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Tragedy at the Doctor's by Antonio d.

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Antonio d. Joseph Brunson Honors English 10 5 March 2010 Definition of Tragedy .......... Are Aristotle’s standards of tragedy as outlined in his //Poetics// still valid in today’s Hollywood tragedies? Aristotle wrote a full 70 page essay describing the basis for what he thought was the perfect tragedy, which followed six basic parts he thought were the most important. Aristotle’s essay first dealt with the introduction of all these parts and what tragedy really was, building the groundwork for the rest of his essay. Antonio d. took this //Poetics// material and created a small movie called “Tragedy at the Doctors," which linked the main points of Aristotle’s //Poetics//, because it included cause-and effect plot, it showed character’s morals through actions and followed what is dictated by the three unities. .......... Plot is explained as the most important, most valuable part of tragedy and the “soul” of it. In the movie there is an excerpt at the beginning that explains cause-and-effect plots, in which the girl says “well because my mom insisted on me eating Indian food because she wants me to diversify my eating, this food caused me to get sick because I do not handle Indian food too well, after this I decided to go to the doctors, and this is why I am here waiting to go into his office” (Antonio d.). This excerpt from the movie clearly shows one of the main characteristics of plot, which is the arrangement of incidents in cause-and-effect. The soul of tragedy is plot, and this plot cannot be divided into episodes because it has to have a constant flow, and this excerpt shows how an arrangement of incidents caused a credible cause-and-effect in the movie, if not Aristotle thought that it was not very credible because it was not likely to happen, and it did not follow the law of probability. Another part of the movie shows how tragedy and the plot are able to cause pity and fear by the boy saying, “oh, well it sounds everything decided to flow in unity and give you a hard time, it is almost like a continuous cause-and-effect, I feel sorry for you”(Antonio d.). In tragedy and as well in plot it was very important to inspire pity or fear in the audience. This was done so that the play could teach the people what to do more effectively by inspiring emotions in the audience and helping them relate the actions in the play to their own life. Another way that one could say this movie relates and further explains the concept of plot in tragedy is by saying that in the movie there is a constant imitation of actions, //Poetics// says the following “ hence, the plot is the imitation of the action” (Aristotle). In the movie everything is an imitation of what has already happened, therefor everything is imitating the actions of the real world. This is done for various reasons but the most important of them being that it needs to be credible, it has to follow the law of probability in order for it to be acceptable, therefore people "buy it" and believe it. These are the biggest characteristics that plot has, but Tragedy consists in other parts such as Character. .......... By doing actions your morality is revealed, this is what Character, one of the six parts of tragedy, dictates. In the movie we can see how a young man chooses to do the following, “(…) I am going to go rob some people, I am short on money, and, well, if I can easily get it by robbing that is what I will do” (Antonio d.). This kid chose to steal money from other people and this immediately informed the public of his morals. This type of person does not have the morality of a hero, and therefore he is a perfect gateway for teaching, making him suffer consequences, and so basically the movie portrays that morality comes due to one’s actions. On the other hand the movie shows us what people should act like, it teaches us that our morality should be like the girl’s who says, “I have decided to not go with you, because if you rob you will go to jail, it is basic cause-and-effect, the law of probability” (Antonio d.). This answer portrays the morality of a hero, something that tragedy needs to have. She chooses to follow the honorable and decent way in life and decides not to rob therefore teaching the public what to do. Another main important part of character is that you have to act, your morals are not shown by speech but by actions, this is something that the movie is not able to do due to restrictions but the girl does say the following, “well I see based on your actions that you have some doubtful morals, but go on, go rob people, do not just say it, go do it, let me see” (Antonio d.), //Poetics// also adds that character shows morals  “   in the form of action, not of narrative” (Aristotle). This emphasis shows us that tragedy follows the saying “show not tell”. In this case the girl follows the //Poetics// guide and insists that she actually wants to see him robbing, and she does not just want to be fooled with speech. Plot, along with character are essential in tragedy, as are the three unities. .......... The other important part of tragedy is that it has to be made up or follow what is known as the three unities. The first of these unities deals with time, and as seen in the movie it does not exceed 24 hours, but the action represented happens in a few hours (Brunson). Tragedy is done this way, without exceeding 24 hours, because of the knowledge and capacity that Aristotle thought people had, which was that they were not smart enough to imagine events taking place over a period of a day. The other part of this unity is that for the time period it was extremely hard to create a nocturnal scene in the broad daylight or vice-versa. The next integrant of the three unities is place, and it says that there can only be one setting (Brunson). Changing settings was hard in 500 BC when Aristotle was living and so there could only be one setting. Creating and displacing settings would be unthinkable with the technology of 500 BC. The last, but not least unity is action, “being an imitation of an action, [that] must   imitate one action and that [is] a whole” (Aristotle). There can only be one complete action/plot. If there are side-plots that are not as important as the main one, it will not matter because there is only room for one, and Aristotle argued that people were not smart enough to understand and follow more than one plot. These three unities are all important although some of them are not mentioned in the //Poetics// excerpt, none the less they are to be followed by all writers. .......... Based on what has been argued about Aristotle and tragedy, does Hollywood still follow some of these rules? To think that Hollywood script writers still look at //Poetics// before writing a movie is not valid because times have change. “Tragedy at the Doctors” by Antonio de Bedout took the groundwork of //Poetics//, plot, character and the 3 morals and implemented it in the movie. This movie showed the main characteristics of tragedy as said by Aristotle in //Poetics,// but would it not be exciting to be the person who puts //Poetics// up to date so that it can be applied to the modern world?

 Works Cited Brunson, Joseph. "Tragedy." Personal interview. 24 Feb. 2010. Aristotle. // Poetics //. Trans. S. H. Butcher. //The Internet Classics Archive//. Web Atomic and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13 Sept. 2007. Web. 4 Nov. 2008. // Tragedy at the Doctors //. Dir. Antonio D. Xtranormal, 26 Feb. 2010. Web. .