"We all know the song . . ."
— Neil Diamond, "Love on the Rocks"
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From "The Case Against the Trauma Plot" by Parul Sehgal, "With the trauma plot, the logic goes: Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it. Such belief can be difficult to sustain. The invocation of trauma promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover. The second-season revelation of Ted Lasso’s childhood trauma only reduces him; his peculiar, almost sinister buoyancy is revealed to be merely a coping mechanism. He opens up about his past to his therapist just as another character does to her mother—their scenes are intercut—and it happens that both of their traumatic incidents occurred on the same day. The braided revelations make familiar points about fathers (fallible), secrecy (bad), and banked resentments (also bad), but mostly expose the creakiness of a plot mechanism." |
In context —
