Hero and villain may be locked together in a struggle, drawn together by circumstances but operating in strongly contrasting, polarized ways that show the whole range of possible human responses to a stressful situation. Nations may be drawn into polarized conflicts because of radically opposed ways of perceiving reality.
2. Polarized Conflict Attracts the Audience
A polarized relationship naturally generates conflict as the characters at two contrasting extremes explore and challenge each other's boundaries, concepts of the world, and strategies for living. We find this endlessly fascinating. Conflict, like magnetic energy, is attractive, automatically drawing the attention of the spectator. As a magnet or a magnetized object has the power to attract certain metals like iron and nickel, so a polarized, conflict-filled human situation attracts and focuses the attention of an audience or a reader.
3. Polarity Creates Suspense
Polarity generates not only struggle but also suspense about the outcome. Which world-view will triumph in the end? Which character will dominate? Who will survive? Who's right? Who will win, who will lose? What are the consequences when a hero chooses one side or the other of a polarity? A polarized system attracts our attention initially because we all perceive that our lives are sawed back and forth by similar contradictions and conflicts, tugging us in many directions at once along multiple lines of polarity, such as man and wife, parent and child, employee and boss, individual and society. We continue to watch with interest to see how the polarized situations will turn out, looking for clues about how to handle these challenges in our own lives.
4. Polarity Can Reverse Itself
When the conflict heats up after several rounds of conflict between the two sides in a polarized drama, the forces that draw two people together may reverse themselves, changing from a force of attraction to a force of repulsion. Two magnets that have been stuck together will fly apart if one of them is flipped so that its polarity is reversed. A moment before, they had been so strongly attracted to each other that it was difficult to pull them apart, and the next moment it's almost impossible to force them together, so strong is the force of repulsion.
Among the curious properties of electrical and magnetic fields is the fact that the polarity of these systems can abruptly reverse itself. The direction the energy is flowing in alternating current electrical systems flips back and forth from positive to negative fifty or sixty times a second, while the magnetic fields of heavenly bodies reverse polarity infrequently but on some mysterious timetable. For reasons that are poorly understood, the giant magnetic field of the sun reverses its polarity every eleven years or so, generating immense storms of radiation that wash over the earth like invisible tsunamis and disrupt communications and electronics worldwide. Scientists believe the magnetic field of the Earth has flipped poles many times over thousands of years, presumably making magnets and compasses point south for much of the lifetime of the planet. Reversals of polarity on this giant scale seem to be part of the life cycle of stars and planets, like a gigantic heartbeat.
Such reversals are also part of the life cycle of a story. They may be temporary, quick reversals of attraction or power within a scene, or they may be major hinges or turning points of a story. Within a scene, a quick change of polarity might happen because one of the lovers gets a new piece of information that reverses his or her attitude, say from trust to mistrust, or from physical attraction to disgust. The piece of information might turn out to be false, only temporarily challenging the attraction of opposites, but it creates tension along the line of energy that connects the two characters, and that tension makes good drama.
5. Reversals of Fortune
Reversal of polarity in a story can be the abrupt overturning of a character's fortune, a change of luck or circumstances that switches the prevailing conditions from negative to positive or vice versa. Good stories have at least three or four of these reversals for the main character, some have many, and some are even constructed so that they produce reversals of fortune in every scene. In fact, that might be a good minimum requirement for a scene — that it produce at least one reversal of fortune for someone on some level of the story. A shift in power, the underdog standing up to the bully, the fates dealing a blow to the victorious athlete, a lucky break or a sudden setback, all these are reversals of polarity that punctuate a story and give a sense of dynamic movement. The moments of reversal can be thrilling and memorable, like the scene of Norma Rae standing up in the factory to organize the workers.
ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPT OF REVERSAL
Aristotle in his Poetics describes the essential dramatic device of the reversal. He calls it peripateia, which refers to the "Peripatos" or covered walkway of Aristotle's Lyceum where he used to walk and talk with his students, developing ideas as they strolled back and forth. Perhaps he used the structure to demonstrate his logic, building up an argument forcefully as they traversed the colonnade in one direction, then demolishing it just as thoroughly on the reverse trip.
Aristotle says the sudden reversal of a situation for the protagonist can produce the desirable emotions of pity and terror in the audience; pity for someone who suffers undeserved misfortune, and terror when it happens to someone like us. A story captures our emotions by putting someone a little like us in a threatening situation that reverses the hero's fortunes a number of times. Think of the reversals of fortune in movies like Papillon, Shakespeare in Love, or The Far Side of the World, with the sympathetic characters alternating between moments of freedom or triumph and periods of danger, disappointment, and defeat.
Reversals of fortune in the life of a hero are inevitable and they make for good entertainment, holding our attention as we watch to see what will happen next, and wonder if the positive or negative energies will dominate at the end of the story. Even if we know the outcome, as in the movie Titanic, we enjoy watching how the contest plays out and how the characters react to the ups and downs dealt out by fate or the playwright. In a well-constructed story these repeated reversals accumulate power, adding up to the emotional impact that Aristotle claimed was the point of it alclass="underline" catharsis, an explosive and physical release of emotion, be it tears of pity, shudders of terror, or bursts of laughter. The reversals, like drumbeats, impact our emotions, triggering reactions in the organs of our bodies. By Aristotle's theory, these drumbeats were supposed to accumulate tension in the bodies of the audience members until the biggest beat of all, at the climax of the play, released a pleasurable shudder of emotion that was believed to cleanse the spirit of poisonous thoughts and feelings. Stories retain their power to release cathartic emotions which is still a profound human need.
CATASTROPHIC REVERSAL
Since the beginning of Greek drama in Aristotle's day, the name for the biggest reversal in a character's fortunes has been "catastrophe." "Kata-" means "over" or "down" in Greek and "strophe" is "turn" or "twist", thus a catastrophe is an overturning or down-twisting. "Strophe" may also refer to a strap or a strip of leather or a length of plant fiber that could be woven into a basket, and is the parent of our words for strip, stripe, strap, and strop. It suggests that a play is a kind of weaving in which the strands of the plot, the fortunes of the various characters, interlock and crisscross, typically with the fortunes of the antagonist going up when the luck of the hero is going down and vice versa. A strophe in a classical Greek drama was a turning movement across the stage by part of the chorus, which recited a critical line of text to accompany the move. This was balanced by an opposite turn by another part of the chorus reciting an answering line of text, called the anti-strophe. It made the drama into a kind of polarized dance with the movements and phrases representing contradicting threads of thought or emotion within the society. We speak of "turning points" in stories and these are usually examples of reversal, with the biggest one, the catastrophe, coming just before the end of a classically constructed drama, and having, we hope, the cathartic effect that Aristotle recommended.