But they get to go together to continue their relationships [in a gorgeous elf fantasy higher plane], leaving a new world starting. It’s like having two happy endings, so: swelled-heart and misty-eyed time.
Mind blowing concept
Fair enough! And it is a great ending for Sam as he goes on in the Fourth Age to raise a family and brings the book to Aragorn and all that.
Ahhh… more tear-welling with heartfelt sigh … thanks
Well, maybe kind of. But what I mean isn’t that we the audience won’t see them again, but they won’t be seen or see each other in the story world again. Frodo was fighting for the Shire, which he won’t see again. Malcolm was fighting for his wife who he won’t see again.
Although. The real tearjerker scene for me in Sixth Sense comes when Cole tells his mom his secret.
Cole:“She said you asked her a question. She says the answer is ‘every day’. What did you ask her?”
Mom: “Do I make you proud?”
Cole: “oh, mom”
Then they hug tearfully and I pretend to have something in my eye as I reach for the Kleenex.
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Like Jims description of the relationship between earth and moon. The moon is constantly falling toward the earth due to gravity, but because of the speed at which it travels, its orbit is always getting bigger, meaning the moon is constantly drifting away. They’re both being pulled together and drifting apart at the same time.
So maybe the stories with the strongest emotional punch are the ones that punch us with the strongest emotional or relational dynamics? And then even if those dynamics are the equivalent of the moon falling toward the earth while drifting closer, they would still count because they’re giving a fuller set of dynamics. And that should account for Shawshank and some of the others on your first list.
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Also, we’re still technically talking about how e=mC2. Somehow there’s some permutation of that formula that says emotion=logic multiplied by something something.
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cognitive dissonance? I told someone, recently, about Chris’ example of unfinished [something or other] stuff in films: the fact that Dorothy took Toto back to Kansas where the nasty neighbor still lived and who had taken Toto to the pound for his ‘end’. Before any discussion, the someone replied, “Thanks for ruining the film for me.”
It looks like when that permutation is finished, the brain has picked one concept, closing on anything further.
Needless to say, I will never ‘discuss’ this with anyone, ever, again. (other than here)
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But the relationship isn’t over. The relationship has just grown in a certain direction. Even if one of the Players in the relationship are dead and gone, the relationship can still change. I feel differently now about my grandfather than I did the day he passed away. That relationship is still going on, growing. In a story, we’re just seeing one instance of that growth.
No one is ever really gone.
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Sorry, this is what I meant by “it’s over”! Not that the movie was over, but the relationships that we’ve seen build to a happy ending are over. The same could be said for something like “The Notebook”.
You’re right about The Sixth Sense though, and that’s different.
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Ah, I thought you were making a joke.
I’m assuming the discussion of the RS for this one focuses primarily on Malcolm and Cole. Now I’m interested in going back to look at the relationships between Malcolm and his wife and Cole and his mom. Or Cole and the ghosts.
Exactly. If the relationship were over, Frodo wouldn’t be so sad to leave the shire, we wouldn’t get shots of Malcolms wedding videos, etc.
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Maybe what hurts is “memories”
Here’s my argument: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/havhcd/what_really_kill_us_are_the_memories/
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I remember watching Season 2, Episode 5 (Run) of Lost in Space, and it made me tear up. After seeing it, I decided that I needed to make a journal about those moments, because I’ve been really interested in the evocation of emotion and Plutcik’s Wheel of Emotion, etc. I haven’t started, shame on me.
It wasn’t at the end of the episode. In fact, it was in the beginning. If you haven’t seen it, stop here, don’t read another word, and watch the first scene. Let me know if it affects you as well. Maybe watch the whole episode.
I think that it could be a dual appreciation moment, and that makes it more powerful. I don’t know who is the MC of the episode (it kind of depends on which story: the past or present-day story), but in the scene, at least, I think John is the viewpoint character.
It felt like an unexpected, emotional reveal and reversal. In other words, I don’t think that I saw it coming. Plus, I think they juxtaposed two or three emotions. First was tension, maybe some pride, and then they dropped the hammer with the RS storyline. They also made John really deserving of that moment and that helped.
All of this is said in retrospect, and I watched the episode a fair amount of time ago. I really need to start that journal and find a good way to record my thoughts about people manipulating my emotions.
I’d be curious what other people say about the episode because there are basically two stories (if I remember right). The flashback story is John and Judy drifting apart, and the other story is them coming together. Which is really cool.
All that means that I agree with @mlucas that the RS story has a lot to do with the evocation of emotion, but it might be equally dependent on the MC or OS because you can create tension or suspense within those through-lines and that might make you more vulnerable to the RS.
I’d also like to ask: I couldn’t begin to count the number of times that movies or television shows have made me tear up, but I’d be hard-pressed to say the same thing about novels. Anyone else? Or am I reading the wrong stuff?
I also wonder if certain emotions lend themselves to certain through-lines or even, Classes – which I kind of hinted at earlier. For example, tension and suspense.
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And Ps, mostly what I was doing in this thread was just pointing at things and saying “see that? Does that fit in? How does that fit in?” Not much else.
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You pointed your list right at my heart. Fortunately, that is my least vulnerable spot.
Casablanca is Failure/Good. He’s failed to remain apart from the war. He’s failed to win Ilsa back. He pretends to like it, that he got her back today, and all that rot, but that’s pure Justification. It’s a movie where the hero settles for the things he should do and doesn’t get the things he really wants.
The movie pulls a great trick on us by making us think he’s got himself back, when really he’s just been convinced to get into the war of several militaristic nation states so that he can have ‘honor.’ The film’s propaganda for America joining WWII.
That “Good” by the way is the Author’s judgment, and it’s propaganda because he tricks the Audience into going along with it, even though they’re being played for saps—persuading Americans to send their sons to go and die in a foreign war.
If you’re an Audience member who is awake to all the balls in play, you may have a different view of the ending. You think RIck has been played for a sap. There’s nothing noble about giving up the woman you love to a self-righteous prig on a messianic mission, and yet somehow by the end of that movie you’re convinced it’s the noblest thing in the world.
By the way, I was stuck in Casablanca for two days on my way home from London in 2016. Therein lay a tale. I’d start the tale by animating a plane across a map and showing its path with dotted lines.
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The Goal of the OS is not to remain apart from the war or win Ilsa back. It’s a story about helping Laszlo and the refugees escape Casablanca. Rick has to be convinced to help, ultimately does, and the escape is a Success.
It’s on a personal, MC level that Rick faces the subconscious feelings he’s struggling with. And the RS between he and Ilsa grows in a positive direction, even though they have to part ways.
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He went off to start a new life with a new friend, someone who he hadn’t known was a friend. That was cool. Some in the audience might appreciate him leaving behind being a casino owner, if any gambling addiction in a family.
I’m a historical fiction writer and WWII was not the 60’s. The heads of studios must have known what was happening in the ‘camps’, being of the same heritage and maybe used their knowledge to create the movie, is my guess. The general public did not find out until later. Conrad Veldt was the top paid actor in the film and wanted to play the Major, since he ‘knew them’. He donated a lot of his income after leaving Germany for the war effort, and left Germany for that reason.
I had a father serve on a WWII battleship, and I had an uncle blown out of a plane and in a POW camp in WWII. I had another helicopter pilot uncle serve three tours to Vietnam Nam and die of sad things from it later. Not the same eras.
An audience appreciates Rick’s beginning a new life, promising adventure, with a new friend.
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First, I think this is a fascinating conversation. I also have wondered about the relationship between syntax and emotion. Couldn’t Dramatica be described as the syntax of storytelling?
It reminded me of wanting to make a comprehensive list of movie moments that made me cry.
Then, I began to wonder if that’s necessary, because “viewers mentally process the projected images and sounds of a movie according to the same perceptual rules used in response to visual and aural stimuli in the world outside the theater.”
Shouldn’t I be interested in what makes people cry in real life, and how those scenarios can be preserved in stories?
It seems like the question is, “are emotions created or magnified through syntax?” That’s something that really intrigued me in the past and still does now.
I thought about the bump and slide information included with Dramatica analyses. Instinctually, I wondered if these shifts translate to tension and suspense. Visually, they seem to. Don’t you think so?
People often remind one to separate storytelling and storyforming. So, doesn’t Dramatica make it a point to strip emotions out of the storyform? At least in the theory’s current form. Perhaps that is why holistic concepts felt hobbled in the past.
So, I guess I’ll ask. Are you asking if emotion can be predicted by a storyform? By storyencoding? Or is it limited to storytelling?
Also:
Well, wouldn’t we have to say that all story is completely subjective based on story reception?
If we accept that the author can make a judgment often via the MC (Jon smiled as he rode off into the unknown.), don’t we have to accept that they can make a judgment about anything else in their story as well?
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There is definitely always a part of story reception which accounts for individual tastes and opinions, however Audience Reception also includes that which the Author was aware the audience would bring (or not bring) to the story experience.
But these terms, Objective and Subjective refer to the specific throughlines in a Storymind. The facets of any human mind which experience an inequity from various vantage points. And in that sense, one can draw distinctions between the facets and in relation to each other.
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I am interested in duplicating the successful story points, forming, and telling found in successful works, i.e. Love Affair when the schoolmaster shares his understandings and feeling with Terry (Irene Dunne) and the kids pop up and down, and when Michel (Charles Boyer) grasps why Terry never showed up at the meeting time [just a stunning piece of acting in those few seconds] I had welling of tears because I saw what I wanted the world to be … not the rotten things I experienced and cried over in childhood and beyond.
Although, I do remember being 8-years old watching Citizen Kane on a small B&W TV, sobbing my heart out for an afternoon after seeing the Rosebud sled tossed into the fire, and understanding that Kane had had a choice and let it slip from his hands, like the snowglobe falling from his hand at the beginning of the film. It taught me I had the choice to create happiness in my own life. And no one was going to do it but me.
I’m with you on it being a struggle to translate emotion into writing.
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