catharsis

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Instincts

I saw an article in the Metro today that I didn’t really understand. I believe the gist of it states that if we want to watch something that will give us a good cry, our brain logically tells us to upload a movie based on a true story. Likewise, if we want to unwind from real life, our brain says read a work of fiction instead of nonfiction, because then we can keep an emotional distance from the story’s events as we know the story isn’t real.

Except our hearts don’t cooperate. We’ll cry just as hard over movies not based on true stories, and feel as deeply emotionally involved with a novel that’s completely fictional as we might with a true story.

In fact, I think the article was trying to say that we’ll feel things even more deeply with contrived storylines.

Well, I should hope so! Filmmakers and writers put a lot of work into mastering their crafts so as to make them emotionally engaging. They work for years to effectively master techniques to tug your heartstrings this way or that at will. If a movie or book is doing its job properly, you should walk away feeling entirely and realistically emotionally sparked.

The trick is, what happens after the movie ends or you put the book down? Do the emotions stay with you as if they had been prompted by real people and events?

Sure they do. Is all that just manipulation? Playing on melodramatic clichés guaranteed to make you psychologically react no matter how detached you try to make yourself remain? Those killing pets, kidnapping children, shooting your spouse sort of contrivances?

A lot of it is, unfortunately. I look for something subtler myself. That isn’t always possible. But I can’t take the raw manipulation anymore some movies and novels insist on throwing at us.

I don’t watch the news either.

For some reason I see all this leading back to the old English One-Oh-One Shakespeare Studies’ concept of catharsis. As one of my characters once said, “I had a bad case of that once.”

But she got better. And that’s really the whole point of catharsis anyway. A surface definition says catharsis is the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. The idea of this release arising specifically through our experience of drama comes to us from Aristotle’s Poetics. But the usual source we hear about it from is when studying Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Hamlet or King Lear.

The idea is that seeing what the tragic heroes go through projects our own need to release similar and repressed emotions onto a safe canvas for us to do so. We experience Hamlet’s and Lear’s powerful miseries vicariously, thereby letting go of our own. Leaving us psychologically healed by the process. At least for the moment.

I can get into that. But I also don’t have a problem with movies or fiction being sheer escapism either. I don’t find anything cathartic in reading or watching Jeeves and Wooster, but I certainly enjoy doing either. Sitting down with a Lars Von Trier movie, on the other hand …

There better be something redemptive about sitting through that sort of experience. And it better be a good kind of sadness. Unlike a gut reaction to yet another manipulative situation of a child or puppy being threatened.

I had enough of that in the news I used to watch.

*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

Publishers and agents all over Canada asked, why even try it once? You’d have to be mad to try it twice.

SO LET’S DO IT THREE TIMES!

BEGINNING MONDAY, DECEMBER 29TH:

REALITY FICTION THREE:

THE INTERRUPTED EDITION

as always, at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

This time with illustrations by the author.

A new year dawning and a Lou Moon rising!