Moving beyond misery porn — why I switched off from ‘One Day’

A little bit over a week ago, Netflix released their adaptation of David Nicholl’s book One Day. As a fan of the novel and the panned 2011 film, I knew what to expect from the story of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, which One Day follows over the course of eighteen years. While it might come as a surprise to the critics, the film adaptation had the potential to make me weep back in the day. Alas: when I watched Netflix’s rendition, the tears didn’t come. There were a few, but they weren’t the guttural sobs that I’d expected. I had the same experience with All of Us Strangers and The Iron Claw too. But scroll X or TikTok, and you’ll find that it’s quite the opposite for most viewers of these sad-centric media, with people describing themselves as “traumatised for life” and “choking on [their] own tears” in response to One Day alone. Was it a ‘me’ problem? Or is it that misery porn is at such a saturation point that I simply can’t withstand anymore?

“The way the iron claw broke me is insane [sic] definitely ugly crying at the moment, ” reads a tweet about A24’s flick on the Von Erich brothers. “I’m dead inside” reads one in response to Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. It’s safe to say that misery porn not only has the desired effect, but that people gobble that up. There’s no better illustration of that than the sheer amount of it. As well as those mentioned, last year saw a renewed interest in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, and recently we’ve been blessed (or cursed) with films like The Whale, Past Lives, and Close. While Hollywood execs aren’t going to slap it on their films anytime soon, misery porn is now almost a genre in itself.

That said, there have been whispers that others are starting to feel stuffed full (and verging on nauseous) with sadness. Spurred on by last year’s stage adaptation of A Little Life – which The Guardian called “four hours of brutality and misery” – people started to wonder if the depths of melancholy contained within the novel’s pages felt crass and exploitative. There was a similar undercurrent to the reception of Alice and Jack too: dubbed as a failed attempt to be “Normal People for a slightly older set”, the character’s dismal backstories were unconvincing. It’s also hard to ignore the lack of attention afforded to the recent TV series All the Light We Cannot See, an adaptation of a book repeatedly deemed as one of the saddest. And all of this comes at a time when we’re not only recognising our society-wide penchant for “yearning”, but wondering what it is exactly that we’re yearning for. Happiness would be an obvious answer to that question if it weren’t for the popularity of films like The Iron Claw and All of Us Strangers. With them in mind, it seems what we’re looking for is the experience of feelings, no matter how positive, negative, or how extreme. Given we’re all a bit numb – big chunks of our existence being mediated by phones and computer screens – that makes sense. 

Essentially, we’re at a kind of crossroads with the genre. Still, what is it about the people, like myself, that don’t get a kick out of misery porn anymore? Some say that not crying at films makes you a bit of a weirdo. Some say it means you’re depressed. I’d hazard a guess that it’s down to the fact that, as I get older, I’m increasingly aware of the fantasy element of what I’m viewing. In this sense, you could argue that misery porn capitalises on a vulnerable audience that has something of a sell-by date. It’s a hypothesis that certainly fits my own experiences. The saddest films I’ve seen – or, at least, those eliciting the most visceral reaction from me – I watched as a teen. And in the same way that people now take to X to post a clip from Family Guy to evoke their sadness, I’d hop on Tumblr to find an appropriate GIF from whatever tearjerker I’d just watched… Maybe I’m just getting old. 

But the idea that misery porn finds an audience unified by their shared vulnerability does tap into something important: that there’s ethical considerations that come with the genre. It’s a rhetoric that all the chatter around A Little Life comes to time and time again. Namely, is it okay to use trauma as entertainment? Or is it veering on the voyeuristic side of things? It’s a hard line of argument to pursue – you start getting bogged down with whether anyone can tell someone else if their art is appropriate – but it’s arguable that there’s a time and a place for misery porn. A landmark work of the genre, for example, might be something like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. That feels off the table in terms of its supposed “value” as misery porn, because it was so seminal in exploring women’s mental health. The same might go for something like Ava Duvernay’s limited series When They See Us, which dramatised the events surrounding the central park five. It’s horrible to watch, but we need to see that.

Beyond that – and this is most definitely a ‘me’ problem – there’s something annoying about the inherent competitiveness of misery porn. The hordes of tweets with suicidal ideation and increasingly obscure clips… They’re grating. As it is when someone obnoxiously sniffs during the final moments of The Iron Claw. That’s no-one’s fault, per say. Directors like Andrew Haigh don’t set out to have their work diluted into a clip from Fleabag and the girl loudly weeping in the cinema is probably just responding to the Letterbox-ification of cinema in a broader sense. You haven’t watched a film unless it’s been recorded on an app, given an arbitrary rating… And sobbed because of it. 

Where does all of this leave us? One thing’s for sure, and that’s that I don’t think we’ll see the back of misery porn anytime soon. That’s okay, though. These conversations are a testament to the fact that we’re increasingly conscious of who’s benefiting from the exploration of these hard-to-swallow subjects. With that, we might usher in audiences that find value outside the things that pluck at their heartstrings. While their online reception obscures it, there’s so much radical loveliness in films like The Iron Claw and a TV series like One Day. Both, in fact, are unified by their endeavour to represent the afterlife, which I’d argue is worth more merit than how much they make you cry. I’ve come to a place where I have to accept that I can’t pinpoint why I didn’t cry as much as I’d “like” to in response to these forms of media. Hopefully, it’s because I’m actually doing alright. I was going to re-watch One Day to see if I could elicit more tears a second time round. But I’m going to leave that for now.