Introduction

What is it about?

This introduction first presents a definition of the ‘feel-bad film’. It argues that feel-bad films stimulate a desire for catharsis, but contrary to ‘body genres’ such as horror, melodrama and pornography (on which they sometimes draw) they deny the spectator the satisfaction of this desire: the feel-bad film creates, and then deadlocks, the spectator’s desire for catharsis. The second part of the introduction presents a classic, humanist conception of the ideal exchange between an artwork and its public. For this, it draws on an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre theorizing art as ‘an exercise in generosity’, a collaboration between artist and recipient. Such an understanding of the artistic experience is modelled on the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, and it is an ideal that can be found in many theories of cinematic spectatorship. The introduction then asks if feel-bad films should be understood as a systematic violation of these (Hegelian) ideas about empathy, generosity, trust and mutual recognition – in other words: are critics justified in calling the feel-bad films ‘anti-humanist’ and ‘nihilist’? This question becomes a Leitmotif through the following chapters.

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