What's the opposite of comfort viewing? I'm not sure there's a term for it, but I suspect it's what I feel watching Ken Burns's documentary series on The Vietnam War. I'm now up to 1965 and the worst is to come, which is saying something after the horrors so far. Mind you, possibly the most horrifying aspect of the whole thing, made very obvious in the first two episodes, is that the Americans just didn't need to have been there. Any number of sensible observers knew that essentially Ho Chi Minh was leading a nationalist movement and in some ways was appreciative of American help. The tragedy lay in an inability to act rationally based on that knowledge.
We sometimes talk of the benefit of hindsight, but watching the tragedy play out makes hindsight feel like a curse.
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