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"If you don't foward this e-mail, that's OK. Mommy says you're a mean heartless person who doesn't care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that she hopes that you stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach. What kind of wretched person are you that you can't take five lousy minutes to forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame for the rest of their day, and then maybe help a poor, bodiless nine-year-old boy?"
Glurge (a term which can be used to describe one story or applied to the genre as a whole) is the body of inspirational tales which conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and which undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering "true stories."
Glurge often contains such heart-tugging elements as sad-eyed puppies, sweet-faced children, angels, dying mothers, or miraculous rescues brought about by prayer. These stories are meant to be parables for modern times but fall far short of the mark.
The term is specific to Snopes.com , coined in 1998. Already in its short lifespan it has reached across the Internet and has appeared in the print media a number of times, and it may well soon make the final breakthrough by appearing in dictionaries as a bona fide entry. The word was invented by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with the site. At a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, she fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.
Glurge sometimes contains a menacing subtext of fatalism or xenophobia. In such examples, happiness and success are linked to following the message's religious or social beliefs — education, hard work, and achievement are irrelevant or subversive. People not members of the favored group may be portrayed as sinister and untrustworthy, and the deaths or misery of such people ignored or even celebrated if it brings one of them to accept the beliefs of the missive.
This entry was taken with permission from the Snopes.com Glossary.
Not to be confused with Tastes Like Diabetes, though that is a common feature of such stories. Some Guilt Trip commercials may also qualify as Glurge.
Examples:
Film
- Many "lesbian" movies make the guys total and complete scumbags/rapists in order to accentuate how "pure" women are with each other. This has the added effect of adding to the perception that lesbianism is the result of "broken" sexual relations with men, and the presence of a "real," decent man would have resulted in things being different.
- Which is neatly averted in Tipping The Velvet, in which all the men are decent and generous and the only villains are female.
- Well there was the boyfriend of the main character's lover who put down her claims the two women were in love as childish female sentimentality. Of course the ex-lover didn't have much to say.
- Ferngully piles on every Anvilicious environmental Aesop known to man...and accidentally subverts it by making the most likeable and memorable character (in The Movie at least) the villainous, demonic spirit of pollution.
- Almost any "inspirational" movie about a teacher, especially of the Save Our Students type, actually implies:
- A teacher can reach all students just by caring. Caring means not having a life at all.
- All the other teachers those students ever had just didn't care enough.
- The school system doesn't need discipline, funding, national standards, or any actual improvements. It just needs teachers who care more.
- Teacher v. Unruly class; both learn lessons.
- It's especially poignant and "inspirational" if the students are from gang-ridden ghettos, and the teacher is white. The teacher's ability to "overcome racial differences" to "reach the kids" is hailed as something amazing and not at all racist, as most of the other teachers in the school are often black, Hispanic, or other non-white. Dangerous Minds is an example. It can all get a bit "White Man's Burden."
- How do I reach these keeds?
- To Sir With Love, however, avoids this very well. Possibly because it's a true story.
- Lean On Me also avoided falling into the typical trap, mainly by stressing discipline and control as the only effective methods of instruction.
- The makers of Pumpkin were trying to parody Glurge. Instead, they just ended up making a very Glurge-filled movie that wasn't absurd enough to be funny.
- Simon Birch is an infamous example of Glurge as the product of Adaptation Decay.
- A Prayer for Owen Meany, the book it was based on, was pretty damn glurgy to begin with.
- YMV This troper was a kid when he watched the movie, and the ending was, if a tad unbelievable, pretty damn Tearjerkery. That being said: Why was the baseball fatal; and why did it take so damn long to actually hit her?
- Parodied in Tropic Thunder with the Film Within A Film Simple Jack, a movie about a mentally-retarded farmhand meant obviously as an Oscar Bait role for actor Tugg Speedman. The movie becomes a total bomb since, as Kirk Lazarus puts it Tugg went "Full Retard", playing the character as genuinely retarded rather than merely The Fool like Forrest Gump or Peter Sellers in Being There and noting Sean Penn's peformance in I Am Sam as an example of why you don't do so.
- Michael Jackson went from Tastes Like Diabetes to this with Ghosts, one of his responses to accusations that his affection for children hid unsavory motives. It uses the framework of a black-and-white horror movie. An evil white mayor (played by Jackson) leads a Torches And Pitchforks mob on the supernatural Michael just because he was sharing ghost stories with some local boys. What results is a parade of Nightmare Fuel to drive the mayor away, and it has been argued that Michael is the real villain even though the idea is that he's the hero who teaches us An Aesop about not picking on others who are different — talk about Unfortunate Implications!
Literature
- Some of the earliest children's books published in English were stories meant for Puritan children. They primarily were stories about children who did nothing but pray and work, and finally had the "good fortune" to die young before they could commit any sins that would have gotten them cast into Hell. "Wasn't that a nice story? Sleep tight!"
- Parodied in The Areas Of My Expertise with The Six Oaths of the Virtuous Child, which are more creepy than inspiring.
- Today shall not be wasted. I shall rise before the sun, so that I may then watch my family as they slumber, with intent, waiting eyes. - I shall honor my mother today, and I shall tell Father he is powerful. - Today I shall be clean. I shall not touch my teeth, knowing that the oils of my skin shall cause them to disintegrate. I shall instead hone them with a good steel twice after prayers. - I shall be a faithful child, and I shall ever make science my enemy. Also eels. - At day, I shall perform my chores and duties happily, and if I see an eel, I shall kill it before it may speak to me seductively of its lazy life on lazy river bottoms. - At night, I shall dream of more labor, and in my sleep I shall smile with sharpened teeth, knowing that today has not been wasted.
- Mark Twain wrote two stories parodying these: "The Good Little Boy", in which the title character's life ambition is to be the star of a Sunday School book, and "The Bad Little Boy", in which the title character misbehaves and karma utterly fails to inflict ironic punishments.
- In his stand up routine, David Cross savages the book Promises to Keep: Daily Devotions for Men of Integrity for being full of Glurge and Warped Aesops.
- If you've ever read any story by Hans Christian Andersen, the patron saint of Glurge, you have been exposed to it.
Live Action TV
Multi-media
- While they're certainly not all guilty of it, more than one film strip on the dangers of drugs has fallen into this.
Music
- The song Christmas Shoes definitely qualifies. We'll let Patton Oswalt speak for this one. It's so infamous that even Christian Radio stations are opting to stay away from this these days.
- There's an Alternate Character Interpretation that posits the kid is a Street Urchin playing on the heartstrings of his marks in order to scam them.
- Speaking of Christmas, Glurge seems to be the steak and potatoes of all the Christmas movies that -coincidentally?- nobody seems to remember. A stellar example: the all but forgotten Disney movie "One Magic Christmas". It is a... loose reimagining of "It's a Wonderful Life", sort of. And it sits uncomfortably between this trope, Narm, Tastes Like Diabetes, Inept Aesop, Deus Angst Machina, and Nightmare Fuel (the latter especially due to the violent Mood Whiplash). Bonus points for having many of the same Unfortunate Implications as "The Christmas Shoes," as pointed out by Patton Oswalt above: "What a horrible f***ing God!!!". The whole things seems like it was designed to scar children for life.
- Hard 'N Phirm wrote an over-the-top response song to Christmas Shoes called She Named The Pony Jesus, in which a guy steals a horse from a fair to give to his ridiculously ailing daughter. The song ends with the horse trampling the girl and running away.
"Can I have a pony, Jesus
your humble servant begs
you see my little girl breathes through a tube
and has a wheelchair for her legs
I'm not asking you to fix her spine
or uncollapse her lung
but I know she'd thank you for that pony
if she had a working tongue...
I know that horse won't stop her tremors
or reattach her nose
but I know she'd hop right on that pony
if she could move her shriveled toes"
Real Life
- Jack Chick and his notorious Chick Tracts. Also stellar examples of Scare Em Straight. In this case, "scare 'em straight to Giant Faceless Jesus and his Pointing Finger of Doom..."
- Spam, chain letters and faxlore by the thousands. Snopes has an entire section dedicated to examples of these, with well over one hundred entries, and yet even that barely dips into the endless well of schmaltz, bathos and unexamined assumptions that winds up in people's inboxes daily.
- Parodied on Cute Overload!, in which the storyteller gets confused by the sequence of events in the pictures, leading to a very Lost Aesop.
- Some of the crazy stuff people come out with on Fundies Say The Darnedest Things are pretty glurgy. Thanks to Poes Law, it's very hard to tell if this is actually serious or not. Example:
"After four years, our cancer warrior Alice has left her earthly bounds and gone to heaven, where her body is healthy again, where the wind can blow through her hair, and where she can finally ride a horse on the beach and swim with dolphins. She was embraced in heaven by all the inspiring teens and children with cancer she met along the way." My question to atheists is: if her parents asked you for your true beliefs, would you really take that away from them? Would you really tell them that their daughter was just unlucky, and suffered heroically for years only to go out like a candle and be nothing more than dirt in the ground?
Western Animation
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