In art, positive feelings are dumb and negative feelings are smart. This is an association I've noticed in especially online discussions of media, it is an error that has gone uncorrected for entirely too long.
This association is bolstered whenever someone says that you shouldn't criticize the mario movie too harshly because it's "fun" and light frivolous things are self justifying. This association is bolstered whenever people continuously categorize media that makes you feel bad as a strictly adult afair, that anything sad or disquieting or revolting is somehow trying to outsmart you and you're actually very cool & hip for rejecting it in favor of dumb pleasures.
This association leaves two categories of art completely outside of discussion and dying for air. Firstly, art that is joyous and life affirming in a mature and reflective way. It'd seem almost sacrilegious to describe Kiki's Delivery Service as "Wholesome," even though it is such prime comfort cinema there's just so much more to it than that. It's a tangibly adult perspective on the themes it presents. But the "happy=dumb" association is set so deep that nearly all critical discussion about miyazaki's movies is about how pretty and sweet they are. They exist in this category of being overexposed yet somehow still unappreciated.
But then there's the inverse, art that makes you feel like shit in a simple and single minded way. Irreversible is the worst time you can have with a movie, probably, and it (affectionately) has nothing going on under the hood. It's a pain box. This category of art tends to confound folks far more than the previous, it elicits a "what's the point??" usually, or if any concession is made towards allowing uncomfortable art to exist it's with the caveat that it has to "justify" it's discomfort. Simple displeasures don't have the same assumed good faith as simple pleasures. The surface level ways in which a film like Irreversible makes you feel like you've been beat up after it's finished? Not worth mentioning.
There's graver consequences to these two boulder-sized blindspots in artistic conception. Like, because negative emotions are smart, people think that making entertainment out of real life tragedies can be de-facto respectful so long as they make the emotions in their entertainment negative enough. It doesn't matter that Netflix's Dahmer plays defense for the killer and uses the image of black people as a boringly virtuous collection of punching bags to milk tragedy from, if it just makes you feel bad enough, gives the surface level impression of graveness, then it's fine that you're making entertainment out of real life people's personal real life tragedy that still exists in recent memory for many people.
I want to elevate joy, bring it into critical attention, stop taking it for granted. I also want to de-elevate misery, take it off it's false pedestal, let us realize that it's all art. FEELINGS are self justifying, not just good ones.
