This weekend I watched one of the darkest and ugliest movies I've seen in a long while--one of mutilation, murder, rape, despair. And it made me realize that, dammit, I *refuse* to believe these kinds of movies in which the world is an overridingly hopeless and ugly place where horrific things happen all the time with little to no redemption.

I am not naive--I do know that there is some fucked up horribly nasty shit going on now. And now. And now. Pretty much any second of every day, something terrible is happening somewhere or another. But I can't believe that the overriding force and theme of life is hopelessness and despair. And even if it is, I refuse to believe it. Because believing it means giving in to it.

I refuse to believe that the overriding force of every American family is some horrid dark underbelly of discontment, despair, indifference, sadness, and madness. Granted, there is always a vein of some or all of these things running through any family. And in some families, perhaps it is the prominent force behind it. But I refuse to believe that a short film in which [spoiler alert] a wife and mother tries to wrench herself out of her daily sadness and into her husband's awareness again by gruesomely cutting off her lips with scissors and then modeling the new look in front of her husband with tears in her eyes in desperate hope of lighting his eyes up again is a symbol of what American family life essentially has become. This image is a haunting and evocative one, in all its horrificness, and granted, there is room for it in the world. And yet, in so many ways, it rings of dishonesty.

I refuse to believe it in the same way that I refuse to believe the nauseating and squeakily happy bullshit Hollywood love stories in which everything works out perfectly in the end and the lovers run off into a distant sunset together, in which everyone's blond and white and model-thin and their only moments of despair come from the plight of trying to win the other's love.

Both are dishonest in that they refuse to acknowledge that life is never completely obnoxiously purely happy or completely horridly gut-wrenchingly horrific and despairing. Even in the darkest of moments, there is some spark of beauty, goodness, redemption, whether or not we notice it. Even in the cheeriest of moments, there is a slight shadow of sadness looming in the corner of our eyes.

And a failure to acknowledge that seems to be dishonest to me. It seems to be false and cliche and dishonest.

I never thought I'd quite understand those folks who refuse to see movies that are about horribly depressing topics, but I think I finally get it just a little bit.

Either that or I'm just getting old.

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