In tragedy, the protagonists, with whom we are clearly meant to identify, struggle and fail due to flaws–hamartias–in their characters. They are excessive proud, in most cases, but the flaw can be something else. What the audience is meant to do is sympathize with the main character, and feel the horror they feel when their world collapses, and to SEE what they might not, which is WHY their world fell apart, and to learn from it. “Pride precedes a fall” might be a lesson taken to heart, and emphasized through negative emotive operant conditioning.
Further, by teaching people that they can feel deep sorrow and recover, you teach mourning. Hank Williams wrote a lot of sad songs, but he was not a sad person, on balance: he loved life. He drank too much, of course, but his short life was filled with a lot of good emotions, and even now his songs make me happy.
And for the Greeks, tragedy was a sort of ritual, something to be gone through periodically, but not something to LIVE in. The great tragic playwrights were not likely morose men; nor were the Greeks who went to see the plays. On the contrary, I suspect they were vivacious and fun. They laughed a lot, playfully, simply. They just understood that sadness, failure, and futility have a PLACE in life: they must be acknowledged and accepted. Once you do that, you can live more fully, more joyfully. It is perhaps counterintuitive, but that is my view too. You get stronger through catharsis, which amounts to a type of emotional exercise.
There have been times Hank Williams songs made me cry: that is OK too.
What is NOT OK is being unable to experience what might be termed primary emotions any more. Our society tells us that pain is aberrational, so we don’t, as a culture, know how to MANAGE it; we don’t practice it; we don’t have good, effective rituals for it. Part of the reason we are so infantile as a nation is that we don’t have a means of processing the necessity of adulthood, the pain of adulthood, which is to say the capacity to live a rational life as chosen. So we pretend that our decisions have no consequences, when of course they do.
In tragedy you feel the horror and fear of the protagonist, and know why it happened. It is intended both to teach moral virtues, and to teach people to process complex emotions, which include the ability to accept the pain and suffering in this world.
In comedy you feel much more muted discomfort at the unexpected and the socially “deviant” (I intend simply deviations from social norms), for which the cathartic response is laughter. It is still useful because it teaches a means of dealing with the chaos, the ebb and flow, of ordinary human life. It has a place in my taxonomy of tasks.
In horror, you feel the fear of the protagonists, but there is no meaning, no escape, and no catharsis. What there is, in my view, is a homeopathic release of tension. I think most people in this and many other countries are chronically anxious, chronically afraid, and I think by INCREASING that anxiety, it can actually be made to fade, for a time. However, the medicine is the poison, in that watching violence clearly also increases anxiety, not least by implanting images in your head that are prone to pop out whenever dealing with any other human, and which pop out in those few unguarded moments when you spontaneously relax deeply. It leaves a question in your mind as to “who is this person REALLY?” Horror movies are filled to overflowing with apparently benign people who slip something in the drink of their victims, who wake up in a terrible place, and die painful deaths.
Imagine clear, relaxing water. Imagine a deep relaxation forming in you, and connecting with that water. How long before some terrible image pops out? Not long, for me, and I don’t even watch violent movies in general.
Faith: that is the root of hope, and the Horror genre damages faith.
The final stage is when you sympathize not with the victims, but the attackers, when Jigsaw is your hero, or Jason, or the Elite Hunting Club. This is the point when you no longer feel your own feelings at all. You feel nothing but excitement when someone is hurt, tortured or killed. You have outsourced your capacity to process the real terrors of this world to a sacrificial victim. This, in my view, is the sociological basis of ritual sacrifice of all sorts.
Catharsis has become a thing which is experienced as pain in the victim. You need to inflict pain to release that terrible burden of anxiety and meaninglessness.
I could say more, but will leave that be for now.