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Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away, by Eric G. Wilson
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Why can't we look away?
Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible?
In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies."
His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human--for better and for worse.
- Sales Rank: #864155 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-14
- Released on: 2012-02-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.85" h x .92" w x 5.36" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
From Booklist
Wilson, a professor of English literature and author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008), certainly has an unusual way of looking at things. Admitting his own fascination for the macabre and the tragic, he asks why we, as a society, are drawn to things that you’d think should repel us. Why do we have morbid curiosity, and what does that say about us? Exploring the question through consideration of a variety of phenomena—our fascination with the 9/11 footage of the towers coming down, our enjoyment of other people’s failures, our fondness for Hollywood tearjerkers and horror flicks, the popularity of serial killers, real and fictional—he develops the theme that we need this element of ourselves, that it’s essential to us. In essence, he argues that we need darkness in order to understand light. Not, perhaps, a blindingly original theme, but Wilson explores it with zeal and a great deal of wit. It’s hard, as one reads this fascinating book, not to see quite a bit of ourselves. --David Pitt
Review
Eric G. Wilson's smart, probing new book . . . sets out to explain what lies beneath our collective fascination with death and suffering . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck isn't some holier-than-thou polemic out to cure us of our dark leanings . . . Instead, it simply aims to help readers gain 'a fulfilling response to two of life's greatest, most pressing and persistent questions. What is the meaning of suffering? What is the significance of death? . . . The book's slim, peripatetic chapters cover an awful lot of erudite territory, as Wilson draws ideas and research from a delightful grab bag of academics, artists and thinkers. Aristotle, Freud, Kant, Goya and Hardy all make appearances, alongside an assortment of sociopaths and serial murderers. (John Wilwol, NPR.org)
Wilson is provocative, entertaining and above all honest. (Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News)
A leisurely, light-footed overview of our cultural obsession with doom, gloom, and gore. (Josh Rothman, The Boston Globe)
Compelling . . . Wilson keeps hearing a voice within that tells him to 'look.' He follows this instinct, energized by the idea that his thoughtful connoisseurship of the world's darkness is good--noble, even. Wilson draws on philosophers, poets, psychologists, filmmakers and more to build a case that 'an eager, open-minded interest in the macabre' provides 'a special invitation to think about life's meanings' . . . Wilson's guidance is personal, engaging, and convincing . . . The book offers heaps of terribly tantalizing topics. (Chris Jozefowicz, Rue Morgue)
Mixing anecdotes, arguments and his own quirky persona, the author of Against Happiness delivers a provocative meditation on morbid curiosity and the pleasure of seeing others suffer. (The Times-Picayune (New Orleans))
Wilson explores [his theme] with zeal and a great deal of wit. It's hard, as one reads this fascinating book, not to see quite a bit of ourselves. (David Pitt, Booklist)
[Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck] reassures: enjoying grotesque, horrible, frightening images is a natural impulse. From fairy tales to crime dramas, they hit us where we are most human. (Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe)
Ruminations of an exceptionally intelligent academic on why people--himself among the guilty parties--seem to search out and enjoy instances of human pain and suffering . . . [Wilson] does a thorough job of examining the people who can't look away. (Nona Nelson, The Roanoke Times)
[Wilson is] fluent and comfortable, whether he is poking for clues in the bewildering complexity of Edmund Burke's sublime, as experienced in the stomach-dropping irresistibilty of, say, a tornado; the Jungian shadow, that archive of everything we hate about ourselves, those destructive crazes and unadmitted tendencies without recognition of which we would not be whole; or the simple, malicious pleasure of another's misfortunes. (Peter Lewis, The Barnes & Noble Review)
Invoking everything from horror movies and television news footage of the Sept. 11 attacks to Dante's tormented verse and Goya's paintings of cannibals, Wilson makes a strong case that humans are natural-born rubberneckers . . . A hybrid of memoir, journalim and theory, [Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck] investigates what this impulse tells us about ourselves and how it might inspire constructive reactions like compassion . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck necessarily deals with a host of grim subjects, yet there are also instances of unqualified beauty. (Kevin Canfield, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis))
In the teeming ranks of the American Professoriat, you could argue that Eric G. Wilson is among those most palpably needed by the world at large . . . Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck is a personal book that touches on 'death tourism,' Hannibal Lecter, Maurice Sendak, Tipper Gore, Francisco Goya, serial killers (a handwritten note by Jeffrey Dahmer can fetch $1,700, he cheerfully informs us), Tiger Woods sex scandals, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, all embedded in an Alexandrian library of literary allusions that can be encompassed in less than 200 pages. (Jeff Simon, Buffalo News)
About the Author
Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, and five books on the relationship between literature and psychology.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
My Review - Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck
By Philip Arnold
After reading and enjoying Eric G. Wilson's Against Happiness, I was pleased to see his latest offering, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck. With much of the same scrutiny and informed insight, Wilson lifts the veil and illuminates the darker forces that shadow the human condition. What we often assume to be abnormal, taboo, or insensitive in our attractions or curiosities, Wilson claims instead to be affirming. Clearly it's a tough argument. But the book covers a great deal of territory - from cinema and the news media to 'celebrity' criminals to horrific public spectacles - to posit a convincing, if not a sometimes unsettling, argument. What I appreciate the most are the various angles he uses to support his ideas, borrowing from psychology, mythology, literature, etc. All in all, its a great read, deeply insightful, exhaustive in its coverage, and highly persuasive. I highly recommend the book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An extended essay with some good content, but page after page
By Michael S. Gross
An extended essay with some good content, but page after page, the moralistically self-obsessed author wrings his hands until they chafe, while the reader vainly hopes that he will finally wake up to the fact that the problem is with his conventional leftyish premises. But he never questions these premises
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Hard to look away
By Deb
Welcome to the dark side.
And, now meet your guide: author Eric G. Wilson, whose book _Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck_ takes us on an illuminating voyage deep into our dark side. He explores the innate morbid curiosity found within all of us (yes, all of us!), and shows how our dark side might not be so dark after all. His book supports his core belief that:
"the morbid offers illuminations brighter than the sun...Darker emotional states--doubt, confusion, alienation, despair--inspire a deeper and more durable experience of the sacred than contentment does." (p. 163)
Each of the 50 bite-sized, yet content-rich, chapters delve into an aspect of morbid curiosity, which Eric defines as "an eager, open-minded interest in the macabre--disease or destruction or death--as a special invitation to think about life's meanings...a spiritual yearning, a hunger to penetrate the most profound mysteries of existence." (pp. 126, 186)
Our morbid curiosity is what brings us to the dark side. Gory horror films, the literary genre of tragedy, the misfortunes of others, flirtations with death, the increasingly popular dark tourism industry, our fascinations with serial killers--we just can't seem to get enough. Eric unearths the factors fueling this fascination with the macabre, including: it allows us to better empathize with the pain of others; it helps us build morale; it inspires ecstasy; it helps us become psychologically whole and integrate our psyche's destructive powers into our bright reason; it reminds us of our imperfections and cuts through the delusions of what's real vs. unattainable (i.e. a world that needs to be perpetually happy and bursting with butterflies and happy faces); it serves as a catalyst for purgation and catharsis for aggression; it allows for the incorporation of the shadow; it offers us a sense of community; it helps us find meaning in suffering and contemplate life's mysteries of love and death; and ultimately, it opens us to truth, good, and the beautiful.
He also extends his exploration of the dark side to fathom his own personal struggle with bipolar disorder and the unexpected wisdom of depression:
"Stripped of its dark powers, the disorder has emerged as more than an affliction. I can see it now as an indispensable energy in the shaping of my identity...my productive sensibilities, my love of contemplation, my honesty about life's troubles, my willingness to endure confusion and discover solutions...The morbidity of sorrow--not cultivated sorrow, but that which comes inevitably--is often a productive sluggishness, a time when the soul slows down, too weary to go on, and takes stock of where it's been and where it's going. During these gloomy pauses, we often discover parts of ourselves we never knew we possessed, talents that, properly activated, enrich our lives." (pp. 170, 172)
So, lead your morbid curiosity this way to discover the light underlying the darkness. But, be prepared, once you start reading, it'll be hard to look away.
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