11/12/15: dreameaters

I recently listened to an interview on the CBC Radio program Q, the arts and culture show, with 3 people who made a low-budget horror film called Dreameater. When asked about how they met, they mentioned 2 things that stood out to me and I believe are connected:
They all worked together at a non-profit organization
They connected as coworkers through their love of horror movies. When describing this, 2 of them prompted the third to speak "eloquently" on how horror movies are a way we can process our trauma

There really is something to this Professional Managerial Class/nonprofit industrial complex/bourgeois mindset and their obsession with processing trauma. It's not processing trauma itself that I'm concerned with, it's the need to justify art as valuable through its utilitarian application as self-help. This is the PMC mindset. Nothing has value unto itself. Nothing is just fun. Most importantly, no admission can be made of pure negativity or nihilism. You cannot say, as a bourgeois non-profiteer with an email job, that you like horror because it speaks to a gaping godlessness (or your fear that this is the case) or that you like a ghost story because it concretizes your fear that death is not an escape from suffering but just a continuation of it for a tedious eternity or that you are horrified by existing or anything like that.

They cannot admit to purely aesthetic enjoyment. They cannot admit to art resonating with a cosmic philosophical pessimism. Everything must be ruled by a relentless utilitarian positivism that is, crucially, about the individual. Horror is good because it HELPS us process our TRAUMAS.

Nevermind, for the sake of this argument, that the PMC class are among the most comfortable people in the history of the world. Just focus for now on the complete inability to assert the value of art on its own terms. Or to assert that it might have no tangible utilitarian value. No, it must be justified by its value as therapy.