Consider it the worst kind of coincidence. In May, just as Ben Affleck was completing his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, four-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from her British family’s hotel room in Portugal. Affleck’s film, a sharp thriller set in a working class neighbourhood in Boston, happens to centre on the abduction of a four-year-old girl, played — in another unfortunate coincidence — by an actress named Madeline O’Brien who bears a strong resemblance to McCann.

But aside from these superficial similarities, Gone Baby Gone, which opens across Canada on Oct. 19, has nothing to do with McCann, of course. It’s based on a 1998 novel by Dennis Lehane (who went on to write Mystic River) and the film was scripted and shot long before McCann disappeared. Still, the film’s British distributor, Disney U.K., decided to pull Gone Baby Gone from the London Film Festival, which opened on Oct. 17, and to indefinitely delay its U.K. release. Affleck told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that he was “pleased by what I think is erring on the side of good taste… It’s obviously a sensitive time and if there are any similarities we can wait to distribute the movie in the U.K.”

These are undeniably decent and sincere sentiments, so why, then, does the decision to shelve the film feel so wrong? Affleck’s movie doesn’t exploit the McCann case, nor is it insensitive to the nightmare of losing a child. The disappearance of Madeleine McCann is an unspeakable horror for her family, but is all of Britain really so traumatized that they should be protected from seeing a fictional Hollywood film? After all, there’s been no suggestion that the British tabloids and gossip rags, which have been profiting happily from their coverage of the case, should be silenced out of respect for the nation’s pain. In fact, journalists have a cynical expression for the public’s fascination with domestic tragedies and violence: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

The delayed release of Gone Baby Gone isn’t the first time in recent memory that popular entertainment has coincided with real-world tragedy, resulting in the work being hastily pulled from circulation. In 1999, following the Columbine High School shootings, the two-part season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was postponed because it featured scenes of a student arming himself with a rifle. Earlier this year, an episode of the crime series Bones, dealing with a college campus murder, was pulled in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. Last year, the trailer for Paul Greengrass’s film United 93, about one of the doomed 9/11 airliners, was yanked from a Manhattan movie theatre following public complaints and in Los Angeles, audiences heckled it by shouting “Too soon!” at the screen. (For the sake of this argument, it’s worth pointing out that the audiences weren’t waiting to see a romantic comedy or an indie romp; United 93’s trailer ran before the film Inside Man, a thriller about an armed bank robbery and hostage-taking, set in a corrupt and racially tense post-9/11 New York. Clearly, audiences weren’t opposed to a violent story, as long as it was fictional.)

Crew and passengers charge the plane’s hijackers in United 93. (Johnathan Olley/Universal Studios)Crew and passengers charge the plane’s hijackers in United 93. (Johnathan Olley/Universal Studios)

Perhaps a little more understandable, given the timing, was the reaction to British author Chris Cleave’s Incendiary. The novel, which was set in the aftermath of a fictional al-Qaeda attack on a soccer stadium, was published on July 7, 2005 — the same day that bombers targeted the London transit system, killing 52 people. The novel, which was primed to be a huge release — with a larger-than-average initial print run and big publicity campaign — all but disappeared. Print ads and public appearances were cancelled and Waterstone’s, Britain’s famed bookstore chain, took down its in-store displays.

Public sensitivity is the usual reason given for pulling these stories and images in the wake of a real-life tragedy. In our evermore connected, but seemingly all the more fractured world, our capacity for sensitivity, empathy and compassion offers one of the few candle-flickers of hope. Think of the global relief efforts after the 2004 tsunami, or the world’s initial heartfelt response to 9/11. But that empathy can be twisted into something politically calculated — like the ramming through of tough-on-crime legislation following a random act of violence — or pious and parasitic. A decade ago, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, inspired an almost unhinged display of public mourning that now dictates that every high-profile demise must be commemorated with an ostentatious show of tears and a ritual offering of teddy bears.

Of course, no tragedy has been more exploited for financial and political gain than the attacks of September 11, 2001. The memory of the dead has been invoked to justify the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act, and the 9/11 profiteers include everyone from presidential hopeful and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani right down to the Manhattan vendors who were shilling FDNY T-shirts before the toxic dust had even begun to settle.

The crassness of this opportunism aside, the mass co-option of suffering following events like 9/11 has a cost on the personal, individual level, too. The idea that “all of America” was attacked on 9/11 is a convenient patriotic metaphor, but where does that leave those who actually did get injured or die, or lose a loved one? What happens to the singularity of their loss?

This is where art comes in. I’m not generally a proponent of the idea of art as therapy — who wants to take medicine every time they see a movie or listen to music? — but our entertainments, at their best, provide a long view on the human condition. We’ve been telling stories of suffering and survival for the whole of our history. Good art reminds us, too, of our capacity for cruelty, self-deception and foolishness.

Incendiary, while an uneven novel, has some terrific flashes of political satire. After the fictional terrorist attacks, all Muslims are fired from government jobs and a Shield of Hope — a group of gigantic balloons featuring the faces of the victims — is installed over the city of London. Meanwhile, celebrity mourner Elton John rises to the top of the charts with his piano anthem England’s Heart is Bleeding.

Likewise, Gone Baby Gone, while a traditional action thriller, manages to slide in a critique of the ways in which tabloids and 24-hour news channels shamelessly exploit tragedy for ratings. A pair of lacquered anchors coos platitudes about the missing girl before their chipper segue to the weather. And at the home of the little girl’s mother, reporters are staked out in front like a pack of polyester-clad jackals. The mother basks in their spotlight and pity, but out of TV-camera range she’s revealed to be a neglectful, selfish and beyond-irresponsible addict.

Gone Baby Gone offers an astute reminder that displays of grief and offers of comfort aren’t always what they appear to be. It probably would have been an insightful message for Britons who are right now awash in the never-ending coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The irony is that they’re the very people who aren’t allowed to see the movie.