Moral Occult

According to what I have read from Brook's, "The Melodramatic Imagination", I can tell that what he call's the "moral occult" is involved in many melodramas. Peter Brooks mentions that melodrama is a way for the characters of a story to, "...give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship"(Brooks pg. 4). I feel that this relates to the moral occult of a melodrama because Brook's defines a moral occult as "spiritual values" that are both hidden and obvious with in the characters' reality. This relates to the way that directors and writers of both television shows and films choose to portray the story to their viewers. For example, in the film, All That Heaven Allows, the main character, Cary, struggles with whether or not she should, Ron Kirby, her gardener of several years. Cary fell in love with Ron, thinking that when she would tell her children that she was going to marry him they would not make as big of a deal out of it as they did. Meanwhile, the audience was able predict that the children would not be approving of their relationship, and they were not. Once Cary finally realized what her reality had to be, she broke off her engagement with Ron. Cary wanted to make her children happy, and that became her reality, until one day Ron was in a horrible accident. Once Cary found out that Ron was hurt, she could no longer push her love for Ron to the back of her mind. With a story like this, a viewer is bound to find this type of ending predictable because of what is known as the "moral occult" of a melodrama.