Why So Many People Are Turning to Collective Screaming

The last person to speak at the protest was a young woman. She said she was a health care worker and had just finished a 12-hour overnight shift. The word she used for how she felt about the state of the world was “concerned,” but she yelled it so hard into the bullhorn that the sound cracked and fried and the crowd winced.

“We are people,” she shouted. “People.” The organizer reached for the bullhorn, indicating that the speaker’s time was up, but she was not finished with her litany of injustices: the children being killed and the other children being deprived of health care, and the cruel evisceration of social services that keep people alive — “and … and … and. … ” Suddenly she stalled out. After a brief stuttering pause, her eyes went wide, and she just screamed. The sound ripped across the square, making the crowd jump and then laugh in shock and recognition.

Everyone seems to be screaming into the void these days. News items pop up about people who have gathered to scream — not in protest, just to scream — all over the country. In a new twist on service journalism, The Los Angeles Times ran a guide to the best screaming spots in the city; similar guides exist for Boston, Seattle, Denver, San Antonio and Grand Rapids, Mich. Even Backpacker magazine recognized demand, running a listicle of “6 Great Voids to Scream Into This Election Season.”

During her recent tour, Olivia Rodrigo led audiences in group screams. Florence + the Machine’s newly released album reads like an instruction: “Everybody Scream.” People are delighted to oblige. Online certainly — there are so many memes I don’t know where to begin — but in the flesh, too. Last fall, a group of students at a Maine liberal-arts college stood on the steps of the college art museum, took a huge collective breath and screamed up into the sky. In May, student protesters at Columbia University gathered outside the residence of the university president to scream their displeasure. Scream clubs hosting free, informal group screaming in public places have formed in cities all over the United States.

There’s even a website designed for this purpose, screamintothevoid.com, where users are instructed to “type your feelings here” and then hit a big red button that reads “SCREAM.” The button is positioned over an image of a dark, swirling vortex, and when you click it, whatever words you’ve typed seem to shrink and retreat, sucked further and further into the image of the vortex until they vanish. The image reminds me: Inherent in the metaphor “screaming into the void” is the strange feebleness of the gesture. No matter how much noise you make, your voice doesn’t produce the desired effect. Depending on the circumstances, screaming into the void is a gesture of perverse thrill — a huge feeling vented without consequences — or of despair. A message appears over the blank space where moments ago your feelings were, as if in congratulation: “Glad nobody read that!”

I have taken to writing all of this down in a little journal I have labeled the “screaming notebook.” In it, I record whenever an interesting scream crosses my path in conversation or stray news items. The book fills quickly.

It isn’t hard to imagine why people might be articulating wild fury. Horrors appear freshly every day: genocide, famine, war, political assassination, wildfire, children shot in classrooms, ancient “revenant” microbes in melting permafrost. Keeping up with the news — for those lucky enough to be experiencing some of these calamities as “news” — feels almost impossible on a neurological level. Each new ghastliness registers briefly before being, as Jia Tolentino has written in The New Yorker, “swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality.”

Social feeds have become increasingly agitated and incoherent — digital chutes where posters hope incomprehensible suffering might register in some undefined way before disappearing into the endless scroll. It’s an expected part of many people’s days to take a break from work, open a social media app and be met with a headline like one that CBS News ran in October: “Gaza War Has Killed an Estimated 20,000 Kids.” Or, as I saw recently, a video of a Massachusetts mother being dragged to an unmarked vehicle by federal agents while her neighbors throw themselves across the hood of the car and wail. What should a person do after seeing something like this? Scroll on to the next post? (Pink-lemonade sheet cake!) Put the phone down and go on with the day as if it didn’t happen?

Screaming into the void can be a gesture of perverse thrill — a huge feeling vented without consequences — or one of despair.

What happens to people who learn to live in a reality that seems so overwhelmingly, poisonously incoherent — a world in which it is normal to endure senseless harm and commonplace to hold in your hands, many times a day, visual evidence of profound suffering. How are people warped by a frustrated desire to respond, when many typical forms of response are insufficient and there is too much to respond to, too many catastrophes even to hold capably in one’s mind? What does this do to a generation at scale?

Obviously, the distress of watching the world’s cruelties unfold from the safety of an office chair bears no resemblance to the agony of a family ripped apart, a town razed, a life stolen. And plenty of people are having both experiences in the course of this year. Living in a whirlwind of simultaneous horrors is now an inescapable part of contemporary life — one that demands some kind of response even as it makes a coherent response hard to imagine.

When the play opens, Electra’s world is a shambles of corruption, violence and grief. Her father, Agamemnon, had killed one of her sisters as a human sacrifice to Artemis; in revenge, her mother and mother’s paramour have murdered her father. Because Electra is unmarried (her name can translate to “unbedded”), she has no power, no status, no social function. She is expected, as a dependent in her mother and stepfather’s household, to suppress her own horror at her father’s murder and return to life as usual — to accept the terms of her new reality. Ten years have passed but, still, she cannot reconcile herself to it.

Instead, she screams. In fact, Electra — who has one of the longest speaking parts in all the Greek tragedies — “talks, wails, argues, denounces, sings, chants and screams from one end of the play to the other,” Carson writes. “Sounds of every kind emerge from her, articulate and inarticulate.” She points out that Electra screams more than any other figure in Sophocles’ work, including Philoctetes, who has gangrene in his foot, and Heracles, who is burned alive.

Crucial to the plot, Electra’s screaming is impractical. It is painful. It appears to accomplish nothing. Electra’s inability to change her circumstances seems absolute. But she can’t or won’t stop.

“Never will I leave off lamenting,” she vows. “Never.”

There is a lineage in Greek myth of people so deformed by grief that they take on an entirely new shape and lose access to normal means of expressing themselves.

In Carson’s introduction to “Electra,” she describes the protagonist as profoundly stuck. “She is a woman stranded at doorways, and passivity is killing her,” Carson writes. “There is only one thing she can do. Make noise.”

In this way, Electra’s screaming becomes both an emblem of her frustrated agency and her one form of action. Her world has lost its coherence — surrounded by great evil, she is being asked to pretend that things are normal. After a decade of trying, in every way she knows how, to persuade people to see reason, she has come to the end of her knowledge of what reasoned speech — even impassioned speech — can do. Even at her loudest, she experiences herself to be somewhat powerless. “I am ashamed before you: I know you find me extreme,” she tells the chorus, apologizing for her inalterable wretchedness. “But I tell you I have no choice.”

The chorus begs Electra to see reason. “Your mother is evil but oh my child why melt your life away in mourning?” it asks. “Why let grief eat you alive?”

“I cannot not grieve,” Electra says.

Electra describes herself as totally impotent before her mother and defenseless against her grief, but that isn’t quite true. In Virginia Woolf’s essay about Greek tragedy, she likens Electra to “a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to the utmost.” She can’t move freely, or much at all, but she has that inch, and she’s using it to scream. Why?

There is a verb that Electra uses to describe what she’s doing when she screams — lupein. It appears seven times in the play, and Carson relates that the Greeks used it to mean “to grieve, vex, cause pain, do harm, harass, distress, damage, violate.” Or, used differently, it means “‘to be vexed, violated, harassed,’ etc., or ‘to grieve, feel pain.’” The word signifies both simultaneously: damage we inflict because of damage we are experiencing, or the impulse to wound as we ourselves are wounded.

This is the ancestry in which Electra places herself: the woman who manages, “although stuck in a form of life that cuts her off from the world of normal converse, to transect and trouble and change that world by her utterance.” Carson describes what Electra and Niobe and Procne do as sabotage — an undermining of other people’s insistence on business as usual in the face of tragedy. As Electra screams, she joins a literary tradition in which women who are denied power resort, in the end, to sheer sound.

Apropos of nothing in particular, one of my students turns in an essay about screaming. She had been feeling the impulse to shriek lately and was been experimenting with letting out short, sharp little howls on her walks at night. Her name is Avery. She calls screaming “the last-ditch expression of the body and mind.”

I write this down in the screaming notebook, where I have attempted a taxonomy: scream of pain, scream of frustration, scream of rage, scream of protest, scream of fright, scream of despair, scream of solidarity, scream of grief. The experimental scream, to see what will happen or who might come running.

Avery also wrote this: “We’re terrified of hearing the animal in us. It makes sense, then, why a collective scream is attractive: When others are screaming just as loudly as us, our own animalistic desperation is both mirrored and blunted. A single scream is sharp. And alone.”

Through a friend of a friend, I heard about an event series that has been running since the beginning of the year. A dozen or so people gather at the home of two life coaches, sit in a circle in the basement and scream continuously for 30 minutes. I signed up for the next one.

I arrived, the notebook in tow, as the sun was going down over a long, leafy block. The Greek Revival-style house was old and grand, its wide front porch set high up above street level. Inside, the building had been renovated to look like a Brutalist palace, with concrete walls and an industrial staircase. Strangers milled around an open-concept kitchen, drinking tea and smiling at one another nervously. The coaches hosting the event eventually invited us down to their basement, which they assured us had walls made of such thick concrete that we could all make bloodcurdling sounds for hours and no one would ever hear us. This was unsettling.

The hosts sat down next to each other and took a deep breath. They were here, they said, to create “a safe container for our anger.” Before anything else happened, we would go around the room and answer the following question: “What do you need to scream about?”

The lighting was low, and the basement had been draped with soft surfaces, cushions, mats, blankets. We went around and explained ourselves. People were there to scream about all kinds of things: news headlines, war, career frustration, parental pressure, divorce, loneliness. More than one woman said that she was there because she “had trouble feeling angry” and always seemed to slip into sadness instead, but that she hoped the screaming might hold her anger in place.

The life coaches greeted each contribution with solemn thanks and deep breaths, one hand pressed to the chest. We would begin in a moment, one explained. They encouraged everyone to scream continuously for 30 minutes, warning us that at points we might become overwhelmed and want to stop but that we should try to push through. Crying was expected, and so, I learned with alarm, was vomiting. They had buckets for us in the corner if we needed them.

When the group was instructed to get physically comfortable and ready to scream, the center of the room emptied. Most people headed for a corner or a shadowed part of the wall, presumably in bids for some sense of privacy. I found a corner that was a tad too well lit for my taste but would at least keep me from having to make eye contact with anyone. For good measure, I buried my head in the yoga blanket that had been supplied to me.

‘We’re terrified of hearing the animal in us. It makes sense, then, why a collective scream is attractive.’

There was a brief moment, just before the screaming, when the air seemed to flex and contract, a barometric shift. And then everyone took a deep breath.

I wish I could report that this was a transformative experience for me. It seemed to be for several people. Instead, I spent the first many minutes feeling self-conscious, ridiculous. I let out a few experimental hoots. I found myself laughing and trying to make the laughter sound like shouting. Finally, irritated with myself for failing to “get into it,” I yelled as long and as loud as I could and still felt nothing. I mentally added more subtypes to the taxonomy in my notebook: the halfhearted scream, the faker’s scream. Around me on all sides was a rolling caterwaul of bellows, shrieks, sobs, moans, rolling on the floor. The loudest of the screams were startling, and more than once I found myself ducking toward the wall as if for cover.

As I leaned against the wall and looked around, wailing lamely, an image floated into my head of a theater exercise that I learned as a way of working myself up into tears. The instructor had pointed at the cinder-block studio wall and said, absolutely seriously, “Go push the wall down.”

I stood up, put two palms flat on the basement wall and pushed. I put my shoulder into it. I crouched and heaved. The wall, of course, stayed the wall. Only then did the scream that came out of my mouth feel like anything. I remembered again the logic of the exercise: Nothing provokes a human being more than feeling that it’s their obligation to move something immovable.

And then it was over. No one vomited, fortunately, though there was plenty of crying. The coaches led us up the stairs and tenderly fed us lentils.

There was a long list of reasons this all rubbed me the wrong way: the setting (a modern “luxury” renovation in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood), the soft rule against stopping or leaving if you become uncomfortable and — most of all — what I can describe only as an indulgent self-reverence manifest in the moody lighting and incense and incantatory assurances. At every turn, we were being encouraged to think that what we were doing was meaningful, courageous spiritual work. This might have been true for some of the people there. “Primal screaming” as therapy dates to the 1960s as a way of managing repressed pain, and while psychologists debate its effectiveness, plenty of patients report feeling healed by it.

But I did not want, it turned out, a safe space for my rage — which is to say, a space where I could vent it without inconveniencing anyone, cathect a little and then go about my evening. I did not want to be convinced that making noise in a space soundproofed from the world was brave.

I had recently been served an ad for a product named the Shoutlet, marketed as a “portable voice-suppression device” in the form of a small pillow designed to fit over your nose and mouth. When the urge to scream becomes too much, the Shoutlet is there (in soothing shades of mist, or mocha, or glacier) to gently muffle you. Printed on one side — so, right over your screaming mouth — are the words “CHAOS TO CALM.” The product’s website suggests that the Shoutlet is meant to be a tool of empowerment, affirming that “emotions are beautiful” and “shouting can change your life.” But the photos of people using it repel me. Is there anything more sinister than a society that produces in people a need to scream, and then produces, as the solution to that problem, a cute little accessory to let people vent that scream politely and then carry on with a smile?

I went to see the London production of “Electra,” directed by Daniel Fish, with a friend in January. Larson stalked the stage in a Bikini Kill T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, her head shaved, hollering into a hand-held microphone. Electra’s howling is so superabundant that in the London production her screams were electronically amplified, distorted and even harmonized into dissonant chords — a technicolor rainbow of assisted screaming. Her Electra was less a wailing woman than what my grandparents’ generation might have derisively termed “a little punk.” By contrast, Channing as Clytemnestra was commanding, elegant, persuasive, even funny. Maybe this was why my friend and I left the theater with a question that I didn’t anticipate. Electra may be justified, but is she good? Are we rooting for her?

It’s a question I’ve continued to turn over in my mind, as I’ve been considering whether Electra as an archetype of the screamer-against-wrongs is a useful metaphor for understanding today’s void-screaming. It might be fair to interpret Electra’s choice to use her “one inch” (per Woolf) for screaming as self-indulgent — it’s easy to read her as a privileged woman who is aggrieved but materially fine and is simply being loud about her personal pain. Or maybe worse, as someone who has fooled herself into believing that just because she feels powerless, her screaming is a sufficient response to her situation.

Electra could also be read as the person whose pain receives the most attention because she is the loudest and most legible. In “Conflict Is Not Abuse,” from 2016, Sarah Schulman writes that “people from privileged groups, or who overlap with the groups society is designed to serve, have expectations that their complaints will be heard.” Schulman points out that the person who overstates her pain may easily — understanding herself to be a victim — victimize others, imagining that because she is hurting, she cannot be the one who hurts others.

Is there anything more sinister than a society that produces in people a need to scream, and then produces, as the solution to that problem, a cute little accessory to let people vent that scream politely?

Electra is both a victim and a wrongdoer. She describes her life’s purpose and her narrative function as lupein: grieving and causing grief, harmed and doing harm. Later in the play, she will collaborate with her brother to murder their mother, demonstrating that shrieking was not, in fact, the only thing she had power to do. By this point in the plot, the question of whether we’re meant to be rooting for her has become obviously irrelevant. This is a story with no heroes. The audience leaves reminded: No one’s pain at the cruelty of the world inoculates them from becoming part of that cruelty. The reverse is more often true.

But there’s one reading of Electra’s screaming that has kept me from thinking of her as a purely tragic example of what person might do when the world loses its moral coherence. The religious ethicist Fannie Bialek, the author of “Love in Time: An Ethical Inquiry,” pointed out to me that while the play is largely about a woman screaming in frustration at her inability to change her circumstances, the story doesn’t end there. In fact, Electra’s screaming, which seems at first like an emblem of her stuckness, is also a form of refusal, a way of extending time until she can formulate her next move. It prolongs the narrative that began with her sister’s murder and will end, she hopes, with justice.

That next move — murder — may not be at all admirable or necessarily just. But it’s instructive to think about the scream separately from the actions she takes later. It is a distinct creative act of elongating a story that seems stalled: Electra screams when she seems to have exhausted all her options but cannot bring herself to simply go silent. It is a last-ditch effort to ensure that her plot doesn’t conclude at that point of failure.

That effort comes at a high cost. Screaming for any real duration is punishing. It stresses the lungs, the muscles, the throat, the heart; it can injure the vocal cords. Marina Abramovic described a performance piece during which she screamed until her voice gave out as an exercise in metamorphosis. “When you are screaming in this way, without interruption,” she recalled, “at first you recognize your own voice, but later, when you are pushing against your limits, the voice turns into a sound object.” The scream, if it goes on long enough, stops being an expression of the person screaming and becomes its own animal; the person transforms into a vessel for this new, strange sound creature.

No one who spends much time in the presence of such a creature can remain unaffected. It can be hard to tolerate something so extreme. After seeing “Electra,” I emerged from the theater feeling exhausted and demoralized, not relieved. But then, Electra isn’t aiming for catharsis. Her choice about what to do within her constraints — to make noise, to refuse, to insist on the continuation of the story by turning her body into a vehicle for raw sound — does “tell to the utmost.” She is transformed by the evil around her, and she will not let anyone in her field of action forget that they, too, are transformed. At several points, she declares her kinship with the nightingale, the bird that transmutes mourning, night after night, into singing.

Refusing to remain untransformed, converting ongoing grief into ongoing song, seems like one viable thing to do with an inch. “We must make an effort to stay with what we see,” Sarah Aziza wrote in a 2024 Jewish Currents essay that argues that when confronted with “a livestreamed genocide, we must ask — what does all this looking do?” Aziza described the witness’s transformation: “Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.” To inhabit that rupture, to allow the wound to remain open, preserves a kind of possibility — many things could yet happen. The way things are, intractable as they seem, is not the way they must always be. “This wound is essential,” Aziza wrote. “Into this wound, imagination may pour.”

That quote is the last thought that I have jotted in the screaming notebook. One wonders if Electra would have found a less violent ending had she been offered this idea. Into this wound, imagination may pour. It is certainly not a balm. What it invites is the hardest work: to allow the warping pain of the world to open you and then to stay that way, avoiding madness or callousness, long enough to turn yourself into a vessel for imagination. This is how people have always called forth better stories than the ones they’re living, and then made those stories powerful, sonorous, undeniable.

“Make them all hear,” Electra says. “Make this house echo.”