The Naked Soul . . . Or, Pathos and Catharsis In Film

What Dreams May Come always makes me cry.  If you haven't seen it, you need to.  Based on a Richard Matheson story (the same guy who wrote "I Am Legend," "The Shrinking Man," and "A Stir of Echoes") the film stars Robin Williams as a man whose love for his wife transcends Heaven and Hell and who turns his back on paradise to save her.  It is in my top ten films of all times, a list which includes tear-jerkers like Moulin Rouge and Top Gun.

In fact, as I reflect on my favorite movies, I realize that many of them contain moments of extreme pathos, moments when heroes fail, beloved characters die, or when someone makes a difficult decision which necessarily ends in tragedy.  Often the movie ends with success, but the journey is an emotional roller-coaster that makes the ending earned.  Earning the punchline is the hallmark of any good joke, and in film, stories, or any kind of narrative, the conclusion must be earned.  Otherwise the movie feels like a waste of time, regardless of the money poured into its special effects.

On that note, I've given some thought to what generates pathos -- what gives a story emotional depth and generates sorrow, pity, sympathy, or tenderness toward a character.

The first, and most vital ingredient, is a goal.  A concrete, identifiable goal is what defines a protagonist.  Think about Luke Skywalker: He wants to join the Rebellion to destroy the empire.  First, he has to leave his home, but his Aunt and Uncle won't let him.  After he receives his call to action by Obi-Wan, he departs on a mission to find the rebellion and deliver R2-D2 to them.  Once he's accomplished that mission, and found the rebellion, his initial goal is achieved.  But he still has to destroy the empire, symbolized in Episode IV by the Death Star.  Spoilers!  He accomplishes his goal.  But in the process he loses something important to him -- his mentor and friend, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Just as important, Obi-Wan is killed while attempting to accomplish his own goals -- a goal he has in fact almost completed.  After disabling the tractor beam so that the Millennium Falcon can escape, he interposes himself between Darth Vader and Luke, enabling everyone to escape.  His sacrifice is what accomplishes that goal and we feel Luke's sorrow by being sad ourselves.

Writers sometimes talk about try-fail cycles.  In a traditional three-act structure, you see that nice arc that plunges at the end of the second act, and is completed in the third.  The protagonists concrete, identifiable goal is important because at the end of the second act, the protagonist should be as far as possible from accomplishing that goal.  In Star Wars the second act ends with Obi-Wan's death because he is Leia's "only hope."  With him gone, hope is gone, until we realize that now Luke has the Force and can destroy the Death Star, which, remember, was Luke's goal all along (even if he'd yet to discover it).

But for a reader or viewer to feel as though something has been accomplished, the characters cannot win every time.  In fact, each time they attempt something they should fail somehow.  When Luke goes in search of R2-D2, he's attacked and needs to be rescued.  Trying to feel Tatooine, Luke and Obi-Wan are interdicted by imperial Star Destroyers, they escape but when they reach Alderaan they are capture by the Death Star and so and so on.  They try, fail, have some success that enables them to try something else, they fail at that, try something else, and so on until the movie ends in victory.

Or consider Top Gun.  Maverick has only one goal: To be the best.  In the movie, this is symbolized in the concrete, identifiable goal of winning the Top Gun trophy.  We see him fail constantly in the classroom, in the air, and he is farthest from his goal just after Goose dies and he threatens to quit the program entirely.  Though he does not accomplish his goal of winning the trophy, we're offered a proxy goal of winning Ice Man's respect in the final battle with Soviet MiGs.

We as viewers feel these moments as deeply sorrowful because they advance both the plot and interfere with the protagonist's ability to achieve his concrete, identifiable goals.

The other form of pathos inducing action is the Noble Sacrifice in which a beloved character (usually other than the protagonist) sacrifices himself to save the protagonist, or our band of plucky heroes.  (Noble Sacrifices for abstract ideas or populations are much less noble because the viewer has difficulty developing affinity with abstract ideas or populations -- consider Armageddon in which Bruce Willis sacrifices himself for Ben Affleck: Though you could argue that he sacrifices himself to save the planet, it is clear that he does so in order to ensure his future son-in-law will survive to marry his daughter.  Or think about Neo choosing Trinity over humanity.)  In such cases it helps if the threat is external and has a definite end-point.  The classic is a ticking time bomb (such as the Genesis Device in Wrath of Khan, or someone diving on a grenade).

The final example I can think of is one of inevitability.  The protagonist cannot win.  Death is inevitable.  These cases, like British Officers on the Black Watch, teach us how to die.  In Deep Impact, facing the end, Tea Leoni's character stands with her father at the edge of the world and meets death with restraint and stoic courage.  The choice is what matters and we feel a profound sorrow in the realization that death is inevitable and that one day we may have to choose how to meet it.

In The Mist, Thomas Jane's character and his son finally escape the general store where they and most of the town have holed up; they've survived monsters in the mist and monsters of the human soul; but they've run out of gas and they can hear the monsters nearing.  With only enough bullets for his son, he makes the decision to spare his son a terrifying and gruesome death and shoots him in the head.  Death seemed inevitable and we're forced to make the same moral calculus as Thomas Jane's character.  Movies like this allow us to experience our own Kobiashi Maru every time we watch them, to challenge our own moral courage and our own values.

The Power of Story . . . And Its Curse

Why Story?

Narratives--stories--are powerful things.  They offer us solace by delineating reality; they fence-in the chaos of our lives and permit us the ability to explain what is, essentially, inexplicable.  Stories like these, the ones that explain the grand structure of our lives, are often called Myths.  Myths that you might know as such explain why rainbows exist, why there is evil in the world, where babies come from.  They are the most important stories because they give our lives order.

Smaller myths exist as well.  These quotidian myths are no less compelling just because they lack the dignity of a capital letter.  They explain the everyday--why is that person poor?  Why do those groups of people hate us?  Or why do we hate them?  Ten thousand . . . a million more.  How you choose to answer those questions reveals much about you, but as likely as not, you explained your answer in the terms of narrative.  That person is poor because of some other external event.  That's the power of narrative, for every action there is a cause.  And a preceding cause, and a whole chain of them ad infinitum.  

The Power of Story

As stories are re-told, though, something about their character changes.  Instead of explaining the world--depicting how something is--they metamorphose into how people ought to react to the world.  Once you've heard a certain number of times how your forebears reacted to an event, you begin to imagine yourself in that same position.  How would you respond?  Likely, you would respond the same way that those people did in the stories that you've been told.

This is the power, and the danger, of the human imagination; it is both the blessing and curse of story. 

A story, in and of itself, is never dangerous.  Even if its contents are seemingly malevolent, the moral content of a story if often imparted only after the fact.  We used to be much more obvious about it, and we still sometimes ask what the moral of a story is.  In common parlance it means something like the theme of the story, but it has a much more literal meaning when we think about how that narrative prescribes our actions.

 Structure of Story--The Grand Myths

Thinking about this got me thinking about what stories we tell ourselves today.  First, there is the grand, progressive narrative of history.  In the Western tradition, at least, history leads ever upward toward human enlightenment and human liberation.  It is a story of freedom from oppression of all types.  Ultimately, it is a story of justice triumphing over caprice and maliciousness.

Buried within that story, or perhaps framed within it, is another, equally powerful story.  It is the myth of capitalism (or of progress, expansion, ever-and-upward).  This is a story we tell closer to home.  It is a hearth story.  Other people have a hearth story that embraces communism or socialism, or possibly some form of fascism.  They are at once stories about how the world works, and stories of how we ought to work in the world.  They are, at their heart, myths about how the world--and especially how our part of it--works.

Embedded even further in that myth, are the narratives of the people who occupy those regions.  These are the stories that tell us how to confront and engage with outsiders, or with enemies, or with rival nations.  They are the stories that teach us how to die dignified deaths, and how to relate ourselves to the state.  Some of these stories are abandoned, as they ought to be, but others are re-appropriated and the moral changed.  These stories, because they are more intimate, because they deal with the actions of real people you can relate to, are the stories that can change.

Narrative is not a panacea, nor is it an evil that once exorcised will cure the world's ills.  It is a tool; and like any tool, it can be re-purposed.  

New Narrative

Narrative is simply a social construct.  And like all social constructs--like the economy, like race, like class--it can be changed.  But only so long as the social will exists to change it.  I propose that the growing emphasis on personal narrative at the expense of the national, or supranational, has damaged society.  We call it tolerance, and multiculturalism, and indeed, each of these things is important.  But more important than understanding our differences is understanding our similarities.

I'll say it again.  I'm not so naive to believe this will solve everything.  But I think it's a step in the right direction.  I think that it has the potential to alter the way we see the world, and by changing our own vision, expand the way we imagine ourselves within it.  To change something, first you have to imagine it another way.  And that is the power of story.