Pathos, Bathos, and the Secret Sauce for Addictive Drama
“The Crown” offers a master class in modern storytelling
A perfect tragedy should imitate actions which excite pity and fear… for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.
—Aristotle, Poetics
Hi everyone,
I keep thinking of the current Biden saga as a “perfect” Aristotelian tragedy. Every post, every conversation, every interview about our President in this political moment is brimming with pity and fear. Yet the daily juxtaposition of Biden’s moral idealism and the sadistic buffoonery of Donald Trump also suggests that we’re trapped in a spectacular farce, from which we cannot look away.
This contrast between the tragic and the ludicrous has reminded me of an annotation that my MFA student
[introduced here last month] wrote a couple of years ago, shortly before she graduated.Jaimie’s craft focus for the anno was the twinning of pathos and bathos, a subject about which I’d never given much thought. As soon as I did, however, I was struck by the use of this device in the series The Crown, as well as in the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words and Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen — all of which my husband and I had just finished binge-watching in one fevered gulp (thank you, Netflix).
The spell that these tales of royals cast over us had mystified me even as we succumbed to it. My husband and I don’t swoon at monarchy. Hard-core realists, we’re repelled by Disneyesque fairy-tales that spin sugared webs around the kleptocracy of kingdom. No surprise to us that every palace is a gilded cage, and not much pity, either, for the cage’s pampered occupants. Even the royals who “give up” the crown never quite renounce their wealth and privilege, so what exactly are they sacrificing? The words that seem to me best suited to the institution of monarchy are “archaic” and “theft.” So, why was I unable to pry myself away from these dramatized windows into the lives of the rich and royal?
Jaimie’s annotation convinced me that pathos and bathos held the answer. We weren’t so much hooked on the true characters or historical events as we were compelled by the masterful manipulation of the poignant and the vulgar in these stories about the crown. Their precise blend of pathos and bathos was like a secret narrative sauce that particularly appealed to cynical modern-day audiences like my husband and me.
It’s no accident that Princess Diana’s character plays a pivotal role in all three productions. She was a true figure of pathos who aroused genuine pity. Yet she also embodied the moment in history when the Crown could no longer hide the bathos that had been running rampant through the royal family for decades (if not forever), the moment when the obscenity of the gilded cage escaped for all to see. Diana represented the tipping point, if you will, when tension was highest between pathos and bathos in the royals’ story.
I must confess, this was not an original thought; Jaimie had planted it by quoting Hilary Mantel from a 2017 piece about the princess myth in The Guardian:
It was Diana’s complaint that no one helped her or saw her need. [Her grandmother] Fermoy had expressed doubts before the marriage. “Darling, you must understand that [the royals’] sense of humour and their lifestyle are different …” The bathos is superb. “Mind how you go,” say the elders, as they tip off the dragon and chain the virgin to the mossy rock.
Diana, in the end, became the hapless victim of her own good fortune, unable either to keep or to surrender power, trapped in a ludicrous situation spun by those who claimed to have her best interests at heart. Whether or not you agree that there are parallels here with Joe Biden’s current chapter, I invite you to join me in this deeper dive into the narrative importance of pathos and bathos, with The Crown as our guide.
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