What’s the Loneliest You’ve Ever Felt?
The author started a project on loneliness by asking this simple question. Many people quickly recounted experiences, often with surprising specificity.
It’s perhaps not much of a statement to say that movie audiences have been conditioned to expect lonely heroes on the big screen. Westerns have long touted the virtues of the lone cowboy while simultaneously fetishizing the isolation of a dame waiting for rescue. Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock reigned in the ’90s with their portrayals of sad, clumsy dream girls. Superhero films have issued unfailingly sequestered protagonists, their power and responsibility separating them from the people they’ve sworn to protect. These are characters who hold within them as much longing as we feel watching them from our overstuffed couches and greasy theater seats.
In these films, certain cues taught viewers how to read
