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Life lessons from an enthusiast of the bizarre
Morbid curiosity, morose delectation, schadenfreude. As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our dark side; we succumb to them at our own peril. And yet we are compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there’s no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible?
In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there’s something nourishing in darkness. “To repress death is to lose the feeling of life,” he writes. “A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies.”
His examples are legion and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag’s On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.
“Eric G. Wilson’s smart, probing new book . . . sets out to explain what lies beneath our collective fascination with death and suffering . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck isn’t some holier-than-thou polemic out to cure us of our dark leanings . . . Instead, it simply aims to help readers gain ‘a fulfilling response to two of life’s greatest, most pressing and persistent questions. What is the meaning of suffering? What is the significance of death? . . . The book’s slim, peripatetic chapters cover an awful lot of erudite territory, as Wilson draws ideas and research from a delightful grab bag of academics, artists and thinkers. Aristotle, Freud, Kant, Goya and Hardy all make appearances, alongside an assortment of sociopaths and serial murderers.” —John Wilwol, NPR.org
“Wilson is provocative, entertaining and above all honest.” —Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News
“A leisurely, light-footed overview of our cultural obsession with doom, gloom, and gore.” —Josh Rothman, The Boston Globe
“Compelling . . . Wilson keeps hearing a voice within that tells him to ‘look.’ He follows this instinct, energized by the idea that his thoughtful connoisseurship of the world’s darkness is good--noble, even. Wilson draws on philosophers, poets, psychologists, filmmakers and more to build a case that ‘an eager, open-minded interest in the macabre’ provides ‘a special invitation to think about life’s meanings’ . . . Wilson’s guidance is personal, engaging, and convincing . . . The book offers heaps of terribly tantalizing topics.” —Chris Jozefowicz, Rue Morgue
“Mixing anecdotes, arguments and his own quirky persona, the author of Against Happiness delivers a provocative meditation on morbid curiosity and the pleasure of seeing others suffer.” —The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“Wilson explores [his theme] with zeal and a great deal of wit. It’s hard, as one reads this fascinating book, not to see quite a bit of ourselves.” —David Pitt, Booklist
“[Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck] reassures: enjoying grotesque, horrible, frightening images is a natural impulse. From fairy tales to crime dramas, they hit us where we are most human.” —Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Ruminations of an exceptionally intelligent academic on why people—himself among the guilty parties—seem to search out and enjoy instances of human pain and suffering . . . [Wilson] does a thorough job of examining the people who can’t look away.” —Nona Nelson, The Roanoke Times
“[Wilson is] fluent and comfortable, whether he is poking for clues in the bewildering complexity of Edmund Burke’s sublime, as experienced in the stomach-dropping irresistibilty of, say, a tornado; the Jungian shadow, that archive of everything we hate about ourselves, those destructive crazes and unadmitted tendencies without recognition of which we would not be whole; or the simple, malicious pleasure of another’s misfortunes.” —Peter Lewis, The Barnes & Noble Review
“Invoking everything from horror movies and television news footage of the Sept. 11 attacks to Dante’s tormented verse and Goya’s paintings of cannibals, Wilson makes a strong case that humans are natural-born rubberneckers . . . A hybrid of memoir, journalim and theory, [Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck] investigates what this impulse tells us about ourselves and how it might inspire constructive reactions like compassion . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck necessarily deals with a host of grim subjects, yet there are also instances of unqualified beauty.” —Kevin Canfield, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
“In the teeming ranks of the American Professoriat, you could argue that Eric G. Wilson is among those most palpably needed by the world at large . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck is a personal book that touches on ‘death tourism,’ Hannibal Lecter, Maurice Sendak, Tipper Gore, Francisco Goya, serial killers (a handwritten note by Jeffrey Dahmer can fetch $1,700, he cheerfully informs us), Tiger Woods sex scandals, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, all embedded in an Alexandrian library of literary allusions that can be encompassed in less than 200 pages.” —Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
We have a torn relationship with the mangled, the bloody, and the dead. Our reptilian brain instinctively prescribes a wide berth, like what you'd give to spoiled fruit or big, angry animals with sharp teeth. But an equally elemental counterforce urges us to go and have a look — and not only a peep but a hard stare.
Is it just our inner imp of the perverse at work, asks Eric G. Wilson in Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, indulging a penchant for doom and ruin for which we will feel exhilaration and shame, guilt and a pleasure all the more gratifying for being frowned upon? Or does morbid curiosity serve some other purpose, perhaps an evolutionary advantage? Wilson, who teaches English at Wake Forest, entertains plenty of suspects for the source of our dark curiosities, and he does so in an informal voice. He's fluent and comfortable, whether he is poking for clues in the bewildering complexity of Edmund Burke's sublime, as experienced in the stomach-dropping irresistibility of, say, a tornado; the Jungian shadow, that archive of everything we hate about ourselves, those destructive crazes and unadmitted tendencies without recognition of which we would not be whole; or the simple, malicious pleasure of another's misfortunes.
He also finds himself in some grim precincts, including the memorabilia industry that has grown up around Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and company — who peddle customized souvenirs from their jail cells — or the venting of aggressive and erotic urges through the nihilistic voyeurism of, godhelpus, snuff films on the Internet.
But back to Darwin, please. Do we commune in one fashion or another with the dying and the dead to glean some useful morsel about behavior to be avoided? That exposure to the macabre allows us to more effectively navigate sinister environments? That witnessing death or misery shakes us out of our narcissism and elevates our ethical imaginations, allowing us to share in suffering, and, through that empathy, begin to understand our greater commonality?
Just maybe, writes Wilson, our fascinations with catastrophe can best be seen as "as a special invitation to think about life's meanings," where we can not only entertain our destructive impulses without hurting ourselves — keeping that special distance; the closer, the better, though not too close — but also be reminded that life is a swift and chancy wonder, inspiring our progress through it to be appreciative and honest. Which doesn't mean that we can't enjoy scandals, failures, falls from grace, or just a fall down the stairs — mockery, derision, ignominy, heap it on — but that calamities of all sizes can ignite a passion for life in the observer, above that immediate sympathy for the Devil.
Peter Lewis is the director of the American Geographical Society in New York City. A selection of his work can be found at writesformoney.com.
Reviewer: Peter Lewis
1.
“Don’t look.”
That’s what she asked, more than once. I heard her distinctly each time, and told myself I should oblige, and even once partially turned my head in her direction, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. I engrossed myself again, and again submitted to the anger, the sorrow, the fear, as well as guilt’s perverse pleasure: I felt that I shouldn’t be doing this, but I was doing it anyway, and got a peevish thrill from my transgression.
It was evening, dinnertime, and this had been going on since morning, right before I left for work. I had just finished breakfast. I had my satchel over my shoulder. It contained my books for that day’s class (on Keats’s “To Autumn”) and also my lunch (a peanut butter sandwich). I had my hand on the doorknob, ready to leave, when Sandi, my wife, ran up to me, phone in hand, and said, “Turn on the TV.”
I did, and there it was. Too slowly, a jet, brilliant white, wide enough to seat a hundred, plowed into a narrow rectangular tower, luminous and silver in the September sunshine. The blast silently boomed, and the skyscraper turned black billow, spume of flame: an immense sinister candle.
There was a stop, and the sequence rolled once more, soundless, with the same dilatory tempo. It repeated, each time more mesmerizing and meaningless, someone else’s eerie dream. No words explained it—fit it into a familiar story, with reassuring causalities and characters. It was unmoored destruction, sublime. I watched, and watched.
We all know what this was, and likely remember our need to witness the eruption one more time, and also to look when the events became more horrific: another fiery collision, and then buildings sucked to the ground, leaving only rubble and crushed loved ones.
Sandi’s voice broke my morbid trance that morning: “Come here.” When I faced her, she appeared to me in the fullness of her three-month pregnancy, holding in her smooth belly a little creature who would soon be pressed from the warm darkness into this glare.
We hugged, not confessing our terror: an infant in this Armageddon. We sat down together and watched the catastrophe worsen.
After an hour, I made my way to my office at the university where I teach. I had seen the attacks on the towers probably twenty times by then. I turned on my computer, went to the Internet, and found the scene again.
But I had classes to teach, and so reluctantly left the screen. I held the students only briefly in each of my three sections, telling them that we would pick up with Keats the next class—even his wisdom did not that day suffice—and urging them to go back to their dorms and call their families and friends. Between classes, I persisted in watching the footage, breaking only to call Sandi, to comfort and in turn take solace.
I returned home around five. Sandi was in the kitchen preparing dinner, food that would best nourish our baby. The small television beside the coffeemaker, like the other sets in our house, was off.
After giving my wife a hug, I clicked the set on: the conflagration in the sky, now strangely comforting, like a wound you can’t imagine not having. More than that, the footage at this point was, as shocking as this might sound, gruesomely beautiful: swelling ebony smoke against the blue horizon. And the film inspired this staggering thought: “Here is one of those rare ruptures from which history will not recover, and I am alive at its occurrence.” I felt exhilarated, inappropriately, and I was ashamed.
“Come on,” Sandi said. “Turn it off and help me chop the vegetables. Don’t look.”
But I did, though she asked me again to stop, and I continued into the night, brooding.
Copyright © 2012 by Eric G. Wilson
Anonymous
Posted March 11, 2012
Reminded me of a college lecture. The author brings up some interesting points that make you think and see things differently.
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Overview
Life lessons from an enthusiast of the bizarre
Morbid curiosity, morose delectation, schadenfreude. As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our dark side; we succumb to them at our own peril. And yet we are compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there’s no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible?
In ...