I'm Done With Tragedy
In Defense of Hope & Absurdity. And Why Sinners Works
*Spoilers for The Hunger Games (2012), Black Mirror S7, and Sinners (2025)*
Don’t laugh, but the first PG-13 movie I watched in a movie theater was The Hunger Games (2012). I am the eldest child in my family and was thus exposed to mature media a bit later than my younger sisters were. There was no older sibling telling me that Santa wasn’t real or showing me the Insidious films - I had to learn it all for myself. And as an ardent rule follower, I had no interest in defying the film rating system or my parents’ rules. I had a stone-solid constitution, lacking footing in any moral grounds beyond the amorphous “I told you so.”
The Hunger Games was an exception. My parents definitely got the sense that disallowing me from seeing it would be like counting me out of Star Wars - a defining cultural moment for their generation. And so they approved my proverbial permission slip, undoubtedly without doing much research on the film content itself.
My friends and I arrived at our local Regal theater on the opening night as if we were attending the actual world premiere - wearing sundresses and ballet flats, our seventh-grade finest. There wasn’t an empty seat in the cinema, and we sat in the front section, off-center right - an excellent seating choice. Near the front, the film encompasses your whole view, there are no black edges where the fictional world teeters off. For those two and a half hours, I felt as if I were in the woods of District 12, in the sterile training facilities of the Capitol, and on the run in a forested course, trying to escape slaughter.
Watching a movie about teenagers fighting each other to the death while on the precipice of teenagedom forces a lot of mental negotiation. Being an eldest sister who has shouldered unwieldy family burdens, by choice and without choice, I strongly identified with Katniss volunteering to take her little sister’s place in the Games. I admired how firm her resolve was, how decisive she could be while being outraged. I gushed over her romance with Peeta, how he acted as a soft foil to her rigid edge.
Ridden with anxiety, insomnia, and a habit of rumination that left me checked out for much of life, the intensity of The Hunger Games pulled me back down to earth. Stripped from the monotony of making ends meet - of just “getting by” each day - Katniss was forced into a primal state. Would she fight or would she roll over and perish? Would she make herself a martyr, or would she defy death?
When I told my mom about the movie, she found the premise shocking. She was surprised that I could be interested in such a gory film. But the violence scared me a lot less than I expected. It was a kind of visual candy - each life lost was a step closer to my beloved protagonist surviving. When it came down to Katniss and Peeta in the end, I drank up the tragedy like sugarcane juice. As they contemplated a joint suicide, it felt like my heart was bleeding in my chest. Like I was staring at a fatal stab wound. There was nothing to do in that moment except feel the pain of it. Pain has a habit of doing that - of bringing you completely into the present. And when it’s not your pain, when it’s not related to your circumstances, there are no repercussions.
I quickly became addicted to romantic, tragic media. I watched Titanic (1997) for the first time and developed a deep obsession with Les Misérables (2012), streaming the soundtrack on repeat daily. I decided that my favorite ballet was Giselle, ostensibly the most tragic ballet of all time. I watched full versions on YouTube weekly and welled up during the Act II pas de deux. I stayed up until one in the morning to finish reading The Fault in Our Stars and sobbed embarrassingly into my pillow when I was finished. Like my contemporaries, I tore through dystopian series, reading about doomed love at the end of the world.
At every sleepover, my friends and I dabbled in more perturbing media - American Horror Story, serial killer documentaries, and horror movies. I certainly didn’t go as dark as some of my peers - there were no ISIS beheadings in my queue, for example - but it was all media that tended to bum me out in a good way. The early teen years are a time to experiment with mood. Living between monotonous, grey schooldays that bleed into the next, media was a rubber band on my wrist, snapping me back to life. I enjoyed stretching the rubber band back, seeing just how far I could extend it before letting go. Just how sad I could let myself get.
For a while, I couldn’t seem to be moved by a story unless it had a dreadful end. Devastation, heartbreak, grief - I was learning that these sorts of things brought meaning to life. I fancied myself intellectual and emotionally mature for having a strong tolerance to sadness, and this colored most parts of my life. I struggled to connect with people in school who hadn’t experienced some level of tragedy. I considered happy-go-lucky types who were always smiling to be dull and painfully aloof to life’s realities. In short, I was nauseating. And pretty sad myself.
Everything, generally, began to change when I reached adulthood. Inconveniently, my becoming an adult coincided with an actual global tragedy, making it challenging to parse what changed as a result of the pandemic and what changed as a result of simply getting older. Recently, it’s been challenging for me to stomach tragedy of any kind, on my screen or on my page. I’ve heard many say that Gen Z has become desensitized to tragedy, having watched so many global catastrophes play out on their personal devices, in the palms of their hands. Violent video games. Gory television. Uncensored clips of devastation sitting on our Twitter feeds in between memes. Many seem to sway back and forth on whether being symbolically closer to the “news” - dancing the line between producer and consumer - has made young people more engaged or more checked out.
Ten years ago, I would have called myself desensitized. As an adult, I feel more sensitive than ever. I had to delete Twitter because I was seeing too many tweets about airplanes crashing, and it was freaking me out. That was my slightly irrational tipping point, but my distaste for the app had been compounding since the election. I was growing tired of all the towels being thrown in, all the cries into the void, which aren’t actually cries into the void, but cries onto my screen. It wasn’t because I wasn’t also outraged, but because I could no longer handle the constant echo of my outrage, particularly in the absence of action.
I tried watching the first episode of the latest Black Mirror season, and it saddened me tremendously, so much so that I struggled to fall asleep that night. Black Mirror is a British anthology series that explores how technology is encroaching on human life. Its stand-alone episodes typically center on some kind of dystopian techy invention - simulated realities, time travel, memory erasure, etc. - and meditate on how it’ll ultimately wreak some level of social terror.
Notably, early episodes of the show were highly absurd - the series opener featured a fictional British prime minister getting kidnapped and needing to have sex with a pig on live television to be released. The absurdity created some distance between the show’s themes and real life. It acted as a balm, a spoonful of sugar to help the satire go down. Without some level of exaggerated insanity or dark humor, Black Mirror’s storylines could hit too close to home, painting too vivid a picture of the dismal future that’s to come.
The season seven opener explores a poor couple - Mike, a welder, and Amanda, a schoolteacher - navigating the nebulous private healthcare system in America. When doctors discover an inoperable brain tumor in Amanda, Mike hastily subscribes to Rivermind, a subscription-style tech startup that replaces Amanda’s excised brain matter with synthetic tissue. While the monthly Rivermind payment is initially affordable, the start-up hikes the prices and introduces new subscription tiers (“Rivermind Plus” and “Rivermind Lux”), forcing the couple to go to drastic measures to make their monthly payment. On the “Common” tier, Amanda experiences a progressively subpar life - poor sleep, low energy, an inability to travel outside Rivermind’s server bounds, and her involuntarily spouting contextually relevant “ads.” The episode ends with Mike ending Amanda’s life, at her request, choosing to die on her terms rather than suffer a life out of control.
This is a kind of tragedy that I would have been extremely moved by in middle school, with my distance from adulthood (and my not paying for my own health insurance) acting as a kind of emotional buffer. Now, the distance between reality and farce feels thin. Absurdity is, increasingly, an ineffective sweetener. I don’t care to watch any more Black Mirror, or even Severance. The Last of Us is out of the question.
In real life, after experiencing a tragedy, the first step to moving forward is accepting that the tragedy happened. Moving past denial. Bearing witness, getting angry, getting sad, and then eventually accepting. In America and online, I think it’s challenging for many to move through this full cycle. We often get stuck in a loop of bearing witness and getting upset, and the media we laud often reflects that, resulting in a parade of beautiful, hilarious, and ugly tragedies. There’s nothing deep about a happy ending because it’s what we all want.
I used to think that bearing witness to terrible things was the same as overcoming them, that the cycle was complete after consumption. I even thought that was somehow a form of activism. This isn’t to say that seeing something tragic or an allegory of tragedy can’t be moving in some way. This isn’t to say that tragic media can’t be well-made or well-intentioned. It’s just to say that the pit in my stomach isn’t enough to move me any longer - these days, I crave hope. And, frankly, more absurdity.
I, along with everyone else, recently watched Sinners (2025) and enjoyed it because it delivered on those fronts. The film is set in Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1930s, following the Smokestack twins - Smoke and Stack - WWI veterans, masterfully portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, traveling back to Clarksdale after doing Al Capone’s bidding in Chicago. Their dream: to set up a juke joint with blues music and dancing. They assemble their dream team, sourcing musicians and doormen from the cotton fields and catfish from the local grocer. Their cousin, Sammie, is a preacher’s son, but dreams of playing the blues, music said to “conjure the devil.” It’s hardly a surprise when Irish antagonist Remmick knocks on the juke joint doors with two Klansmen in tow to shut down the fun. The twist: they also happen to be vampires.
The first half of Sinners paints a soulful picture of family, ambition, and resilience in the face of intolerance. As the film progresses and the vampire threads crystallize, it begins to lean more absurd in a way that some have been critical of, but that I find welcoming. When a ripped, tank-top-clad Michael B. Jordan begins staking vampires, the film feels further from its cozy, earnest origins, leaning more action-hero-centric. But it regains its hopefulness in the end, as a torn-up Sammie drives away from his father and the cotton fields, holding a broken guitar neck over his heart.
In 2012, The Hunger Games wove lessons about the perils of authoritarianism into a teenage dystopian romance, while grossing nearly $700 million globally. In the 80s, Star Wars spun a similar yarn about rebelling against oppressive power structures, set against the backdrop of an intergalactic hero’s journey. Sinners works for the same reasons - by imbuing a grandiose, fantastical, hero-driven story with a gooey, hopeful center.
It’s no longer enough to witness the outrage - I want to see the sunlight illuminate a path forward. I want to see individuals overcome the systems that seek to oppress them in a boisterous way. I want corniness, I want ridiculousness. I want a reminder that David can defeat Goliath.
Thissssssssss. We need hopeful stories. *Safe* stories. But that doesn't mean they have to be saccharine (watched Sinners last night, I'm obsessed).
I wrote a sci-fi novel where two characters take on an entire empire - and win. Against truly hopeless odds. I knew it was over-the-top, like opera, and a comic-book story - but I enjoyed writing it.