Too Tense

One of the things I’ve noticed about my, uh, psychological stability in recent years is that I can no longer tolerate tense movies and TV shows. (See image/metaphor above!)

’Twas not always so. Although I was never a fan of pure horror films (heck, the Disney cartoon of Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was enough to send me crawling under the covers when I was a kid). I guess I saw a few Stephen King films, but generally Joyce (also not a fan) and I avoided the horror genre during our decades of going to at least one film a week.

But I had no problem with other kinds of tension, the kinds that occurred in cop and detective movies, in Westerns, in sci-fi, etc.

Not today. Hell, I would now Pause High Noon and Shane and Star Wars, which are hardly bubbling with terror.

I can’t say exactly when this happened—or how—but I noticed that Joyce and I were going to see more and more rom-coms and comedy-mysteries. Or films where people sat around and talked most of the time (My Dinner with Andre and the like).

Now that our film-and-TV viewing are all of the streaming variety, I find myself clutching the remote, ever ready to push Pause and switch over to a comedy special when screen-things get too tense for me. Joyce tolerates this—just as she tolerates a bit (not a lot) more tension than I.

I think that’s why we’ve both come to favor the lighter British mysteries—Death in Paradise, The Mallorca Files, Doc Martin, and the New Zealand one, The Brokenwood Mysteries. Sure, they get a bit tense now and then—but the tension often happens in the first five minutes when the murder occurs.

Ensuing that are detective work, humor, warm and communal moments in a restaurant, etc. And I can still tolerate that sort of thing.

As I said above, I’m not sure how this has happened. I don’t know if it’s just yet another wonderful feature of aging (and there are so many of those!)—or if my own ever-more-evident mortality has made me realize that death is neither funny nor interesting. Especially not mine.

I really can’t stand torture. We’ve started watching a new (and interesting) Britbox series called Grace (the surname of the lead detective), and I’ve had to endure scenes of a guy buried alive, a guy getting his finger cut off, etc.

So it’s going to take us a L-O-N-G time to get through it: I keep Pausing and shifting to a Netflix comic we’ve just discovered and love—Nate Bargatze.

The 1960s Me sometimes emerges late at night, waking me, asking me: When did you become such a WUSS?!?!?