For our August Video of the Month, Vtape recruited our summer Young Canada Works employees, Brody Weaver and Janina Malapitan, to make the selection. They have chosen better than awful (2015), by Christine Negus, and each has provided a brief write-up of their response to the video below. better than awful (but still pretty shitty) provides an absurd proposal to cope with trauma. As the narrator makes (futile) suggestions at superficial solace, the work inadvertently and unabashedly laughs in the face of pain and suffering.

better than awful (but still pretty shitty)
Christine Negus (Canada, 2015, 1:51)

In better than awful (but still pretty shitty), Christine Negus offers a tongue-in-cheek recipe for turning individually experienced trauma into collectively witnessed spectacle. Rather than sulk and process in isolation, invite your loved ones over to watch. Throw a party. Be resilient. Cope. Distract them, and yourself, from the depths of your wounds. “This is a very kind act on the part of the victim,” Negus’ voiceover attests. Enlisting the affects of a tell-your-story confessional culture, better than awful asks viewers to consider the tendencies that enable, promote, and monetize trauma-as-commodity. With characteristic wit, Negus leaves unaddressed what happens next: after everyone has gone home, the freshly traumatized host is left to clean up messes literal, emotional, and metaphorical. As mid-2000s pop-punk musician P!nk might say, “this used to be our funhouse / but now it’s full of evil clowns.” Healing is anything but spectacular. —Brody Weaver

Christine Negus’s better than awful (but still pretty shitty) begins with a dusk-darkened sky and a countdown to fireworks. Booms, bursts, and the Boss (“Born in the USA” soundtracks this work) provide the summer night setting as a wry voice begins to instruct the viewer on how best to throw a party when something horrifyingly bad is about to happen. Absurdity catalyzes the catharsis achieved by Negus’s work, which focuses on violence and victims’ trauma. The voice identifies treats the victim / party-host should have ready that assuredly make awful things better, like “chocolate cake” and “sparklers when available.” An apotheosis is reached when the voice finally aligns with the image, describing the ideal light show for party guests: a sublime comet that explodes like fireworks into brilliant shrapnel, annihilating us, and all of our traumas, into oblivion. The perfect party, for the witnesses and the victim, for the spectators and the spectated alike. —Janina Malapitan

Image credit: better than awful, by Christine Negus (2015)