CHOICE
Another possibility for a Resurrection moment may be a climactic choice among options that indicates whether or not the hero has truly learned the lesson of change. A difficult choice tests a hero's values: Will he choose in accordance with his old, flawed ways, or will the choice reflect the new person he's become? In Witness, policeman John Book comes to a final showdown with his ultimate enemy, a crooked police official. The Amish people watch to see if Book will follow the violent code of his Ordinary World or the peaceful way he has learned in their Special World. He makes a clear choice not to engage in the expected shootout. Instead he puts down his gun, leaving the villain armed, and stands with the silent Amish. Like them, he is a witness. The villain can't shoot when there are so many witnesses. The old John Book would have shot it out with his opponent, but the new man chooses not to. Here is the test that proves he's learned his lesson and is a new man, Resurrected.
ROMANTIC CHOICE
The Resurrection choice may be in the arena of love. Stories like The Graduate or It Happened One Night take heroes to the altar at the climax, where a choice of spouses must be made. Sophie's Choice is about the impossible choice of a mother who is told by the Nazis to pick which of her two children will die.
CLIMAX
The Resurrection usually marks the climax of the drama. Climax is a Greek word meaning "a ladder." For us storytellers it has come to mean an explosive moment, the highest peak in energy, or the last big event in a work. It may be the physical showdown or final battle, but it can also be expressed as a difficult choice, sexual climax, musical crescendo, or highly emotional but decisive confrontation.
THE QUIET CLIMAX
The climax need not be the most explosive, dramatic, loud, or dangerous moment of the story. There is such a thing as a quiet climax; a gentle cresting of a wave of emotion. A quiet climax can give a sense that all the conflicts have been harmoniously resolved, and all the tensions converted into feelings of pleasure and peace. After a hero has experienced the death of a loved one, there may be a quiet climax of acceptance or understanding. The knots of tension created in the body of the story come untied, perhaps after a gentle tug from a final realization.
ROLLING CLIMAXES
Stories may need more than one climax, or a series of rolling climaxes. Individual subplots may require separate climaxes. The Resurrection stage is another nerve ganglion of the story, a checkpoint through which all the threads of the story have to pass. Rebirth and cleansing may have to be experienced on more than one level.
The hero may experience a climax on different levels of awareness in succession, such as mind, body, and emotion. A hero might go through a climax of mental change or decision which triggers a physical climax or showdown in the material world. This could be followed by an emotional or spiritual climax as the hero's behavior and feelings change.
Gunga Din combines effective physical and emotional climaxes in succession. Cary Grant and his two English sergeant pals have been badly wounded, leaving the water carrier Gunga Din, once a clown, to act as the hero and warn the British army of an ambush. Although wounded himself, Gunga Din climbs to the top of a golden tower to blow a bugle call. The army is warned and many lives are saved in an action scene which is the story's physical climax, but Din himself is shot from the tower and falls to his death. However, his death is not in vain. He is recognized as a hero by his comrades and is Resurrected. In a final emotional climax the Colonel reads a poem which Rudyard Kipling has written in Din's honor. Superimposed on the scene is Din's spirit, dressed in full army uniform and grinning as he salutes, Resurrected and transformed.
Of course, a well-made story can bring all levels — mind, body, and spirit — to climax in the same moment. When a hero takes a decisive action, her whole world can be changed at once.
CATHARSIS
A climax should provide the feeling of catharsis. This Greek word actually means "vomiting up" or "purging," but in English has come to mean a purifying emotional release, or an emotional breakthrough. Greek drama was constructed with the intent of triggering a vomiting-up of emotions by the audience, a purging of the poisons of daily life. Just as they took purgatives to empty and cleanse their digestive systems from time to time, the Greeks at regular times of the year would go to the theatre to get rid of ill feeling. Laughter, tears, and shudders of terror are the triggers that bring about this healthy cleansing, this catharsis.
In psychoanalysis, catharsis is a technique of relieving anxiety or depression by bringing unconscious material to the surface. The same is true, in a way, of storytelling. The climax you are trying to trigger in your hero and audience is the moment when they are the most conscious, when they have reached the highest point on a ladder of awareness. You are trying to raise the consciousness of both the hero and the participating audience. A catharsis can bring about a sudden expansion of awareness, a peak experience of higher consciousness.
A catharsis can be combined with a simple physical showdown, for a satisfying emotional effect. In Red River, Tom Dunson and Matthew Garth come together for an explosive fight to the death. At first Garth won't fight. He is determined not to be provoked into abandoning his principles. Dunson hammers at him until Garth is forced to fight back to save his own life. They commence a titanic battle and it looks for all the world as if one or both of them must be killed. They crash into a wagon loaded with domestic goods — calico, pots and pans — and destroy it, suggesting the death of hope for building home, family, or society on the frontier.
But a new energy enters the scene: Tess, an independent woman who has come to love Matthew Garth. She stops the fight with a gunshot to get their attention. In
an emotional climax — a genuine catharsis -— she spews up all her feelings about the two men, and convinces them that their fight is foolish, because they really love each other. She has changed a deadly physical showdown into an emotional catharsis, a moment of highest awareness.
Catharsis works best through physical expression of emotions such as laughter and crying. Sentimental stories can bring an audience to a catharsis of tears by pushing their emotions to a climax. The death of a beloved character, like Mr. Chips or the doomed young woman in Love Story, may be the climactic moment. Such characters are inevitably "resurrected" in the hearts and memories of those who loved them.
Laughter is one of the strongest channels of catharsis. A comedy should crest with a gag or a series of gags that create a virtual explosion of laughter, jokes that relieve tension, purge sour emotions, and allow us a shared experience. The classic Warner Bros, and Disney short cartoons are constructed to reach a climax of laughter, a crescendo of absurdity, in only six minutes. Full-length comedies have to be carefully structured to build to a climax of laughter that releases all the boxed-in emotions of the audience.
CHARACTER ARC
A catharsis is the logical climax of a hero's character arc. This is a term used to describe the gradual stages of change in a character: the phases and turning points of growth. A common flaw in stories is that writers make heroes grow or change, but do so abruptly, in a single leap because of a single incident. Someone criticizes them or they realize a flaw, and they immediately correct it; or they have an overnight conversion because of some shock and are totally changed at one stroke. This does happen once in a while in life, but more commonly people change by degrees, growing in gradual stages from bigotry to tolerance, from cowardice to courage, from hate to love. Here is a typical character arc compared with the Hero's Journey model.