Anti-Aristotelian Cinema-- The Hurt Locker

Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century German playwright, disliked the Aristotelian model that had dominated dramatic theory for over two-thousand years. What particularly irked him was Aristotle’s concept of “catharsis,” the idea that the play (in Aristotle’s case, Greek tragedy) was supposed to purge harmful emotions like suffering and fear, so that the spectator might leave the theater feeling relieved. For Aristotle, it was not that the plays he was watching had happy Hollywood endings that lifted you up and out of your seats, but precisely the opposite: You witness the horrible consequences of patricide, fratricide, incest, rape, etc.—tragedies don’t skimp on such nasty stuff. You have seen it all, but the thing is that in the end it has happened to somebody else. You can leave the theater unscathed, secure in the knowledge that things, after all, are not so bad for you. You’ve experienced horrors, albeit second-hand, by identifying with the characters on the stage, but you, unlike them, have come out the other side without having lost a thing (except the price of admission). This is what bothered Brecht—if art is meant to improve society, he reasoned, what’s the point of filling the spectators with a sense of satisfaction with the status quo? Instead of allowing his spectators to identify with the characters on the stage, he strove constantly to bounce them out of that identification, to remind them that they, as separate individuals, were implicated in the social, political, and ethical dilemmas depicted in the play. He wanted them in other words to be acutely aware of their own role as agents of change as they considered, intellectually rather than emotionally, the serious issues raised by the play.

There is, though, another element that Aristotle cited as crucial for drama to have its effect on the viewer. Each play, he said, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Well, duh! But is this really as obvious as it seems? The movie, The Hurt Locker, shows us that there is a different way from Brecht’s to destroy the Aristotelian effect of catharsis. You don’t have to violate the spectator’s sense of identification with the characters; all you have to do is demolish this most simple and obvious tenant of the narrative, that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The movie follows a bomb-squad in Iraq from one anxiety-laden situation to the next. The situations are tense for us, the viewers, precisely because we identify with the characters. We root for them, and against the menacing figures prepared to blow them up with simple batteries and cell-phones. The film fills us with an expectation that the over-arching story, however, will follow that basic Aristotelian structure, beginning, middle, end. Text that pops up at the beginning of each sequence tells us how many more days in the team’s rotation—if they can just make it down to zero, they will be alright! This, of course, adds to the tension—we have a sinking suspicion something awful is going to happen, any minute now. And then it keeps happening, over and over, even if the soldiers seem to come out of these situations mostly intact. The movie is like Groundhog Day with explosions— the soldiers can’t even relax when they’re relaxing—in their spare time, they get drunk and go after each other with fists and knives. Unlike the hero of Groundhog Day, however, the bomb squad never really gets out of this eternal repetition of the same. One countdown, it turns out, is followed by the next. The movie ends with the powerful impression that there is no end in sight. Its plot structure is not a line or an arc, but a spiral into the void.

Ancient tragedies can be cathartic because they have an ending. You know the story is over, even if the hero’s life goes on (a life that perhaps will be filled with more terrible stories). You have identified with the suffering and fear you have seen on stage, but you can leave it behind, now, because it is over. The awful thing about The Hurt Locker is precisely that you cannot leave it behind, because the story is not over. The fear and the suffering, and perhaps also the intellectual concern to do something about it, stick with you instead of staying behind in the theater.

The Dialectic of Romantic Comedy

An example of how the dialectic between freedom and necessity influences all the most important aspects of our psychic lives: We want to believe two contradictory things about love, that it is destiny to fall in love with the people we fall in love with, and that we have chosen them. Our love affairs have to be both the result of destiny and of a choice freely made. This is why romantic comedies always have a two-part structure. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl—that’s FATE. Boy loses girl; boy struggles to get girl back—that’s FREE WILL—there is always a moment of decision for the boy: should he mope about feeling sorry for himself for having lost the girl of his dreams, or should he run after her and through some feat of daring win her back? Of course, he gets her back in the end and she, in turn, forgives him. Thus fate and free will end up happily married.

More Large Thoughts!

When I started this blog, I told myself I would update it at least once a week. Somehow that didn't happen, but anyway, here are a couple of posts to make up for it.