So much of the general reaction seems to fall more on the bitchy side of the scale that it almost makes you pity the multimillionaire actresses who are on the receiving end (almost, anyway).
Bloom has a fine eye for emotional particularity — like how seeing your ill and infirm lover padding around in "backless bedroom slippers and green baggy pants" would make you feel equal parts pity and disgust.
Adding "I apologize" can make you seem more sincere and pitying, thus making your parent pity on you too.
Penn's intriguing documentary made you rather pity Henry VII – he outlived his first-born, Arthur, and his beloved wife, Elizabeth, and spent his life clinging to power, suffering several bouts of TB, before dying in 1509.
No, Wuornos's story is unique and through Nick Bloomfield's filmmaking (2002's Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer is the follow-up to his 1992 documentary, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, also on Netflix), a sadder portrait emerges, one that makes you feel pity on the abused former prostitute.
"Facing 20,000 of your friends," sings Anni-Frid Lyngstad, "how can anyone feel so lonely?" Naturally, being Abba, while telling you how wretched being in a huge pop group really is – "wishing every show was the last one" – they don't make you wallow in their self-pity, making sure every element of the song is the most finely honed of pop.
If your friend is constantly saying things that demean you, that make you feel small or unhappy, or if your friend makes you feel unworthy and pitied, then you have lost a friend and gained a critic.
Self-pity, however, makes you feel wretched and is a rudeness to single parents coping with a child with autism while being forced by the bedroom tax to search for one-bedroom flats.
