Depressed? Here’s some advice I’ve heard before: leave the house, hit the gym, see your friends, get your nails done, casual sex, slay a dragon (in a video game), and maybe a hot, hot bubble bath.
But sometimes dealing with sadness means acknowledging sadness. Sometimes we need to feel our feelings, and lean into that vast darkness. After all, sadness is a part of life, and it’s fine to feel it as long as we don’t linger too long.
So. About leaning in.
Art is the best way to lean in. A sad song, a tragic movie, a painting that makes you question everything. Art takes all the chaos of life and orders it for our processing. It snatches the little fragments of life from the world around us like butterflies, and it pins them by the wings to the display case for our viewing, our knowledge, and our enjoyment.
This is the media I turn to when I’m depressed.
1. Arrival (2016)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams, this science fiction film is, on the surface, a funny alien story about language. Dig a little deeper and it’s about the recursive nature of time.
But when I dig into myself it’s only about one thing: is life worth living, even knowing that suffering is inevitable and, more often than not, the whole point?
Near the end of the film, a twist is revealed that recontextualizes the entire story, and I find myself bawling every time.
The song which plays, On the Nature of Daylight, is a mainstay in my sad boy playlists and Amy’s acting is pitch perfect as she, as Mikey Neumann puts it, “invents new emotions.”
When I’m at my lowest point and I want to die I have to remember that life is worth experiencing, even if most of it is sad and difficult. As I’ve aged it’s gotten harder to cry, no matter how sad I am, but this movie is a piece of art that can instantly unlock the dam inside me, freeing the floodwaters at last.
2. Forever 2 0 0 6
I can’t stress this enough. It’s just four hours of Silent Hill ambiance with the Playstation 2 UI superimposed over a vast, dark sea and a full moon. Distantly, you’ll hear rain.
3. Bloodborne
The dream and the night were long.
This is FromSoft’s H.P. Lovecraft inspired jaunt into gothic horror. While it’s still a fantasy JRPG, it’s much different from Dark Souls, mainly because of the world it places you into.
For the most part, gone are the grand, crumbling castles, the mysterious towers, the lush magical forests. Instead we have the gray-back cobblestones of a dying town. Blood soaked streets. Lantern light. Guns. A mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks who are themselves fully becoming beasts. The full moon.
The gods aren’t dead like in Dark Souls, but they are incomprehensible. Rather than a giant woman, the daughter of the cosmos is a bewinged, tentacle headed monster at the bottom of the world.
As fast paced and blood soaked as this game is, a great deal of my time with it is spent quietly creeping through dark, ruined towns. Occasionally you’ll get a gothic castle (I lied! There are still some castles!). Occasionally a poisonous, snake infested swamp. And always there is the sense that the deeper you go the worse it gets. The more your character tries to help the world by killing beasts, the more doomed it seems.
The few people you run into have, for the most part, been driven mad. Or they’re Beast Hunters like yourself who are destined to go mad. There are a few regular people in the world, shut inside decaying houses, speaking to you quietly through the doors. In the first area there is a little girl who asks you to look for her parents, who have not returned from the hunt.
If you bring her evidence of her parent’s deaths, she herself will go out and die looking for them. If you withhold the information, she will eventually disappear. If you withhold the information and tell her about a nearby safe haven, she will go missing, and her older sister will ask you to seek her. Circles and circles.
If you tell her about the other safe haven she will meet a fate worse than death.
The best thing for her is if you never even speak to her. If you keep walking. If you never engage. And that’s Bloodborne.
4. IGOR
Tyler the Creator’s fifth studio album is sonically and conceptually a departure from his earlier work. His lush, quirky productions are still there, but there is a greater level of thematic consistency, a single minded dedication to the vibe. It is an album about unrequited love. About being used. About longing.
When I loved him, I spent a summer in my bedroom listening to Igor over and over. “Can we be friends?” he asks. And that was the best I could ever, ever hope for.
5. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin is my favorite author and the greatest writer working in fantasy and science fiction today. Her work strides confidently across genre, zigzagging her way into totally unique parables about oppression, race, struggle, solidarity, and wrath.
My favorite work of hers is The Fifth Season, a novel about a planet besieged by generation defining apocalypses one after another, called “seasons.” Seasons sometimes cause ice ages, take away the sun for a few decades, or just destroy all infrastructure. Society is totally constructed around surviving these apocalyptic scenarios.
This state of affairs is complicated by the existence of orogenes, people with the magical ability to redirect kinetic energy. With this skill they can both shake the earth and still it, they can freeze a person solid in an instant, or draw magma up from the planet. They are loathed by regular people, who believe they are in league with the “Evil Earth” that’s always trying to kill everyone.
The main character, Essun, is an orogene in hiding. Both of her children have the gift. One day, a massive rift opens in the earth, spilling toxic gas into the atmosphere and causing a devastating earthquake. Mere hours earlier, Essun’s husband discovers that his baby with Essun is an orogene. And he beats the little boy to death.
The Fifth Season is about a group of people with the power to help the world who are constantly persecuted. It is about the friction between an oppressed class and the people who dehumanize them. It is about being pushed to the absolute brink, and then punished for becoming dangerous.
It is wonderful.
6. The Apocalypse | ContraPoints
I could really put any Contra video here. After all, the Hunger is pure despair and loneliness distilled into 57 minutes. There is something about the Apocalypse though that captures the overwhelming feelings of doom that come with living in these times. But, importantly, the video taught me that calling climate change the apocalypse is another form of denialism: it presupposes that it’s inevitable.
Still. It is very sad, isn’t it?
7. “Normal Again,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I have a complicated relationship with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At one point it was my favorite show. And then I learned about the numerous allegations of abusive conduct against creator and showrunner Joss Whedon. It is admittedly hard to watch or even think about Buffy now without wondering how many of the wonderful women on the show were hurt by Joss’s narcissism.
There are many sad episodes of this show. The Gift. The Body. Becoming Part II. Just to name a few. But Normal Again sticks out to me. In this episode Buffy comes to believe that her entire life—the entire reality of the show—is a delusion she is having in a mental hospital.
Up to this point, Buffy’s life has been extremely difficult. Brought back from the dead to work a dead-end job and spend her nights fighting even more demons. She has this incredible emptiness inside that resounds throughout the entire sixth season, one I recognize every time I watch an episode from this era.
Near the end of the episode, Buffy’s mother (who is still alive in the other reality) tells her that: “You have a world of strength inside you, you just have to find it again.” And in that moment Buffy realizes that the asylum is the delusional fantasy, that she’s running away from her real life, which is punishing, despair filled, and relentless. But it is still her life. And she is still strong.
“Thank you,” she says, leaving the fake world behind. Forever.
8. Berserk
I’ve brought Berserk up before on tableaux because it’s all I’ve been reading lately. I don’t know what else to say about it other than it’s the greatest manga ever written and it captures the overwhelming nature of despair perfectly. I have no notes.
9. Nier:Automata
Just about everything in the Yoko Taro catalog is sad. When side quests don’t end on a melancholic note it tends to be a sinister one. This is a world beset by constant war between androids and bulbous headed machines. And both sides are constantly searching for meaning and, frustratingly, never quite finding it.
Like Arrival and Bloodborne, Automata is cyclical. The tragedy that plays out feels at once shockingly, randomly cruel as well as inevitable. The color pallet is desaturated grays, verdant greens poking through concrete, an endless desert, and the shocking red of blood.
Androids 9S and 2B start the game as reluctant partners and by the time your playthrough is over it will be clear that they deeply love each other. And it will be clear that love can be a very complicated emotion. It’s so close to hate, after all.
One character, Emil, says it best: “Even if it’s pointless, you still have to do it.” Because that’s the thing about the Nier games: it all ends up pointless. Every well made plan falls apart, every war has no reason to start or end, every conflict is chaos. And yet, our main characters are still trying.
They fight to live in a world that has been abandoned by their human creators: a world that is both breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly violent. They can find no reason for this state of affairs, and yet they must persist. They must live. Life is all about the struggle within this never ending spiral of life and death.
It’s humanist. It’s sad. It’s my favorite video game.