reserve) to poor (Educated by Tara Westover), broke sales records. And the memoirs discovered fictional contrasts of novels, such as Gale Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant and Miranda Cowley Heller’s “Paper Palace.” Even TV and movies were crazy about trauma. Queue the detective (true detective, dry) who must face his own trauma before he can break the case. And an ad executive who can only write the perfect copy if he stops running from the past (the madman).
The craving for a story of suffering reached a fever pitch in Willaghihara’s “little life.” The 2015 novel follows Jude, a corporate lawyer (named after the patron saint of the lost cause). The 2022 theatrical adaptation by Belgian theatre director Ibo von Hove was so faithful and bloody as the woman by my side cried out loud at the break when I saw it at the 2023 Adelaide Festival.
Her cry resonated. Why were trauma stories so popular? Was our appetite insatiable or was we a cultural turning point?
In the last decade, no traumatic backstory has been invented in the television writer’s room. Certainly, the idea that one’s mind could be shaped by the early experiences of characters being able to have an explanatory and humanized backstory has been mainstream for over a century. However, there is a difference between passing trauma through a story and allowing trauma to become the whole story.
It was the use of trauma as a ballast in the plot, which was very impressive, not as a technique to describe the character. Again and again, viewers were raised on a spoon on the same plot. We were introduced to the protagonist who exhibited neurotic and self-destructive behavior. (What are these behaviors relying on this genre? If it were a comedy, I met a Fleabag who was as cynical as sex.
As if to wonder why they were like this, the flashback teased us with the promise of answers. Something really bad happened to them! But if you want to know what it is, you need to watch up to the last episode and read all the way to the last page.
These kinds of stories use good old suspense, which makes us happy. Flashbacks are bombs and you can’t look away until they explode. However, the trauma plot is also filled with deeper levels.
Trauma’s plot lost cultural currency because it obfuscates many of the nuances of living with trauma
In real life, when someone tells the story of the worst thing that happened to them, it can be the first step towards healing. Certainly, that is the overall point of speaking therapy. People may be able to find stories for their own experiences, thereby controlling and containing them. When these stories are told to the audience (in a personal essay, memoir, or lecture), their effects are strong. It validates the speaker and gives the audience the authority to tell their stories.
Traumatic plots are an alternative to this healing fiction. In fiction, when trauma is ventilated, the story reaches a natural resolution. The tension eases and the mystery surrounding the protagonist disappears. The audience’s relief mimics the sense of witnessing and participating in real life testimony. We are facing the worst and are stronger and more determined to be faced with it.
Of course, the trauma plot was destined to become stronger over time, like the looting of other stories. Firstly, it is now so easily parodied, because it is such a recognizable formula. (In comedian Kate Berland’s award-winning solo show Kate, she teases the audience by referencing childhood trauma.
Second, the trauma plot lost its cultural currency. Because it obfuscates many of the nuances of living with trauma. One of the purposes of Yanagihara’s Express was to challenge the concept that by writing a small life, suffering can be overcome. She wanted to write a character that “never gets better.” Still, the use of her textbook trauma plots undermines this goal.
Jude’s deepest, darkest secret – his most terrifying experience from his childhood of endless despair – is lit up with increasingly detailed flashbacks. When the final flashback is revealed, the emotion is one of overwhelming relief. For Jude, memories of what happened may be something he never “surmounts.” But for readers, it is the answer to all our questions, the solutions we’ve been waiting for.
In life, talking about your trauma doesn’t always neutralize it. However, in the trauma plot, everything is resolved the moment the trauma is revealed. The characters’ core wounds are not merely extra details of the rich tapestry of their minds, but rather the final clue to solving the mystery of who and why they are. Storytelling devices designed to add depth ultimately have a flattening effect.
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But even if the traumatic plots become old, pop culture has not lost the crooked psychoanalytics. From Wicked to Mufasa, Mufasa and his pupils, some of last year’s critical and commercial hit films suggest that Hollywood replaced the trauma plot with an origin story.
We are all shaped by our suffering. The task is to expand your vocabulary rather than blunting it
We are no longer satisfied with accepting the villain as mere agents of confusion. Now we have to have formative experiences that can explain their bad behavior. In fact, it appears to be already on the path of a trauma plot. The device, designed to complicate characters and demonstrate that no one is completely right or wrong, is oversimplified.
It raises the question, why do we continue to look for characters better, why when we prove such an inadequate tool, when we prove something that obscurely oblivious to where we resort to it and clarify and complicated?
An alternative to documenting trauma from storytelling was calmly dramatized in one of last year’s best origin stories: Apprentice. In the final scene, Sebastian Stan’s Donald Trump rises to the complete villain the moment he appears in his eyes as a reporter, answering questions about his childhood and calmly replies, “I don’t want to think about it.”
It takes humility to admit that characters are adaptable and vulnerable to the experiences that shape us. It is worth repeating endlessly the idea that we are all shaped to some extent by our suffering. The task is to expand your vocabulary rather than blunting it with clichés. Rather than repeating what has come before, we continue to seek new ways to tell stories about trauma.
