Not entertainment: torture

Watching The Slap just four months after reading The Corrections was a mistake.

Both stories concern themselves with suburban familial problems, and in both the plotlines are tortuous and slow. Spending, in the first case, hours, and in the second, months, striving to silence an inner voice that constantly wails, "But who cares?" is a challenge even for the strongest entertainment devotee.

But therein lies the problem: these stories are not entertainment. They're torture.

Why? I think it's the characters. Compare The Slap and The Corrections with other family dramas like The Sopranos. The reason we care about the Soprano family is that we can see something of ourselves in them, and this is amazing, because they're mobsters. We look at Tony or Carmella and think, "These guys are freakin' crazy!" At the same time, we're touched by Tony's almost self-abasing willingness to give basically everyone in his family a break—even those we'd happily counsel him to kill.

Tony's a monster who's more human than we are. By comparison, Breaking Bad's Walt White is a human who's more monster than we are. This kind of character composition makes for intrigue; it sets us up to be moved.

The Slap and The Corrections have "complex" characters, but only within the narrow kaleidoscope of neurosis, self-loathing, self-absorbtion, and apathy. They're monodimensionally complex. All their intricacies lead down the same interminable path: you know nothing interesting can happen by page (or minute) five, because by then each character's utterly uncreative personality has been so clearly laid out. No one's going to do anything noble, or daring, or even halfway self-respecting. Their whole purpose is to exemplify pathetic self-entrapment in myriad repetitive ways, and far too many installments.

Even that makes this genre (if indeed we should call it that) sound more intriguing than it is: these stories simply gild brain-dead, educated, middle-class suburban boredom into "relatable" media products. At best, they are good things to show your children, eyes pinned open, Clockwork Orange-style, with the words, "For Christ's sakes, if you do nothing else, think more creatively about life than these morons."

For modern dramas, they're both appallingly neatly wrapped up in their dying moments, too. Burned bridges are rebuilt, the selfish become more charitable—but always for the goal of self-preservation though the protection of some conservative, idealised status quo.

That status quo sees morbidly dysfunctional families stay together, toxic friendships mindlessly perpetuated, and humans, in general, bowing to convention, obligation, and societal expectation rather than intelligently thinking about what they might need or like, and at least setting out to try and achieve it. Moreover, both stories present their protagonists' actions as strength rather than cowardice and/or outright stupidity.

The capacity for creative thought about life is exactly what I value in my contemporaries—people who are the antithesis of the characters in The Slap and The Corrections. To which end I can't understand why I'd want to see or even contemplate how that other, boring half live. I know it's boring. End of story.