The Happy Sad Effect

I get this kind of good anxious feeling when things go well for me I realized.  As if bad things must be on the horizon because I'm somehow undeserving of what's going down.  However it's especially hard for me to be down whilst listening to this song:

   

    I know nothing else about this artist at the time this post is being written.  Kudos to Scott for showing me this.  Where does the term kudos come from?  I don't actually care that much.  

    

    Movies that are sad don't always make me sad.  This is for multiple reasons, each dependent on the film:

1.  The movie was garbage.

2.  The movie was too manipulative without earning it.  This is the equivalent of coming on too strong romantically (I don't know if that makes sense):  The score comes in to let you know that it's sad but frankly you're not invested enough in the characters yet to be affected by the events and reactions transpiring onscreen, and so it has failed to emotionally engage you.  This does not mean the movie was bad necessarily, and perhaps it was interesting or even funny, breezy, or charming, but if you're not able to be upset at all by what's going on, the film's potential effect is severely hampered.

3.  Failure to identify with the characters/main crisis.  This is an interesting one, because a sign of a really  great film is the director getting you to feel exactly what she/he wants, even if that emotion is somewhat irrational given the circumstance.  For instance, and people might deny this in order to seem more sane, but Hannibal Lector, a cannibal, is incredibly likable in the film The Silence of the Lambs.  The director did this on purpose, because it makes him eerier that you like him so much despite his previous actions.  How this relates to sad movies:  The more preposterous a thing the director tries to make sympathetic, the better the movie has to be in order for it to work.  Suppose there's a movie about a father that begins to crumble under the pressure of life and the end of the film results in him murdering his family.  I know, holy crap, how is THAT movie going to work?  What I'm saying is, that movie better have a tremendous director, or else the only thing the audience will be thinking is "that dad sucks, I hope he rots in prison and then burns in hell."  Obviously there's a point in which seemingly no emotion can be salvaged if the screenplay is awful, but regardless of this example, I hope that point makes sense.

4.  The movie is truly beautiful.  Some people will disagree with me, but sometimes I feel that a film, usually because of it's sadness (which succeeded in engaging the viewer emotionally), is so wonderful because of the depth of emotion and what that means and all the nuances and effects that can have on the viewer and so on.  That was a fruity sounding sentence, someday I'll be a better communicator.  What this means is that the beauty overpowers the feelings of being down, or more often they accompany these sad feelings, I don't know how to express that.  Whatever.  I'd use examples of movies that are like this but I don't wanna ruin them for those who haven't seen them.  

     I'd like to clarify that sadness and depression are not one and the same.  Sadness requires the emotion of sorrow, it is a tragic emotion, whereas depression is more synonymous with submission, overwhelmed, hopelessness.  

     

     Instead of taking advantage of the end of Daylight Savings Time (Daylight Losing Time?), I um, wrote this.