When the best drama is no drama at all
Predicting a new genre for the coming decade
According to Aristotle’s “Poetics”, the role of theatre in human life was to drag the recipient through the catastrophe in order to help them achieve catharsis — a state of total purification of all emotions.
Aristotle was an ancient philosopher whose ideas served as a stepping stone for modern cinema and storytelling. Aristotle was also a wealthy slave owner sipping lemonade in a shade of olive trees on his property — in the exact center of a civilization where nothing bad could ever happen to you unless you specifically ask for it.
The dude was chill.
We are not chill.
The purpose of drama
In the last decades, movies were getting more violent, more heartbreaking. I don’t know whether it was for the purification of our souls or our pockets, but the more hurtful it got, the more glued to the screens we were. What if we kill off the main romantic hero? Cut an ear off onscreen? Rape? Crush hopes? Show a mass slaughter? Wreck a family? Dunno, show a boob?
In the study books of the future, they will write that the 2010s were the pinnacle of high-pitched drama creation. They saw Game of Thrones with a story large enough to accommodate all the…
