Schadenfreude is not just a village in Germany

LGMers of a certain age will remember the big budget disaster films of the 1970s. The genre got rolling with Airport (1970), which was actually nominated for Best Picture despite being a very cheesy melodrama. The formula here was: put together an “all-star cast” in a perilous situation: a crippled plane or ocean liner or burning building or earthquake-stricken city etc. The genre still has occasional revivals, like that movie about the bus that had to maintain a certain speed, and if it fell below that speed it would blow up, which meant that the hero driving the bus had to keep the bus at that speed no matter what. I think it was called “The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.”

Anyway pop psychology theorized that the basis of these films was that they gave their audiences reasons to feel better about their own lives, because after all you weren’t actually trapped in a burning building or in a capsized ocean liner or a bus that couldn’t slow down. I’ve always assumed this is the same logic that drives all the stories about how miserable celebrities actually are that you can per their headlines find in raffish supermarket tabloids, that always feature remarkably unflattering photographs of their subjects.

For some reason all this came to mind when I was, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, involuntarily subjected to some quotes from Ryan Lizza’s latest installment in his expose of his former paramour Olivia Nuzzi. (not linking; proceed very much at your own risk). Now I fully acknowledge that Nuzzi’s behavior in this and related affairs seems to have been really awful, and that it’s a disgrace that someone who apparently makes it a habit to sleep with her sources has been handed yet another plum journalistic gig despite all that, but even so somebody needs to stage an intervention and ask Lizza how he would feel of Nuzzi were to harm herself as a consequence of his own present behavior.

Yes I know that under the circumstances we’re supposed to just root for injuries, and Jah knows they would be well deserved all around, but seriously this is gross and disgusting and beyond the pale of journalistic settlement and sentiment, since it’s not actually true that all’s fair in either love or war.