Matt Smith comes out against trigger warnings, worries that stories are being "dumbed down"

House of the Dragon star Matt Smith talked to The Times of London recently about his misgivings about audiences being warned ahead of time about potentially upsetting content in front of movies and TV shows. “Too much policing of stories and being afraid to bring them out because a climate is a certain way is a shame," he said, per Deadline. "I’m not sure I’m on board with trigger warnings.”

"It’s OK to feel uncomfortable or provoked while looking at a painting or watching a play, but I worry everything’s being dialed and dumbed down. We’re telling audiences they’re going to be scared before they’ve watched something."

Before he appeared on House of the Dragon, Matt Smith rose to fame playing the Eleventh Doctor on Doctor Who, a show aimed at a younger audience but which nonetheless featured some frightening scenes. According to Smith, this was one of the "great things" about the series. “That you scared children, in a controlled way, but you did scare them," Smith explained to the BBC. "Imagine you go to kids watching Doctor Who, ‘By the way, this might scare you.’ No, I’m not into it.” Smith fondly recalled his own childhood when he would rent certain movies despite being too young to watch them, joking that Friday the 13th "“absolutely ruined me.”

What's the deal with trigger warnings?

The idea of trigger warnings have been around for a while now, as has hand-wringing about trigger warnings coddling people. Just speaking for myself, I don't see many trigger warnings in the wild, and I watch a lotta TV. Just for fun, I checked the beginning of the House of the Dragon episode "A Son for a Son," which ends with Helaena Targaryen young son being decapitated. That sounds like something you might want to warn people about, right? There's no trigger warning on that episode. Although there are some notable examples of trigger warnings popping up in episodes of shows like Severance, Baby Reindeer and 13 Reasons Why, I don't think they're common. I suspect people clutching their pearls about trigger warnings is more frequent than trigger warnings themselves.

And I doubt that seeing a trigger warning at the beginning of a movie or episode of TV is going to ruin the experience for anyone. According to a study published in a journal called Clinical Psychological Science, people who were given trigger warnings before watching something had the same levels of distress as those who weren't. “Trigger warnings had trivial effects — people reported similar levels of negative affect, intrusions, and avoidance regardless of whether they had received a trigger warning,” the study reads. “These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.”

That raises another question: if trigger warnings don't do anything one way or the other, does any show or movie need to bother with them at all? I think that's a more worthwhile question than "Are trigger warnings dumbing us down?" cause in that case the answer seems to be a clear no.

All that said, I agree with Smith that it's okay to feel "uncomfortable or provoked" when experiencing a piece of art; that might even be the point of the piece of art, and I think that's legitimate. I only start to have a problem when writers and producers preemptively remove potentially objectionable material from a show or movie before a trigger warning even has a chance to give us a heads up, but that's another story.

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h/t Yahoo Entertainment