Trigger Warning: This can be a column about trigger warnings.
Our coddling culture of celebrating weakness is perilously near letting the above sentence change into a serious, totally real, non-satirical norm.
Take the most recent label that was just added before Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone With The Wind.”
It says that the old book, which was made right into a huge 1939 movie, amounts to a “romanticization of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery.”
Um, duh! It’s a Civil War story that’s pro-Confederacy.
A more useful trigger warning I’d throw in front of “Gone With The Wind,” nonetheless, is: “This book is 1,472 pages long.”
In truth, books, movies and TV shows almost never begin with a trigger warning that might actually help me make a call. Listed here are some I’d wish to see.
Trigger Warning: You won’t ever give you the chance to afford this beautiful home
Every flippin’ Nancy Meyers movie (“It’s Complicated,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Holiday”) has a stunningly gorgeous Hamptons or California home where wealthy, relaxed Ina Garten-types drink red wine on beige couches that miraculously never stain. I won’t ever have one among these marvelous manses — and I’m triggered!
Trigger Warning: This cruel film depicts an unrealistic variety of days off
In “Dirty Dancing,” a family stays at a Nineteen Sixties Catskills resort so long that their youngest daughter becomes an expert mambo dancer. How did Jerry Orbach land this Loch Ness Monster of vacation packages? Why do I envy a fictional doctor in a cabin?
Trigger Warning: Jar Jar Binks may enrage you
“Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” is a highly enjoyable movie … for those who stand up and leave the room each time Jar Jar Binks is onscreen. The dumb face, that annoying voice. “Okie day”?!?
Trigger Warning: Some parts of this book must have been snipped
Prince Harry’s unhinged memoir “Spare” was not only a barn-burning tome of off-the-charts entitlement and reckless family betrayal — it was also gross. The rogue royal decided to disclose that he’s circumcised and said that his boarding school pals knew one another’s privates status. “We called it Roundheads vs. Cavaliers,” he writes. Spare ME!
Trigger Warning: Tom Hanks does this weird thing together with his voice
What the fresh hell was Tom Hanks doing with that loony Colonel Parker voice in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis”?
Trigger Warning: This film is unbearably boring and you should have to pretend to like it at dinner parties
“Nomadland,” “Roma,” “The Power of the Dog” — so many hours might have been saved with a single helpful sentence.
Trigger Warning: These characters only eat within the hotel restaurant
A bunch of rich sex-obsessives schlep off to Sicily in Season 2 of “The White Lotus.” Do these lucky losers dine on frutti di mare by the ocean? Do they hop around and cheat on their spouses at homey trattorias? Nah — they almost at all times eat on the rattling resort restaurant. Triggered.
Trigger Warning: This film incorporates a dog death — whoops, sorry, spoiler alert!
When I’m going to an Owen Wilson comedy — he’s Dupree for, God’s sake! — the ending of “Marley & Me” is just not what I’m within the mood for.
Trigger Warning: You’re about to commit six years of your life to a show with a horrible ending
If only this message had blazed across my screen before the incredible 2004 pilot of ABC’s “Lost.”
