Saturday Soapbox: The Feelbad Factor
I like to spend a lot of my free time being miserable, and I don’t think I’m entirely alone in that regard. I’m drawn towards sad things, whether that’s wallowing in the autumnal sludge of shoegazing music or getting lost in the downbeat melodrama of filmmakers such as Sirk or Ozu. It’s not a strange or unknown phenomenon, either. A great deal of good art is touched with melancholy, so it goes, and a look through the frontrunners in the recently published new edition of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time will tell you as much. Between the psychosexual drama of Vertigo, the bleakly realist Tokyo Story or the anti-heroics of The Searchers there’s barely a smile to be had (although all those straight faces are admittedly balanced out by Sunrise’s brilliant drunken pig skit). Games can do melancholy, and some of their defining moments have come when that’s been the prevailing mood. The death of Aerith, for example, or the strange sadness that coats so much of Ocarina of Time before being made a part of the very fabric of Majora’s Mask. Read more…
