An Aversion to Weird

I have found that two types of subjects for films or TV series have become increasingly less palatable over the years, those involving significant amounts of violence and those involving deliberately weird confounding stories.

To be honest I have never enjoyed violence in entertainment but now, a scene of excessive or unnecessary violence will cause me to turn a film or TV series off never to return. If a review mentions violence I won’t even start to watch it. If a director is famous for violence like Tarantino I won’t watch anything they make, so although I am sure that they are well made films I will never watch anything of his. The same goes for programmes like Happy Valley which has two actors I really like, but whose focus on violence made me decide after a few minutes never to watch it again.

I used to enjoy weird films but I don’t have the patience to wade through them anymore. As I have got older and as the world has got more confusing I want to escape from inexplicable stories and watch things that are straightforward. I am happy to entertain fantasy and frequently watch films like that but there has to be an internal logic that I can follow. I used to enjoy weird horror movies but I have stopped watching them entirely. I enjoy certainty and stories with a beginning, middle and end.

Media is an escape from the outside world for me and given the violent and unstable age we are living through I need to be comforted not challenged by my viewing. I can appreciate that others have very different reasons for watching the types of films I avoid and I also appreciate that I’m no doubt in the minority but it is better for my peace of mind.