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 Christine Muir gazes up at the movie theater screen. In the Harry Potter movie to end all Harry Potter movies, Severus Snape lies in Harry’s arms, dying. Just as Snape squeezes out a silver tear for Harry, Christine also begins bawling in a rare display of emotion.

The ultra-widescreen television illuminates Connor Quade’s dark dorm room with the graphic images of Jigsaw’s games in the movie Saw. Connor turns and, with a small sense of pleasure, watches his friend, a forever enthralled first-time viewer, lean forward in the seat.

Natalie Alberto’s family drags her to the movie theater for the third Transformers movie, but seeing the explosions, Shia Lebouf screaming, and the general excitement of the movie lifts her spirits and erases the hurt of the depression she felt that day.

What do Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Saw, and Transformers 3 all have in common? They are not only entertaining, but also have the potential to improve your psychological well-being. As Jean-Michel Frodon, famous French film critic, says, “The most important thing to be said about film is that it is based on the emotions we experience during the watching of the film.” Catharsis allows us to experience and examine the emotions we suppress daily, and movies benefit people on a basic emotional level through catharsis.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle coined the word “catharsis” and first applied it to entertainment. Imagine living in ancient Greece and attending a Greek tragedy for the first time. You pick out a patch of grass on the side of a hillside, surrounded by others wearing linen robes, eager for the play to start. Soon all three actors arrive, dressed in bright costumes and wearing masks with exaggerated expressions. They dance and flail their arms as they tell the story, going through their lines with practiced grace. Such is the scene of a traditional Greek drama. In a tragedy, the play always includes a moment of “katharsis” or “purgation” which Aristotle describes as a purging of emotion when the audience experiences the action on the stage. In a particularly dramatic scene, the audience will create an emotional link with the characters in the play; they are no longer watching actors on a stage, but experiencing the characters’ joys and troubles for themselves, and releasing those emotions. That is how catharsis was defined in Aristotle’s time. Since then, catharsis has taken on modern meanings.

Catharsis is a term most often used in psychotherapy that describes a purging of emotions. It began with Sigmund Freud, who believed that his patients could never heal until they reached catharsis, a state of enlightenment he recognized in physical acts such as crying or screaming. To Freud, these acts released all of the suppressed emotion and allowed change for the better. Despite other theories of Freud’s that have been discredited, catharsis is still deemed by most psychologists as a healthy release of emotion, even on a more subtle level than Freud initially believed. However, catharsis does not need to occur in therapy. It can be achieved in a variety of situations, the easiest of which being in the experience of a film.

In Southlake’s own Harkins Movie Theater, one serial summertime employee named Natalie Alberto works her shifts in drudgery. Record-breaking high temperatures outside release a flood of customers into the theater, and this June afternoon is particularly miserable for the lanky, dark-haired part-timer. “I was really, really depressed. The night before I had the most trying workday ever. It was a closing shift so it was late at night, and I was frustrated with everything. I didn’t want to leave my bed that morning.” This is also the premiere weekend of the third Transformers movie, Dark Side of the Moon. As per the Alberto family ritual of attending movies on the premiere weekend, Natalie, her parents, and older sister return to Harkins the first night. From the beginning, Natalie remains quiet, unwilling to talk much for fear of spreading her bad mood to the rest of the family. She doesn’t want to “be all grumpy grump.” A change in her occurs as the movie progresses. The projected image of Shia Lebouf leaps and dives between flying debris and robotic limbs. Natalie fully immerses herself in the plight of the characters as they scream and release a wild tirade of action and emotion. As Shia Lebouf dodges another piece of metal, she mentally swerves out of the way as well. As he beats and rails against the oncoming threat, she fights and defeats her own internal enemies. Before she knows what is happening, Natalie’s bad mood melts away in the action of the movie.

We humans are very emotional creatures, but we also have a habit of suppressing those emotions. While this is a good thing when suppressing extreme emotions in the face of trauma, like witnessing a violent crime or being in an accident, we often suppress ordinary emotions, like Natalie does with her negative emotions the day after a hard night at work. Her intentions may have been to keep from spreading a bad mood on a family outing, but bottling up emotions is not good.

Psychologists James Gross and Robert Levenson studied some of the negative effects of emotional suppression. They had people watch a film associated with particular emotions: one was sad, another neutral, and the last amusing. They found that the participants asked to suppress any emotional response to the film had an unusually active cardiovascular sympathetic response, which means that their heart rates were unusually high. According to this study, suppressing emotions will have the same effect on the body as feeling excessive stress. Overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system can lead to decreases in immune function, making you more likely to get sick and have feelings of depression. That is what makes catharsis so important. We need to release all of our pent up emotions to ease the strain on our bodies.

It may not always be beneficial or appropriate to expend emotion in most daily settings. Like Natalie, our negative emotions can lead to negative outlets, like bad attitude or even violence. Nevertheless, that emotion needs to escape, and movies can be used to reach catharsis in a situation that is separate from reality. When watching a movie, we can enter another state of being somewhere between fantasy and reality. We can use this separate space to deal with emotions that are otherwise inappropriate or difficult to face. We can cry when Ryan Gosling finally kisses Rachel McAdams in the rain in The Notebook, scream when Shia Lebouf is nearly trampled by a Transformer robot, or laugh when Reese Witherspoon solves the case in Legally Blond. These expressions of emotions are examples of the many forms that catharsis can take.

For Christine Muir, catharsis occurs in the form of tears whenever she watches Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. In the film version of the ten-year culmination of the story, Harry Potter must return to Hogwarts to fight the dark wizard Voldemort. As events begin to build into a climax, Harry approaches Snape after a giant snake has fatally attacked the potions teacher. Shedding a single silver tear, Snape gestures and says to Harry, “Take it.” The tear contains his memories, with which Harry soon discovers that Snape is not the villain initially thought. “I never cry in movies, but every time I see that part, I do,” says Christine from behind purple glasses. To Christine, that is what makes a good movie: “making you happy, making you sad, making you laugh, making you cry.”

“First we love, we cry, we are afraid, touched, moved, something we have experienced or dreamed of or hoped will happen to us,” says Jean-Michel Frodon in his interview with the Stanford Humanities Center. Frodon, a famous film critic in France, was the editor-in-chief of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema and currently writes “Projection Publique,” a blog that reviews film. In the interview with Stanford, Frodon sits amid a background of shelved books, his gray beard, black shirt, and blazer accentuating his French accent. “From this hope, we’ll eventually do something more,” he says. “There is potentially an immense self, an internal elaboration, which can be made. This is what they do with films.” Frodon describes the key point of catharsis. As we watch a deeply emotional movie, the audience will connect to the action and the characters, begin to feel that emotion as well, and project that emotion onto our own hopes and dreams. Once that occurs, we can discover something more about ourselves, an internal elaboration that we will express on a physical level. “First we love, we cry, we are afraid, touched, moved.” In the span of a few seconds, catharsis is reached.

Imagine your favorite movie. Regardless of which movie, there is a reason why it has earned your favor over the blockbuster hit you saw at the theater last week, and I bet that good character development and an exciting plot only scratch the surface. For it to be your favorite, you have to have an emotional attachment to this movie. For me, all of my favorite films have a common element. When I think about Clue, Legally Blond, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, I remember my childhood. I remember weekends spent at the local Blockbuster, perusing some of the old favorites on the shelves that my head barely reached. I remember afternoons in my grandparents’ house, sitting on white cushy couches, watching these movies with cousins strewn about or my soft grandma sitting next to me. I think of times long come and gone, and remember myself as a kid filled with questions about the world and people around me. I look at the characters on the TV screen and feel myself begin to enter their world. I travel where they travel and feel what they feel. Their emotions open the floodgates to my own emotions, and my catharsis is like a tiny gasp.  

Cathartic experience can change with different movie genres. Depending on the emotions you tend to suppress, you can choose a specific type of movie to effectively release those feelings. Nobody wants to experience negative emotions, but we can come to terms with expressing the negative emotions in complementary movies. In order to act on the sadness in life, a movie that inspires sad feelings can be helpful. Tearjerkers like The Notebook or Harry Potter and, interestingly enough, romantic movies like Under the Tuscan Sun can appeal to sadness within us to more easily express sorrow. Some movies can help purge anger, like Transformers, Kill Bill, or Blade Runner, and other movies can appeal to our need to express fear, like Saw or The Exorcist. Sometimes we need to experience different kinds of movies in order to experience different kinds of feelings. Movies are our connection to unfulfilled emotion.

Many people believe that watching movies is another means of escapism and enables us to put off our worries for another two hours, another form of emotion suppression. However, the right movie can do the opposite and lead to catharsis. “The movie is the experience,” says Connor Quade. Watching a movie can lead us to reexamine the emotions we have suppressed and allow us to experience them again. The specific movies that do this vary from one person to the next, or by situation or mood. Sometimes the cathartic catalyst is the characters with whom you have invested over ten years, like Christine with Harry Potter. Sometimes the catalyst is influenced by the reactions of those with whom you share it, like Connor and Saw. Sometimes you can find catharsis in a movie with a refreshing plot, like Natalie. Think back to your favorite movie and remember what exactly draws you in and keeps you invested. There you will be able to find that sweet spot of catharsis that makes you leave your seat when the credits roll feeling better than you did when you sat down.