Artistotle, Catharsis & Extreme Emotion

“Robert McKee, in his excellent book Story, defines the goal of the screenwriter as ‘a good story well told.’ A story must also be the vehicle for an emotion. The audience wants to be moved. Those elements that contribute to an emotional experience are valuable: those that aren’t are extraneous and probably dispensable. According to Aristotle, ‘catharsis’ (emotional and spiritual cleaning) is the goal of tragic drama and is produced by the strong emotion of ‘pity and terror.’ But why do we need cleaning, and what impurities—and why do we need such extreme emotion to burn them away? To ask this is to ask why we like to tell and hear stories at all. Perhaps, we need to be cleansed of the aimless chaos of our lives. The characters and actions of real life are raw, in unorganized state; Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) wrote, ‘The very impuse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning….'”
Screenplay, Writing the Picture
Robin U. Russin and William Missouri Downs