In your writing, remember that the purpose of everything you're doing is to bring about some kind of emotional reaction in your reader or viewer. It may not always be the full-blown explosive reaction of catharsis, but it should have its effect on the organs of the body, stimulating them through repeated blows of conflict and setback for your hero. You are always raising and lowering the tension, pumping energy into your story and characters until some kind of emotional release is inevitable, in the form of laughter, tears, shudders, or a warm glow of understanding. People still need catharsis, and a good story is one of the most reliable and entertaining ways of bringing it about.
QUESTIONS
1. What role do holidays and the seasons play in your life? What role in your stories? Do you associate the holidays with emotional catharsis? Do your characters?
2. What happens if you resist or ignore the rhythms of the seasons? What happens if you don't participate in the seasonal rituals of your culture?
3. How is the seasonal cycle of catharsis played out in the world of sports? Do we get more catharsis from playing athletic games or from watching them?
4. Why are competitive reality shows and talent contests so popular? What is the catharsis that they provide?
5. What is the effect of experiencing a dramatic catharsis in a group? How is watching a movie or play in a packed theatre different from reading a book, playing a computer game alone, or watching television at home? Which do you prefer, and why?
6. Has reading a book or watching a movie, play, or sporting event ever triggered a feeling like catharsis in you? Describe that experience and try to make the reader feel it too.
7. What was your most memorable holiday experience? Could that experience be material for a short story, a one-act play, or a short film script? Would a character in it experience a catharsis?
8. What role does fashion play in the seasonal cycle? Are we manipulated by the fashion industry or is it natural to wear different colors and fabrics for each season?
9. What seasonal rituals are still practiced in your community? Do any of them use dramatic effects to create catharsis? What feelings are stirred by these rituals?
10. Where are movies going in their search for situations that will trigger some kind of emotional or physical reaction? Is it harder to stimulate people today, and what will moviemakers and storytellers of the future use to bring about catharsis?
Although we use our minds to process and interpret stories, much is going on throughout the rest of the body as we interact with a narrative. We react to art and to stories about our fellow creatures with the organs of our body. In fact the whole body is involved, skin, nerves, blood, bones, and organs.
Joseph Campbell pointed out that the archetypes speak to us directly through the organs, as if we were programmed to respond chemically to certain symbolic stimuli. For example, big-eyed infants of any species trigger a reaction of sympathy and protectiveness, or cause us to say things like "How cute!" Puss-in-Boots from the Shrek movies knows how to exploit this deep emotional trigger by making his eyes huge when he wants sympathy. Emotions are complex processes, but on one level they are simple chemical reactions to stimuli in our environment, a fact that storytellers have always used to get their emotional effects.
Certain images or tableaux have an automatic emotional impact on us, felt in the organs of our bodies. A tableau is a figure or several figures in a setting, enacting some primal scene that either affects us intuitively, on an almost animal level, or that has become charged with emotion because of long tradition. The Last Supper, images of the Madonna and child, and the Pieta depicting Christ's mother cradling her dead son's body are all emotionally loaded religious tableaux. Similar images with equal force existed in earlier cultures, like the Egyptian goddess Hathor nursing her child or Isis tenderly assembling the scattered pieces of her dismembered husband Osiris. Images of beings in conflict, people in combat or gods and heroes wrestling with monsters, cause tension in our stomachs as we identify with one or another of the combatants. Images of protective or generous spirits (kindly grandmothers, angels, Santa Claus) give us a warm feeling of comfort. Representations of sympathetic characters in physical torment evoke a physical response, as in graphic medieval art depicting the Crucifixion and the martyrdoms of various saints like St. Sebastian who was shot full of arrows.
Classical Greek drama used startling visceral effects on stage, like Oedipus appearing with his eyes torn out, to elicit a strong reaction in the bodies of the beholders. The language of Greek plays could be bold and brutal, hammering at the audience with vivid word choices that suggested violent blows and the spilling of blood. Often a bloody act was committed off-stage, but described with stomach-wrenching detail, or the shocking evidence was displayed in the form of blood-soaked clothing or actors portraying corpses.
The Romans took this to extremes in their version of Greek theatre which became more degenerate and cruel as the Empire stumbled to its death. Symbolic or simulated acts of violence were replaced by real ones, with condemned criminals suffering the fate of the fictional characters, literally bleeding and dying on stage to amuse the Roman public. Gladiators stepped into plays to enact mythological combats and actually fought to the death in the theatres.
In the late 1700s, the puppet character of Guignol was imported from Lyons to Paris, where his brash, violent nature gave birth to a whole wave of plays known as Grand Guignol, whose object was to provide thrills of terror and shudders of horror with the realistic depiction of torture, beheadings, dismemberments, and other insults to the human body.
Observers of the first impact of moving pictures on the public remarked on the realism and physical power of the images on the screen, causing audiences to jump back when a train approached or flinch when a gun was pointed at them for the first time in The Great Train Robbery.
In the 1950s and '60s, Alfred Hitchcock was known for provoking physical reactions in his audiences, and he was a master organist, playing the viscera like a mighty Wurlitzer in tension-filled movies like Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo, but he was not alone, for all good directors know instinctively how to use their tools to make us feel something, physically and emotionally. They employ everything in the toolbox — story, characters, editing, lighting, costumes, music, set design, action, special effects, and psychology — to bring about physical responses such as holding the breath in suspense, gasping in response to surprises, and exhaling in relaxation when the on-screen tension is released. In fact, the secret of drama may come down to control of the audience's breathing, for through the breath all the other organs of the body can be regulated.
In the 1970s the special effects—laden movies of Irwin Allen (Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) were heralded, and sometimes condemned, as a new wave of visceral entertainment, playing to the body rather than the mind. With the arrival of the modern special effects masters of the Spielberg and Lucas generation, movies were able to seduce the eye and the other organs of the body ever more convincingly.