Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gregerson, Mary
• Wedding, Danny

Titel

Slaking Thirst for the Tragic Mirrored in Schadenfreude: The Pleasure in Viewing Others’ Distress

Ist Teil von

• PsycCritiques, 2012-02, Vol.57 (6), p.No Pagination Specified-No Pagination Specified

Ort / Verlag

American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Reviews the film, The Ides of March directed by George Clooney (2011). Does modern American psychology acknowledge a thirst for the tragic, in other words, human foibles and flaws unfortunately and unpredictably dashing grand conceivable yet unreachable aims? Is it schadenfreude? This German term refers to pleasure in viewing others’ distress. American culture eschews even coining a term for this phenomenon apparently normal to Germans. Sadism comes closest, but it is relegated to mean an abnormal impulse rather than the normalcy imbued in schadenfreude. What do Germans see that causes Americans to avert their eyes? Popular movies like The Ides of March raise such questions as these and provide few answers. Schadenfreude, social comparison theory, identification, and projection may explain why in their absence. The truly tragic in portrayals heightens internal tension through understatement, through oblique revelation of reasons for projection, identification, and social comparison. Otherwise only banal, sleek window dressing serves as semisheer café curtains, giving the pretense of separating the outside and inside world. The bottom half of a Dutch door needs to be closed for effective function. No matter how well produced, directed, and acted, if the story does not prompt identification, projection, and social comparison, then only surface scratches and not deep gouges occur in the audience’s armor. True tragedy is not like World Wide Wrestling in its loud, over-the-top drama but rather more like a soft, persistent wave lapping persistently and steadily at the shore to wash the sands clean. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)