Tragedy and horror as a form of play

Yale professor Paul Bloom offers an interesting theory for why we humans are often fascinated by horror and abomination (think scary movies, circus freak shows, and feeding Christians to lions) and drawn to tragic figures or the odd beauty that sad stories can evoke:

A better idea, I think, is that these pleasures reflect a form of safe practice — or, to use a more common term, a form of play. Some play is physical: It is a useful skill to be able to attack and defend yourself skillfully, and you get better at it the more you practice, but real fights are risky and painful, and so certain animals, including us, are constituted to take pleasure in play fighting, going through the moves of combat with someone we like, holding back so that nobody is hurt.

Then there is imaginative play. We use our minds to explore alternative worlds, an indispensable skill when it comes to planning for the future. From this perspective, the appeal of horror and tragedy doesn’t lie in the specifics. It’s not that we have to prepare ourselves for the rise of the undead or our father being betrayed by the Queen. We are drawn to horror and tragedy because they are creative representations of worst-case scenarios, situations that we really need to worry about, such as being attacked by strangers, betrayed by friends, experiencing the death of those we love, and so on.

It’s a fascinating question to me how far this “safe practice” theory can be pushed, whether it can explain other masochistic behaviors, including social and sexual ones. But if it is right at all, it would show that being a hedonist is more complicated than it looks. Even seemingly perverse pleasures have meaning; they have been shaped by natural selection to solve problems that we might not be consciously aware of. Simple pleasures aren’t that simple after all.