Tackle this one second:

One of the greatest purposes of art is to allow us to dwell into experiences not witnessed in our everyday lives. In the case of tragedies, I think we like to repeatedly experience that moment of intensity presented in the tragedy, as it provides us the emotional experience without actually affecting us permanently. Tragedies influence unique emotions in the individual, and art allows us to feel these emotions repeatedly without being affected personally. As for why we revisit tragic piece of art while already knowing the result, I think it is because we are intrigued by the experience of that art, and so we experience it again and again because of the pleasure that it gives us. Many individuals (myself included) may revisit a tragic piece of art hoping for a different result. One may already know what the result of a tragedy will be, but the experience of that tragedy's occurrence still seems to draw the viewer into wondering what the result will be.

This question leads me to add another requirement to tragedy. In response to the other question I stated that tragedy must be something final and wholly terrible. I think that something that makes tragedy even more tragic is hope. Every person on the Titanic had something to look forward to. Industry was progressing into the future with great big indestructible ships that could carry all classes of people to new lands, and there was so much hope. If everyone had been indifferent, it may have still been a tragedy but not one we would pay to watch. Dashed dreams make tragedy sell.

My simple answer for this question is that pain makes us feel alive. What is life without pain? Happiness is no longer happiness without sadness. Without sadness, happiness would be monotonous and reduced to just 'meh.' We need contrast in life to put our feelings and understanding into perspective. We watch media depicting life in third-world countries and are constantly reminded by our mothers to "be thankful for what we have." We are only drawn back to these events because prior to them, we did not know what we had. Life is meaningless until we grasp life and force our own meaning into it, like a forcing square peg into a round hole. Why do we consistently do this? I would say we, as humans, generally do not know how we should feel about life, so we invent meanings and feelings and use that that is different around us to contrast and define our lives. So when watching movies like Titanic, or unfortunate media footage it is not just the pain that we are seeking but the definition of life, and the organization and rules and boundaries that we give our lives structure. Although rules and boundaries may result in pain, the never-ending turmoil between pain and happiness is much better than the blankness and insecurity of not knowing how to feel.

Although I have not seen Titanic, this tragic/romantic archetype is commonly reproduced, so I believe that I have an understanding of the moods, themes and ideas prevalent in the film. The Titanic first carries the idea that I mentioned above: the events in the film make our lives seem better by comparison and give definition to pain and suffering. Tragedy, however, is not just one-dimensional; it often serves simultaneously as a warning and inspiration to its audience. Firstly it is inspiring because tragedy like Titanic often intermingles with love and inspires audience to find their own Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet. Then it strikes back and says, "you better find your love now, or it might be too late as it was for these two." The double-edged blade of tragedy is dramatic and emotional despite its cliche tendencies because it plays into the weak-spots that we all have. We all want love, and we all do not want to die without first YOLO-ing it up to the mostest. Tragedy just gives us a nice little kick in the rump and tells us to get moving.

With literary tragedy, knowing the outcome actually makes the story more poignant. Since you know Jack will die at the end of Titanic, you value his relationship with Rose more. You begin to view the relationship from the tragic point of view, where something bad will happen and you can't do anything to stop it. I think we love literary tragedies for their play on our emotions. The first time, you read or watch the story for the plotline. But the value of tragedies comes in subsequent views or readings, where you begin to notice the foreshadows of doom and how preventable the ending is, yet isn't. When I read a story, I like to just quickly read through once, know the events that will happen, and then go back and indulge in the details. I am more emotionally invested when I know that things won't turn out the way the characters want them to. If Jack and Rose both survive, sure it's a great love story, but we would not love Titanic nearly as much.

For me, that's two separate questions: Why do we pay people good money to make us sad (when we watch/read a fictional tragedy)? and Why do we still feel those emotions (or want to revisit a tragic story) even though we know the outcome?

To answer the first part of it, I'd like to think it boils down to storytelling. We like a good story, and we like it best when we can fall for the characters and their goals. It's always nice to see a story where everything turns out fine and dandy and the main character got everything they ever wanted without...well...without really trying (I just saw Lakeridge's performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying last Saturday and, though I thought their production and the play/music itself was amazing, I thought that the story lacked a moment where the character was truly faced with a tough choice [love or business success]), but it's so much more compelling to see a story where the character struggles (as we personally may have struggled) with their problems (be it life, love, work, or whatever) and (hopefully) ultimately succeeds. So what happens when they don't succeed? Why do we even want to be exposed to those kinds of stories? Sad stories are a part of life, so not having them in fiction would be odd, but, more importantly, sad stories make us feel those painful emotions without the sense of true loss. No one actually died, nothing is wrong, we're safe and sound in our own homes, but we feel the pain of the characters. It's kind of strange that we'd want to feel that pain, but it's also very human. What do we want if not to seek out emotions and experiences? Why do we watch movies about super-human-hyper-people with magic powers fighting equally super-human-(possibly-alien)-ultra-villainously-villainous-people? Because wouldn't it be kind of awesome to be (or even just see) one of those people in real life? Why do we watch movies that make us laugh? Or feel proud? Or feel happy? For the same reason we want to have stories that make us sad. We want to feel these emotions and stories let us do so in a safe environment.

As for the second part of the question....well...it's a bit odd that we'd want to see the same story once we know the ending. We know how we're gonna feel, we know what happens, why would we bother experiencing that again? In a detective story, it's pretty straight forward. See it again to catch all the awesome little clues you may have missed. But with something that ends in tragedy, despair, or sadness....why revisit that? The fact that we even consider revisiting a work like that is a testament to the skill with which it was crafted. There is something within the work that really spoke to whomever decides to come back to it. They know what they're going to feel and they want to feel that. They want to go back over that same journey with those characters, perhaps even with the hope that somehow, someway, it will end differently. Perhaps, if you were able to press pause or stop reading in the middle of the story, everything would be happy and perfect (this is something that my favorite book series as a kid, A Series of Unfortunate Events, did a lot. When something good had just happened, the author would say something like "you can stop reading right now and pretend that the three orphans lived out their days with their new guardians/friends and that Count Olaf [the villain] had been captured, but that is not how the story goes..." He'd then taunt you in a way by saying that he has no choice but to transcribe these events exactly as they happened, but that you could stop if you truly wanted to and go on pretending). No one can stop, however. Once you've begun the journey, it's hard to pull yourself away from the characters you care about. And, lo and behold, the tragedy you feared but knew was coming came with a bang. While many works are capable of this, not every work can make every viewer/reader feel that way about the story or the characters, but when it does...it's something very special indeed.

As twisted as this idea is, I truly think we invest in tragedy as entertainment because our lives, sometimes, become to boring and repetitive. There is only so much satisfaction that one can find in watching movies about happy endings after happy ending. Humans, on a daily basis, are capable of a range of emotions and when some of those haven't been fulfilled in the real world, we resort to other forms of entertainment to satisfy these human needs to be happy, sad, disappointed, scared, challenged, etc. When we watch tragedies we are able to see a side of ourselves and challenge an emotional side that we don't usually tap into or come face to face with. It is a twisted desire to force oneself into tragic situations like these merely to fill an emotional void, but it is important for humans to understand the full range of emotions they are capable of and satisfy them regularly.