I have, of late, developed a terrible addiction to a really bad genre of YouTube video: bodycam footage of arrests. They’re mostly DUI stops gone awry and Florida bar patrons refusing to leave various premises. (It seems that Key West is a particular hotbed of petty crime and public drunkenness; I naively thought it was mostly old queens and Judy Blume.) They’re grimly fascinating to me, in a way I’m not proud of, for a variety of reasons. There’s the copaganda of it all, the rock-bottom human pain of it all, and the unsettling fact that the videos mostly involve women—reading the comments, it’s clear many viewers are looking for (and, in their mind, finding) confirmation that women are crazy and erratic and entitled. The titles of the videos include that word, “entitled,” quite often, and there is rampant misuse of the neologism “Karen.”

Again, I am not proud that I have watched dozens of these videos in the last few days, glued to the squalor. A rare few are what one could call righteous: a dangerous, obnoxious person halted from menacing other people. But mostly they are sad and frightening, glimpses into what I hope is the worst day of someone’s life. I can’t really explain why I keep watching them, but I do. Though I am trying to stop. 

This is a long way of saying that I went to go see Toy Story 5 on Tuesday afternoon, wanting to wipe the YouTube awfulness from my brain and instead spend some time with something sweet and wistful and clever, the way Toy Story movies have been consistently for 30 years. I think it mostly worked. Well, it at least chased grainy footage of people contorting in handcuffs and screaming incoherently about their made-up attorneys from my consciousness. But it did make me a little depressed in another way.