Pity, Fear, and Catharsis (10 minute read)
Happy Friday!
It’s been a bit of a roller coaster for the past couple of weeks. There have been major setbacks on a couple of fronts but also some forward progress on others. I’ll give you more details when I can.
I may have mentioned this before but I have one tried-and-true coping mechanism when things get difficult. When I’m at my lowest point I get in my car, I turn on “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel, I roll down the windows, and I drive.
He wrote this song about leaving Genesis. The way that he explains it is, “It’s about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get. It’s about letting go.”
For me it’s a reminder that no matter what happens I have a choice in the matter. I can stay, or I can “walk right out of the machinery, my heart going boom boom boom.” Once I remind myself that I’m not a helpless bystander in my own life (or career) my mood generally starts to turn around.
I’ve had to do it a few times recently and I’m proud to report that it still works. Maybe it will work for you, too.
I also went to the movies this week to see LAST NIGHT IN SOHO and THE ETERNALS. I enjoyed them both quite a bit but what I think I loved most was that being in an actual movie theater forced me to put my phone away for 2-3 hours. I'm still in the process of detoxing from the pandemic and one of the things I'm hoping to do is retrain my brain for deep focus after being glued to my devices for a year and a half. Being IN A MOVIE THEATER a couple times a week might actually help me do that.
Go figure.
Hope you have a great weekend!
Pity, Fear, and Catharsis
This past weekend I watched a TED Talk called “The Mystery of Storytelling” by a British lit agent named Julian Friedmann. He talked about three-act structure via Aristotle in a way that I’ve never really considered before but after I heard it I found myself thinking about it all week.
He believes that, “A writer’s primary relationship has got to be with an audience and not with your characters,” that you have to know what you want the audience to think and feel and how to guide them through it. Lucky for us, he believes Aristotle cracked it a couple thousand years ago.
Step one: You need to make the audience feel pity for a character. You do that by having them suffer some misfortune, injustice, or indignity which enables the audience to form an emotional connection to that character. Once they identify with the character you have some measure of control over them and you can move on to the next stage.
Step Two: Put the character into worse and worse situations so that the audience fears for them.
Step Three: When you finally deliver that character from whatever jeopardy they’re in the audience will experience catharsis.
Seems simple, right?
One of the most difficult tasks for me as a writer is getting the audience to care about what happens to a character as soon as possible. The sooner you can engage them emotionally the better. I think about the question, “Why will the audience care” every single day but I’ve never really thought about it in terms of pity.
Over the course of the week I thought about how it relates to so many of my favorite movies and TV shows and how I’ve just never given that specific name to what I felt for those characters.
The very first thing that happens in E.T. is that E.T. gets LEFT BEHIND when his spaceship takes off. Then we meet Elliott who gets picked on mercilessly by his older brother and his friends. Of course we feel pity for both of them. And then they become friends! Hooray!
Except now we fear for them. We’re afraid Elliott’s family is going to find out he’s keeping an alien, we’re afraid the man with the keys is going to finally catch up to them, and it just gets worse and worse until we’re afraid they’re BOTH GOING TO DIE. (spoiler alert) When Elliott finally gets E.T. back to his spaceship to go home we get catharsis.
In the opening scene of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK we see Indiana Jones use a whip to disarm a gunman, make his way through an obstacle course of deadly traps, get the idol, escapes the crumbling temple, only to have it stolen from him at gunpoint by one of his rivals. We feel even worse for him because we know exactly what he just went through to get it.
In the pilot of GLEE Rachel Berry delivers a show stopping number only to get a slushie thrown in her face a few moments later.
Walter White gets a cancer diagnosis.
Tony Soprano has a panic attack.
Josh Chan breaks up with Rebecca Bunch two minutes into CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND.
It’s worth pointing out that in all of these examples there are things we love or admire about these characters as well. E.T. and Elliott are both lovable. Indy is smart and capable. Rachel is a gifted singer, Walter White is a genius, and so on. We can’t just pity them because then they would just be sad sacks and nobody wants to watch that for ten episodes.
I’m in the middle of doing another rewrite on a feature spec and thinking in terms of the structure this way helped me see it in a new way. I already had an opening six pages or so that maximized the pity we feel for the main character. And I was putting her in increasingly dangerous situations until it just couldn’t get any worse.
What I had shortchanged a little bit was the last stage of catharsis. I really wanted the audience to feel a swell of emotion when two characters are finally reunited but it seemed like that moment was missing a visceral punch.
I remembered watching the opening night of the very first production of my play REPLICA at Cal State Fullerton. My original ending was pretty bleak and as I was sitting there in the audience I just felt terrible about what I was doing to them. I was getting ready to send them out into the night without so much as a glimmer of hope. I had to make a change for the next night.
One of the actors, John Short, suggested that we repeat a very simple physical gesture that the audience had seen in Act One, a gesture that spoke to the potential for connection between these two characters who were on stage at the end of the play. We added it the next night and there were audible gasps. It's worked ever since.
Remembering the power of that simple physical gesture I did a similar thing in this feature spec, assigning emotional significance to a simple gesture and giving it an echo in the final pages, reminding the audience of their connection to these characters. I put it in and it instantly felt right.
It reminded me of something I may have talked about here before, the "ideograph." Per Julie Taymor's description, it's a gesture, a moment, pulsating with narrative power, unencumbered by distracting detail.
I kept drilling down on that moment of catharsis and found a simple visual idea to bring the whole movie together. If it works the audience should all feel that release at the exact same moment. With any luck I'll get to find out in a theater some day.
Listening to this one TED TALK for fifteen minutes or so made the last few pages of my spec more impactful. It was a helpful tool this week, which is why I’m passing it along to you here. Maybe it will help you unlock some new idea about how to hook em and hold em.
The mystery of storytelling: Julian Friedmann at TEDxEaling How we tell stories seems to be a mysterious process that millions around the world want to be able to do, but 99.9% effectively fail. Why is it so hard for ...
Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill (Live DNA) This montage of live performances of Solsbury Hill includes footage from Rockpalast (1978), Live in Athens (1987), Secret World Live (1993), Growing Up Live ...