We are Dying to be Moved

I’ve done a lot of ranting lately about a show I loved last year that I’ve now come to hate. Maybe you’ve already guessed it, just from that sentence. Maybe you’re about to be gobsmacked by what it is, and you’ll respond by sending me angry emails. It doesn’t really matter to me which it is, because I have come to fucking hate Ted Lasso.

Which is a real shame, because it was honest-to-God one of 2020s bright spots for me. I looked forward to every episode of season one. The shocking cheerfulness. The unabashed hopefulness. What a treat! It felt almost revolutionary while the world was literally and figuratively burning all around us.

Now though, I retain my inexaustible thirst for and delight in things that are optimistic, warm, and wonderful. In fact, that’s kind of my whole deal. But the show has completely put me off through its self-aware aggrandizement. Something has become wildly inauthentic and treacley about it, and it’s just so painful to sit through. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but as I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, I’m pretty sure when we go back and watch the show post-pandemic, we’ll all realize it was terrible all along.

Which brings me to the complete other end of the viewing spectrum, where I’ve found myself today, on a gloriously sunny, happy, lazy fall day. I’m watching a digital performance of the chamber opera/contemporary theatre work Garden of Vanished Pleasures – a sombre, challenging, deeply moving piece of actual art. The piece is for four classical/opera singers and a trio of instruments. It is a heady, dreamlike expression of the end of one’s life, explored through the last days of English artist, filmmaker, and queer rights activist Derek Jarman. LGBTQ+-centric themes of life and loss and gender and love are beautifully expressed and never tokenized or co-opted. I sobbed. Through almost the whole thing. The music was incredibly composed and performed. The minimal set played gloriously against the extensive and tasteful use of projected photography and video. In a piece about death, I found myself feeling profoundly reborn.

Why do I tell you about this against the backdrop of what is clearly meant to be fluffy, feel-good television? Because, what I think we’re all reaching for, and what something like Ted Lasso (or the far worse offender, This Is Us) is trying to deliver, is the desire to be moved. To feel something rise up inside us that maybe we didn’t realize we felt. To be reminded of a profound human truth, or perhaps a part of ourselves we tucked away for a while. To have a bit of a cry. To feel catharsis. To reconnect to our feelings, which a lot of us have had to push aside for most of 2020 and 2021 just to get through every day. Feeling things is good. It’s important. In fact, it’s essential.

I was talking to my dad the other day about things that are so stressful or upsetting to you right now that you can’t let your mind touch them or you might just completely explode and self-destruct. I take back that opinion. I think that – aside from real trauma, which is completely different – we need to dive into the little corners of feelings we keep tucking into our pockets during this pandemic experience, and allow ourselves to move them out into the light. Art of all kinds is the most incredible tool for doing this, but we need to be proactive about seeking it out right now, especially as much of it continues to be delivered digitally. It’s worth it. Turn off the Netflix, the Apple+, the whatever-it-is, and find something where some people are taking artistic risks to tell bigger, richer stories. You will be moved. It will be okay. You will see.

Garden of Vanished Pleasures is a production of Soundstreams in Toronto. It runs, online, until October 10, 2021. Check it out here.