Mild violence
Touchy-feely bestselling author goes the extra mile.
Joanne Harris, author of the bestselling novel Chocolat, has begun adding content warnings to her books after comparing them to “wheelchair ramps”.
Mm. Yeah no. Wheelchair ramps are necessary because people in wheelchairs cannot use stairs: it’s physically impossible. It’s not the case that it’s physically impossible to read a novel because there’s something shocking or painful in it.
Readers are now told that Harris’s 1999 hit novel contains “spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance”.
Leaving readers feeling there’s no point in reading it now.
At least she’s kind enough to explain the ramp analogy.
“It makes a lot of sense,” she said at the time. “Trigger warnings are like wheelchair ramps. They exist because some people need them.
“The fact that some people don’t take the stairs does not detract in any way from my experience, nor do I hang around the wheelchair ramp mocking those who use it, or telling them how much better it would be for them to be exposed to the climb.”
Well no but that’s because wheelchair ramps really are physically necessary [see above]. Trigger warnings are not physically necessary, and it’s far from universally agreed that they’re emotionally or psychologically necessary. Really very far from universally agreed.
Chocolat is the most awful, sickly, cloying book. We are supposed to believe that a village in France (land of laïcité) thinks that delicious chocolates are a deadly sin against God, in the 90s (which we know, because one of the characters has a collection of videotapes). The characters are so two-dimensional they may as well have GOODIE and BADDIE tattooed on their foreheads. None of it made any sense at the time.
She’s quite the dim bulb, in fact.
There was a brief thirty seconds or so when I thought fondly of the idea of trigger warnings. But then I worked out the bogus logic of how they play out in the real world, as opposed to the idealistic logic of how they work in theory, and I quickly got over it.
I confess: I have a “trigger.” It’s men getting shot in the skull. You’d be amazed how often men (and women, too) are shot in the skull in movies and TV. (Look into it and — trigger warning — it will, ahem, blow your mind!) My father was murdered, or, depending on your wording preference, executed, or assassinated, or, as the kids prefer to call it these days, “unalived” (ugh), via a bullet to the temple. I spent many of my younger years ruminating over the circumstances of his death, playing over and over in my mind what he must have experienced in those final moments as he was hogtied at gunpoint and heaved into the trunk of a car. (Or was he ordered at gunpoint to get into the trunk and then tied? I’ve asked myself a thousand times, trying to comprehend why in the hell he seemingly complied with the orders that were surely going to lead to his death.) He was then driven out to the middle of dirt desert Texas nowhere, then they got him on his knees in a ditch, and then there was the bang heard by everyone around but him, marking the exact first moment of the rest of the world’s continued existence right after his final exit.
I kinda do appreciate a warning beforehand that someone’s gonna get graphically shot in the skull before I start a movie. (Unless it’s a Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino movie, in which by now anyone who doesn’t go in expecting a hail of skullbullets and N-words should maybe just stick to Disney fare.) Because those scenes really do jar me. They used to jar me a lot, and sometimes they’d pull me right out of the movie and set my mind ruminating about my father’s awful death all over again.
But it feels like a violation of the social contract to put my own personal circumstance ahead of everyone else in that way. It’s embarrassing to be reminded that I’ve got an atypical hangup about a storytelling element that’s so common it occurs in almost every single action movie or TV show that has been made in the last three decades. I wouldn’t want to feel coddled in the way that a “skullbullet trigger warning” specifically designed for me and my personal hangup would do. I don’t want to exploit that trauma as a means to call attention to my “specialness”. And that’s really what trigger warnings do.
And it turns out that not making such a big deal about skullbullet scenes has helped me to get over them. I don’t ruminate so much anymore when they happen. I’ve adapted, and now they elicit maybe more of a wince than what other people experience. If I’m on a date, I might take my fella’s hand for a little squeeze or lean in for a reassuring cuddle.
But I’m happy to cope with it, as a reminder that I can still participate in the same pleasures as the rest of society without requiring special accommodations laid out just for me.
It seems perverse to want to be so dysfunctional that you require the rest of society to construct metaphorical wheelchair ramps for you.
There are over 8 billion humans on the planet. Is there anything less conducive to fostering peace and unity between us than by demanding that everyone treat each of our individual selves as having special needs? Where’s the humanism in that?
How does one avoid reading the trigger warnings, which spoil the book for some readers? It seems to me that a better analogy would be to force everyone to use the wheelchair ramps, despite it being easier and safer for some people to use the stairs.
Artymorty, I have some similar triggers; not skullbullets, though I dislike the graphic violence depicted so casually in modern movies. There are things that have happened in my life that lead to me reacting negatively to certain words, images, or actions. Other people don’t find the same things disturbing. I appreciate the rating system on movies to indicate what might be there, because my husband and I avoid graphic violence, and when I was the parent of a young child, I wanted to know what movies were fit for my child. That doesn’t mean they should be required for every single possible trigger, but a small notice that the movie contains strong language, graphic violence, nudity, etc.
I don’t like that on books; I don’t know exactly what makes it different, since I can avoid reading it in books as easily as I can ignore it on a movie.
The real key is…I am getting over some of these triggers by exposure. I can’t let my life be ruled by the past to that extent, although using the past as a learning experience is good. I certainly can’t let other people’s lives be ruled by my past.
The problem is, some people need to grow up.
Jeezus, Arty, how awful.
I disagree somewhat with you, Arty – the warnings are there for those that want to use them, for reasons they think is best. If they are more cautious than they need to be in re-acclimating themselves, it is still not a thing that affects another person reading or watching the same thing. It’s just a line under the header, or on a still frame before the program proper begins.
That said, there are some trigger warnings that strike me as self-defeating. I have seen a articles mention rape, and warn potential readers with the following: “Trigger warning: article mentions rape”. Okay… and now the person reading the trigger warning has seen a mention of rape before even starting on the article. self-defeating, and also infantilising.
Arty, my genuine heart felt sympathy for what you have endured.
——————————–
A few years back one of our TV current affairs shows (ABC’s 7:30 report) ran several stories on trigger warnings in Australian Universities. The gist was that students should, indeed must, be exposed to challenging material in higher education, and with that I fully concur.
However, every news story that is about the death of an aboriginal person on the same channel is prefaced with “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this story contains images of someone who has died”. A trigger warning and infantilisation all in one.
One good explanation of how we got here, and how to climb out, is this book.
https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/trigger-warnings-9781925713183