On 'The Trauma Plot'
1/23/2022: On 'The Trauma Plot', NY Mag's Cover Story Season 1: Power Trip, TJs Chocolate Brooklyn Babka, & ... More!
This week’s post a response to a piece in The New Yorker, “The Case Against The Trauma Plot”
About a year ago, I binged the Amazon series Undone. Every day for about a week, I’d crawl into my bed in the middle of the afternoon, turn off all of the lights, and watch as the rotoscoped characters flitted around my brightly lit laptop screen grappling with intense experiences and existential questions – car crashes, brain injury, anxiety, depression, grief.
At its core Undone, created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob Waksberg (who both worked on BoJack Horseman), is about trauma. Even writing that word, trauma, I wonder how it will be perceived. The show is about a young woman, Alma, who gets into a car crash, starts seeing visions of her dead father, and discovers that her consciousness can travel through time. The way in which the show subverts classic narrative arcs and constantly shifts focus mirrors the instability of a brain riddled with PTSD.
I binged the series at a time when I was heavily steeped in my own trauma – I had just watched my mom die of a prolonged cancer and then I took a medication that gave me a reaction that left me in the ICU, fighting for my life. All of this in the midst of a national pandemic.
When I sum up these events in my life and slap the label ‘trauma’ onto them, I kind of cringe at myself. I put quotes around the word ‘trauma,’ tampering the intensity with punctuation.
Trauma has no doubt become a buzzword over the past few years. Within the psychiatric community, clinicians argue over whether PTSD is actually on the rise or whether it is simply over-diagnosed. The definition has expanded in the decades since WWII. Once solely used to describe war veterans, the term now can be applied to sexual assault survivors, victims of racial violence, domestic violence, hate crimes, those who have endured medical trauma and witnessed death up-close. PTSD is now defined as a prolonged stress response to a traumatic event. In 2021, The National Center for PTSD reported that about 15 million adults experienced PTSD.
The expanded definition of the word has definitely changed our cultural perception of who is affected by trauma. There are harmful repercussions – over-diagnosis can lead to overmedication. More people who perhaps wrongfully identify with the word can become morally authoritative or numb to other people’s pain. But we have to weigh the harm against the good. Expanding the definition of PTSD has no doubt allowed more people to receive the care that they truly need.
I was prompted to write this post because of a piece I read in The New Yorker – The Case Against The Trauma Plot by Parul Seghal. In it, she espouses that the pervasiveness of trauma in society is mirrored in literature, film, and TV. She says that stories have become too heavily reliant on “the trauma plot,” which “flattens, distorts, and reduces characters to symptoms.”
Sehgal’s argument felt flimsy on so many accounts. It is hard to make out what her main point actually is. Is she arguing that the expanded definition of PTSD in society is leading to flatter characters on screen or the other way around? Is she arguing for more characters whose traumas are obscured or characters who have no trauma at all? How is her idea of ‘plot’ distinctly distinguishable from the ‘trauma plot’ given that screenwriters are taught to drive plot through tension and conflict? One thing is clear – she believes that the pervasiveness of the trauma narrative on the screen creates reductive, unrelatable characters.
This, I must say, is bullshit.
Undone’s Alma, Fleabag’s nameless protagonist, I May Destroy You’s Arabella, and of course, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are all examples of characters who have been made deeper, more relatable, and more full-dimensional by delving into their specific trauma and grief.
Of course there are books, movies, and TV shows that do a poor job of depicting trauma and those characters can come off unrealistic or trite. The Marvel superheroes that Seghal talks about in her piece are a good example of this. Spiderman watches his uncle Ben die and he immediately dedicates himself to a life of vigilantism that stems from that single moment of trauma. This is an extreme depiction of what trauma can do. But even that has value. A single traumatic event can take over and define the course of someone’s life. That doesn’t mean it has to erase other qualities, hopes, dreams, and fears, but it does become a crucial, if not catalyzing, part of the story.
In many ways, Seghal’s claim that trauma becomes a “totalizing identity” for characters is true. In some of my favorite pieces of art, the trauma plot engulfs the entire piece. But isn’t that the point? Take the 2021 Academy Award winner, Promising Young Woman. This movie is an example of the trauma narrative on steroids – it is one woman’s quest to get revenge after her best friend is raped and killed. She internalizes her friend’s trauma so deeply that it indeed “evacuates” her entire personality and consumes her life. But the movie is so self aware. It is playing on what it feels like to have a trauma subsume your entire brain – you become obsessive, singularly focused, a different person entirely. The trauma wipes away everything in its wake.
Seghal argues that characters were far more interesting when they were shrouded in secrecy. She says that the modern trauma plot presents us with “locks and keys,” whereas earlier stories and characters remained largely mysterious. Writers used “strategic opacity” and the reader's imagination could rush in to fill the gaps. There is, of course, so much value in leaving room for interpretation and imagination, but I worry that Seghal’s message reads more like this: people are more interesting when their traumas are hidden, when they keep themselves mysterious and guarded.
I feel passionately about standing up for the “trauma plot” because over the past few years watching characters engulfed in their own traumas has helped me find relief. The past two years have been the most complex, scary, and transformative years I’ve been through. There have been times where it feels as if my brain has been co-opted by someone I don’t even know – consumed with thoughts of bodily demise and death. Watching characters on the screen grapple with the totalizing effects of trauma has made me feel so much less alone and has given me the ability to find agency again.
At the end of the day, I do think that Seghal and I want the same thing. We both want stories that provide connection and catharsis. At the end of her piece, she writes about the way in which she imagines details from her life showing up in character’s lives – “Stories are full of our fingerprints and our old coats; we co-create them.” Seghal wants space in the plot to find herself.
I prefer to lose myself in the mental anguish of a character completely separate from myself. There I am in the dark watching Alma from Undone on the screen – black hair, brown eyes, the car crash, the time travel … of course, her story is not mine. Maybe Seghal would say the ‘trauma plot’ in the show is too heavy-handed and that is why I don’t immediately see myself in the story. But I do find myself – in the imprints of Alma’s brain, in the way she breaks down when she hears her father’s voice, in the tumult of emotions, in the jagged flashbacks, in the synapses firing.
Long after I close my laptop and the show is over, I feel it — connection, catharsis, relief.
Media Recs –
New York Magazine’s Podcast Cover Story, Season 1: Power Trip – truly one of the most shocking and revelatory podcasts I’ve listened to. This Season explores the underground psychedelic drug therapy movement and the harm that it’s done to patients over the years.
Watch this thought-provoking documentary, Thank You For Supporting The Arts, that explores stripping as an art form and then read my review on the doc!
Trader Hoes –
TJs recs this week are courtesy of my beloved BFF Jacqlyn — Chocolate Brooklyn Babka (for a taste of Jewish New York!), Chicken Soup Dumplings, and the Mini Vegetable Samosas for a quick, easy, delicious little lunch :) (If you have a TJs rec that you’d like me to include in this newsletter, send it ova!)
Happy Sunday:) Go Rams? See ya next week.
Bex