The trauma plot: how did culture get addicted to tragic backstories? | Diana Reid
Again and again, audiences have been spoon-fed the same plot: a character can only be explained by a past trauma, tantalisingly revealed in the last episode. Has the trope reached a tipping point?
You only need to look at some of the biggest stories of the past decade to realise popular culture in the late 2010s had a love affair with trauma. Online, there was the personal essay boom that kept websites such as BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Australia’s own Mamamia afloat. In publishing, memoirs that explored the full gamut of human suffering – everything from the pampered (Prince Harry’s Spare) to the impoverished (Tara Westover’s Educated) – broke sales records. And memoirs found their fictional counterpoint in novels such as Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace. Even television and film were trauma-obsessed. Cue the detective who must face his own trauma before he can crack the case (True Detective, The Dry); and the advertising executive who could write perfect copy if only he could stop running from his past (Mad Men).
Our craving for tales of suffering arguably reached a fever pitch with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The 2015 novel follows corporate lawyer Jude (named after the patron saint of lost causes) as he stumbles through a glamorous life in New York, haunted by the abundance of abuse he suffered as a child. A 2022 theatrical adaptation by Belgian theatre director Ivo Von Hove was so faithful, so bloody, that when I saw it at the Adelaide festival in 2023, a woman beside me exclaimed aloud in the intermission: “Why?”
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