Does this happen to every generation? Where a cultural moment that, during our adolescence appeared deliciously shocking, is revealed to us in adulthood as, at best “troubling”, at worst a grim representation of how the world is cracked down the middle, a thick and low-humming oil dripping from its wound?
I realise now what a naive girl I must have been, to have accepted without daily outrage such clumsy horrors as the media’s addiction to Amy Winehouse’s addictions and Britney Spears’s breakdown, and I choose “naive” rather than “cruel”, because this week has been tough enough. But today, entering middle-age tired and thoughtful, I remain grateful for the ongoing trend for films and TV shows produced as correctives to those decades of casual cruelty, partly for the answers they give, and partly for the questions they leave me with.
