November 19, 2008
What is tragedy?
Brooklyn residents answering the question, “What is tragedy?”
(via Gowanus Lounge)
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2 Responses to “What is tragedy?”
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Brooklyn residents answering the question, “What is tragedy?”
(via Gowanus Lounge)
2 Responses to “What is tragedy?”
Leave a Reply
This is great. As I watched it I was vaguely thinking of witty things to say about it, but then at the end, when the elderly woman speaks of her nine year old sister being killed by a car on the sidewalk by the candy store, it all just seemed too big to talk about in a humorous way. I kept thinking of a line from Tillie Olsen’s story “I Stand Here Ironing.” The woman ironing thinks of her bleak past and says “My wisdom came too late.”
I like this video because it made me think. In the answers, there is perhaps little that passes for real wisdom, yet taken in the context of speakers’ experiences, I can’t help but ponder how their responses speak to their concept of tragedy.
The opening guy who talks of putting someone in a coma, the little girl who responded with bragging about hitting someone with a glass bottle elicited from me a quick “How could they!” followed by a reexamination of the question. How could they? Perhaps it is a worldview that views person-to-person tragedy as a zero-sum game: there are those who receive tragedy, and there are those who visit tragedy upon them. By telling bragging tales of violence (even fabricated ones), perhaps one moves up the imagined pecking order, feeling that much safer from the threat of tragedy from above. As an older man later says, “Tragedy is what I cannot control.”
There’s an interesting young / old dichotomy, too; how the younger generation greets the question with a smile and often a joke, while the older folks bring up specific instances of tragedy. That the young just haven’t known real tragedy seems too facile and answer. Tragedies appear so suddenly and unexpectedly, then fade so fast. (As evidenced by the man who rails against “tax, tax, tax!” then offhandedly “my whole family died here.”) Perhaps it takes the reflection of age to realize all that has been lost, what could have been. “We are old…all of our friends are dying,” is especially poignant; it seems not one tragedy, but two.
And the pacing of the video is lovely, with the constant return to comic relief provided by the hammer-and-sickle shirted intellectual, delivering (and it took me 3 viewings to figure this out) a freshman-level exegesis of literary tragedy, his multisyllabic stream punctuated with expectant looks at his female companion, who offers up a hesitant smile of approval before looking more and more lost. That is a tragedy, a wonderful tragedy.
What really haunts me, though, is the man who chides the interviewer, his posture straightening with paternal pride. “Look at these girls’ pretty faces. There is no tragedy.”