Hard to Please

Good light-hearted art is hard to find. It had been a while for me, until this weekend.

It had been a solid three years since I've had reason to be so pleased that I left a movie theater glowing the way I did on Friday night. Three years ago it was when I saw "Super Troopers" in the theater. Friday, it was "The Incredibles."

I spend most of my time observing, listening to, reading and analyzing the subject matter of the dark, satirically comedic, the ambient, the pessimistic and largely depressing realms of art. For this reason, I am occasionally shocked to find that there is still material being made that can make me as happy as meeting Winnie the Pooh at Disney World did when I was 3.

The Pixar animated film was like that first sip of water the morning after a hard night of drinking and the subsequent hours of open-mouth snoring.

After three solid years of re-watching "Super Troopers," attempting to relive the magical viewing, and delving back into the moody world of metal, indie rock, Chuck Palahniuk and Tim O'Brien, I needed a break.

There are only so many references to death and spiritual torment a man can take before he needs to be reminded what it's like to love living again.

It seems to be much easier to make depressing art than uplifting. I could paint you a "word picture" of a man on the brink of suicide in a low-rent apartment, bottle of grain alcohol in one hand, TV-dinner stains on his undershirt, and a never-fired snub-nose revolver bought from the local pawn shop, in the other hand. Bringing your mood down a notch only took a minute or so.

But I can't do the opposite in a single sentence. I can show you a mid-'30s family man pleased with life and wife, on the New Jersey shore with his children as a kick of wind sprays the sea onto his brow and a kick of his youngest boy's foot places a red, yellow and blue beach ball at his feet. But that didn't bring you back up, did it?

Somehow, depressing is just plain easier. It's easier to relate to a man's pain than his happiness.

Writers have reached more profound depths of pain than happiness. Dante's "The Divine Comedy" is a perfect example. In "Inferno," he goes to great lengths to describe most horrific punishments of sinners, feet ablaze, limbs bound by serpents that gnaw at their backs. These are vivid, lucid descriptions of pain most of us will hopefully never know.

"Paradisio" fails to live up to these descriptions. Vague imagery permeates the text. There are many references to light and smiling, but is this all that makes up happiness and contentment? It seems to be a particularly difficult task to find a way to manifest elation.

Even most of the comedies of recent years have failed to truly make a man's day. Mockery and satire dominates today's comedic scene. While I can and do appreciate it, it seems to me less lightening to point out flaws than to generate something positive.

"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," in all its outright brilliance, always fails to really improve my day, because at the same time that it consistently brings forth a hearty laugh, it saddens me. It reminds me that there is a need to improve the society to an extent that attempting to do so feels futile. It almost seems a paradox to laugh when the stress fractures in our social inner-workings are made clear.

It's no help that there's hardly any songwriters these days that can write a clich?(c)-free tune that doesn't make the listener want to take a nose off a bridge into oncoming traffic. I don't have any right to complain. Even the "inspirational" songs I write contain death imagery.

Maybe it's because the ultimate act of human elation, the orgasm, is considered taboo, so we settle for laughter which can hardly act as a counterweight to cancer in the balance of happy subject matter to sad. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the moral fabric of our society is threadbare to the point of transparency, rendering us incapable of any real sense of appreciation and capable only of bitterness. In any event, there are rare exceptions to the rule and reign of depression.

Long live Pixar!