This document provides an overview of a book series titled "Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts". The series aims to address fundamental questions about art and specific arts like literature, film, music, and painting. Each book in the series introduces key topics in a clear, accessible style and is written by distinguished philosophers. The overview lists the first two books in the series - "The Philosophy of Art" and "The Philosophy of Motion Pictures" - and announces upcoming books on the philosophy of literature, music, and black aesthetics.
This document provides an overview of a book series titled "Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts". The series aims to address fundamental questions about art and specific arts like literature, film, music, and painting. Each book in the series introduces key topics in a clear, accessible style and is written by distinguished philosophers. The overview lists the first two books in the series - "The Philosophy of Art" and "The Philosophy of Motion Pictures" - and announces upcoming books on the philosophy of literature, music, and black aesthetics.
Original Description:
Noel Carroll, from his book The Philosophy of Motion Pictures.
This document provides an overview of a book series titled "Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts". The series aims to address fundamental questions about art and specific arts like literature, film, music, and painting. Each book in the series introduces key topics in a clear, accessible style and is written by distinguished philosophers. The overview lists the first two books in the series - "The Philosophy of Art" and "The Philosophy of Motion Pictures" - and announces upcoming books on the philosophy of literature, music, and black aesthetics.
This document provides an overview of a book series titled "Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts". The series aims to address fundamental questions about art and specific arts like literature, film, music, and painting. Each book in the series introduces key topics in a clear, accessible style and is written by distinguished philosophers. The overview lists the first two books in the series - "The Philosophy of Art" and "The Philosophy of Motion Pictures" - and announces upcoming books on the philosophy of literature, music, and black aesthetics.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 24
Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts
Serict Editor: Philip Alperson, Temple University
The foWldations of the Philosophy of the Arts series is designed to provide a comprehensive but flexible series of concise texts addressing both fWldamental general questions about art as well as questions about the several arts (literature, film, music, painting, etc.) and the various kinds and dimensions of artistic practice. A consistent approach across the series provides a crisp, contemporary introduction to the main topics in each area of the arts, written in a clear and accessible style that provides a responsible, comprehensive, and informative accow1t of the relevant issues, reflecting classic and recent work in the Held. Books in the series are written by a truly distinguished roster of philosophers with international renown. I. The Philosophy of Art, Stephen Danes 2. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Noel Carroll Forthcomina: The Philosophy of Literature, Peter Lamarque The Philosophy of Music, Ph1lip Alperson Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul Taylor The Philosophy of Motion Pictures Noel Carroll fiJ Blackwell Publishing 146 MOVIN(.; IMAGES rejected by Dllvid Bordwell in Narr<ltion 1n the fiction fJJm and by Gregory Currie in his and Mind. dcNte is deftly sumrn.uized by George Wilson in his "Le Grand ImoaJer Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration," Philosophical Topics 2 5: I (Spring 1997), 295-318. Wilson, himseU', comes out in fllvor of the thesis that all fiction motion pictures ha,e fictionlll narrators . This position is challenged in: Berys Gaut, "The Movies: Cinematic Narration," in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, edited by Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Andrew Kania, "Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrlltors," Journal of Aeschetics and Art Criticism 63:1 (Winter 2005), 47-54; and Noel Carroll, "Film Narrative/Narration: Introduction," in The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Carroll and Choi. Though this particulM debate is not canvassed in this book, it is well worth a look. One very exciting place to go in order to continue your exploration of the philosophy of motion pictures, then, might be to start by checking out the relerences in the preceding two parllgraphs. Chapter Six Affect and the Moving Image There is an undeniable relationship between moving images and our ailective life - that is, our life of feeling. Many motion genres derive their very labels from the types of a.lfect.s or fedings they ue designed to provoke -- suspense, horror, mystery, weepies (a.k.a. and thrills (thrillers). In addition to being motion pictures, movies also generally aspire to being e-motion pictures; they not only yield the impression of movement, they also move us. Indeed, one of the primuy reasons that the kind of moving fictions we affectionately call movies are so popular is undoubtedly their potential to arouse us affectively. After a day of numbing routine, we crave some excitement - a jolt of suspense perhaps, or horror, or fear, or a good cry, or maybe some robust laughter. Movie fictions facilitate experiencing these affective conditions imaginatively, that is, without having to pay the price that these states usually exact as tears of sadness typically re<1uire some genuine loss. Rather, fictional motion pictures give the system a hearty workout - our affects are enlivened - though we worse for it, as we would be if we had to confront the sort of perils that typically horror or suspense . Even if there can be motion pictures that do not the emotions - such as surveillance footage of empty parking lots - energizing our affective system is so central to the enterprise of the movies that no philosophical account of the moving image would be complete without discussing it. Of course, motion pictures may not only he valutd for the affective calisthenics they promote . Some motion pictures may be esteemed for engendering feelings in us for peoples and causes that heretofore left us unmoved -- such as the plight of exploited factory workers in so-caHed 148 Alfi::CT AN!J THI. MOV!Nt; !MALl developing countries.* Furthermore, certain motion pictures can even alford us sclf-lmuwledge, by awakening feelings in us we never knew wt had and enabling us to examine them apperceptively. But whether for the sake of bracing affective stimulation or for ;he purpose of expanding our emotional reach - either socially or introspectively -- the link between the moving image and our affective life is one of its major draws. However, it is not the case that moving pi ctures engage our alfective in some simple, unitary fashion; motion pictures engender leeling-rcspmu;es in u.s in a nwnbcr of different ways. This is not onlv because movies possess several difTercnt chaimels of .Jrcctivc address also bec.1w;c our repertoire of aflcctivc responses is itself variegated . That is, the motion picture can elicit a range of allects not only because it has a battery of_ diverse at its disposal, but also because there is a multiplicity of aflec't.S available for stimulation. These affects indude reflexes, phobias, affect programs, cognitive emotions, and moods. "AfTect'' is our name for this entire domain; others might prefer to call it the "emotions," but for reasons that will emerge in what follows, I reserve that label for only certain species within this genus. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore, to varying degrees, .l diversity of phenomena in the realm of affect in relation to various structures of the moving image. Because there are a number of different affects and a number of ditlerent structures at issue, I will attempt to lffip<JSC some order here by dividing the chapter into two parts. These parts correspond to a crude and ultimately artificial distinction between two levels of motion picture address. Part I pertains to the affective reactions of audiences to the depictive array at large, while part 2 zooms in more specifk.ally upon the range of audience responses to fictional characters, notably to protagonists and antagonists . Or, to put the division more perspicuously, part 2 is about our affective relationahips to tlctional characters, and part 1 canvasses the broader catt:gory of that plus everything else. Part 2 is not opposed to part 1, but rather is more focu.st..>d on one of the perhaps most important levers movies have upon audience affect. And, perhaps needless to say, other motion pictures can be particularly dangerous for stoking morally inappropriate hatreds between people. 149 Audience and Affect The gamut ?} ajfccc Bv "affect," I am referring to felt bodily states that in\olvc or sensations. The compass of affect is broad, comprising, among other things, hard- wired rellex reactions, like the startle response, sen.s.1tions (including pl easure, pain, and sexual arousal), phobias, desires, various occurrent, feeling-tomd mental states - such as fear, anger, and jtalousy - and moods . Through various strategies and devices, motion pictures possess the capacity to kindle and even to inl1am(' a number of these states. In this section, we will begin to examine a selection of these capacities in relation to the kinds of atTcctin: expericnn:s that they arc suited to enlist. Through the manipulation of sound and imag\.', the creators of moving images can induce changes in our bodies . The plummctmg in This Is Cinerama caused roller-coaster chills in the stomachs of audierKes, while some of the abrupt cuts in Bulliu made our bellies flip. moving- image arrays have the power to activate the involuntary and automatic reflexes of audiences at a .subcognitive, or cognitively impenetrable, I{ vel of response . For example, loud noises - either recorded e!Tccts or musical sounds - can elicit instinctual reactions from spectators . A sudden explosion even if expectd is apt to make the viewer tlincb. The response is cognitively impenetrable in the sense that, despite the fact that you know that you are not in danger, your body ,.,-ill respond otherwise and prepare you alTectively for Hight or some other sdf-protecti,e bchaior. Adrenaline will rush into our veins as we are primed for action. more, this "high" can be enjoyable can be savored if there really is no real danger in the vicinity. This kind of response is called the ." It is an innate of the human organism. All things being equal, the adrenaline rush elicited by a fiction is pleasurable - as it is in the case of fireworks (as to battlefield bombardments) . This is why so many movies, come seasonal vacation periods, are tantamount to fireworks displays; they literally excite spectators by triggering inborn perceptual/hormonal mechi}nisnu; for the purpose of throwing audiences into heightened affective states. So many genres are devoted to this enterprise from disaster falms to war !Urns (whether on earth, or in outer space, or in some fantasy realm, like Narn.i.l, or in the distant future, like The Time Machine or Planet rhe Apes). ISO AFHCT ANU HIE MOVING IMAt.;E These rdlcx states, of course, are not onl) tripped by loud noises . Sudden movements toward the camera or of the camera or rapid move- ments laterally acToss the screen can put the body on high alert. The maw of the giant surges forward and we start backwards. The movie S<-Tecn is a rich phenomenal Held in terms of variables like size, altitude, and speed, which have the capability to draw forth intense, feeling-tuned, automatic responses from the bodies of'vicwers, as do the variations in the loudness and cadence on the soundtrack. This is why so many movies are "action-packed." The relentless move- ment in movies provokes a level of inner commotion that is experienced positively. In this way, the movie can keep the audience percolating with affect from the pre-title scene to the end credits. And that is the aspiration of the many swnmer action spectacles which subscribe, according to some French critics, to the "Boom-Boom" theory of filmmaking. In addition to reflexes, the standard-issue hwnan organism comes equipped with certain broadly shared phobias. Fear of insects and snakes, for example . Moviemak.ers exploit these in all sorts of ways; the nwnber of films named after their presiding bug is legion, from Killer Bees to The Spider {a.k.a. Earth Versus the Spider). Ditto snakes - as in the case of Anaconda. Sometimes our phobias are titillated by making these creatures enormous - for example, The Blaci Scorpion - but also by marshalling swarming masses of them togtther as in the case of the army ants in Byron Haskin's The Naked junyle. Or one can have them both larger than life and swarming, as Peter Jackson does in the scene in the pit in his remake of Kina Kona Horror fictions, of course, specialize in phobic creatures. Our instinctual aversion to dead and decaying things is exploited by monsters from A to Z (for zombies). In these examples, we relish the shudder they invite, since we arc in no danger of being eaten alive or infected. Again, the heightened affect comes cost-free. But horror tktions are not the only movies that traffic in tantalizing phobic reactions. An instinctual fear of heights plays a role in many action genres; that is probably why so many films feature mountain climbing, airline disasters, roof-top chases, and so on. Alfred Hitchcock was identified by Fran<;:ois Truffaut as a director who overtly strives to tickle phobic responses. In North by Northwest he is said to h.lve experimented with agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) in the crop- dusting sequence, while Vertigo is, of course, named after a phobia, one which the film attempts to simulate cinematically. The recent film Snakes on a Plane exploits several phobias at once by releasing venomous vipers in the t-:abin of an airplane in flight - thereby racking up fear of reptiles, heights, cl.mstrophobia, and fear of Hying in one shot. AFFECT AND THE MOVINC IMAt;l: IS I Perhaps, little needs to be said about the ways in which motion pictures can arouse sexual feelings; we will leave that research to the reader. Emotwns The alfec.'tive responses reviewed so far are somewhat rigid. They arc Jed.wmJ -- they issue a llxed response to a very specific kind of stimulw. This is not to discount their importanct' to either self-preservation or moviegoing. They were evolved to protect us in environments fraught with danger. HowCH!r, where there is no danger, as is typically the C;l!Je in most movie theaters, inciting them, as already indicated, can b<: a source of great pleasure. However, in addition to these somewhat primitive responses, the body has affective resources that are more discerning - if you will - in their activation. Whereas the startle response warns the organism on the oc'C:asion of a loud noise, these affective systems - which we will cal.l the emotions proper - can detect danger not only in a explosion, but also in a whispered threat or in one's spouse's overly attentive laughter to the .attractive stranger. These resources size up the situations and things that give rise to and elect differential reactions to the aforesaid stimuli on the basis of antecedent computations, whether immediately prior or after some 1bat is, these computations may occur on contact at the initial levd of perception or they may be pr<X'Cssed cognitivcly in the forecourts of the mind, either tacitly or consciously. They may engage the frontal cortex of the brain or they may bypass it and may be relayed directly to our behavioral- response centers. It is the function of these affect systems to evaluate the circumstances before us in terms of certain recurring existcntial-hwnan themes - like loss - and to prepare us to react appropriately. For example, if the stimulus is be harmful, the organism is primed to fight or Hee. This response, of course, is what we call fear. Likewise, if the situation that confronts us is one in which we perceive a wrong done to ourselves, or to those we hold near and dear to ourselves, or to our interests, then we are prepared to "get even." This, needless to say, is anger. Other affective responses in this neighborhood include sorrow, pity, indignation, reverence, awe, hatred, love, shame, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, comic amusement, loyalty, and so forth. This is the realm of the emotions. Emotion is the realm of affect in which computational appraisals of stimuli relative to certain interests give rise to feelings which typically prime behavioral tendencies to act. Or, to put the matter !52 AHECT AND TilE MOVING IMAGl: graphically, the perception of danger (an appraisal of the large, hulking thing in my vicinaty) leads to a chill down my spine (a visceral feeling) which makes me freeze in place (an evasive behavior). Altogether these add up to an instance of the emotional state of fear. Since, as we have seen, there arc other sorts of affects, like the startle reflex, which are more prirllitive structurally, we will reserve the label the "emotions" lor only those affects that have the preceding, complex structure that integrates differential computations with feelings . The emotions arc a good thing to possess from an evolutionary stand- point. Compared to processes of conscious, rational deliberation, the emotions are very ta:;t, "down and dirty," decision-making routines . They scope out situations quicldy and ready the organism to react, sometimes within the blillX of an eye. lh.is is no small advantage in a tight spot. Of course, the emotions are sometimes mistaken. What I may at first size up as a large, potentially dangerous creature standing in the shade may in fact turn out to be nothing but a curiously shaped bush. However, way back when in the environmental circumstances on the African veldt where the emotions first developed, it was better to be safe than sorry. The emotions were evolved by natural selection in the first instance to respond to percipient's conception of the situation. That is, if the percipient believed that the large shape in the shadows was a dangerous creature, then the organism was thrown into a state of fear, even if the stimulus was really onlY a bush. Yet if this is how the emotions are supposed to work, it seems to raise a question immediately about how our emotions can - for better or worse -- be aroused by llctions, including motion pi<..-ture fictions. For, with respect to such fictions, the audience clearly knows that the aliens in War t?f the are made up and that these monsters pose no threat to either the viewers or to anyone they care about. The saga has been concocted from whole cloth. So how is it possible for audiences exercising their natural, selectively given emotional powers to feel fear upon exposure to Steven Spielberg's completely fabricated spectacle? For if they know the lllm is a fiction, they patently cannot believe that Earth is being invaded from outer space. And the audience must know it's a fiction, since that's what they paid for; no one pays to be shot at by space monsters. Earlier we hypothesized that experiencing an emotion like fear - where one did not have to pay the usual entrance fee of risking potential danger -- <.-'Ould be pleasurable. However, that brings up a prior question, namely: how is it even possible to fear that which one knows does not exist? We calm the upset child by telling him, "There are no such things as ghosts." ... FH(' T AND TI-ll MOVIt-;(; IMAt;f. I 5 j So how can we be seized with fear we know are no such things as alien invaders? Indeed, the problem extends to other emotions beyond fear. How can you feel sad about someone 's loss of a loved mw in a melodranw, when you know that there was never a loved one to be lost? And, of course., if vou are sitting in a movie theattr watching a well-known actress emote, do know- and therefore believe - that it is "just a story." And yet we cry. Oocsn't this defy reason 7 Some philosophers have found this phenomenon tjUite puuling and h,ne even conjectured that, ifmovk audiences arc emotionally moved bv fictions they must be, at least temporarily, irrational (or, in words, fo; the duration of the fiction). This conundrum is sometimes called "the paradox of flc"tion" - the mystery of how one can he emotionally moved (for example, frightened) b/ you know does not exast. And yet, on the basis of our understanding of ways in which the emotions work naturally, it docs not appear that we actually are compelled to agree tkt fearing fictions is in any way paradoxical or self-contradictory, nor must we be forced to such a desperate conclusion as the that movie viewers must be momentarily deranged. One consideration against the temporary insanity charge is that, as we have already observed, many emotion-like, allcctive states ..... such as reflexes and phobias - can be elicited sans bdid. We start at the loud noise the balloon bursting - even t110ugh we know that it is harmless. No one thinks that is irrational. Insofar as emotions are ncar relations - cousins perhaps-- of these more primitive affective states, isn't it possible that they do not require beliefs in order to be launched? And, in any event, since various reflexes, phobias, and affect programs <.:an be set in motion while bypassing the belief-centers of the brain, there would not appear to be. a paradox of llction with respect to the board. Furthermore, although it is true that an emotional state can, and often is, ignited by a state of belief, this is not the only menta.! state that c.m arouse an emotional reaction like fear or anger. We may also imagine a state of afTairs and then take note of an emotion welling up within us . And there is nothing abnormal or irrational about this. Consider : we are about to ask our boss for a day ofT in order to visit a dying relative. We imagine how things might go down . in our mind's eye, he denies our request and makes a characteristically cutting remark. Our ire mounts, though we do not literally believe that our boss has either denied our request or insulted us. We only imagine that he does so, and this is enough to start our emotional engine churning. Or, in a moment of 154 AffECT AND THE MOVING IMA(;f frustration, entertain the idea of saying something hurtful to a person who is mentally disabled, confused, utterly dependent upon you, and who, as well, worships you. A feeling of shame may overcome you, though your lips remain sealed. Belief - holding the content of proposition x before the mind assertively - can bring forth emotions. But so too can something that has been merely imagined - that is, a propositional content entertained in thought non- assertively. Or, in other words, believing that x and imagining that x - in the appropriate circumstances - are both psychologically empowered to elicit our emotions. Moreover, it is easy to see the evolutionary advantage to be had in possessing the capacity of the imagination to arouse emotions. For by this means we can enhance the survival prospects of our conspecifics by instilling fear in them with respect to counterfactual states of affairs. In order to warn children otT trusting strangers, we may, for instance, tell them tales about what might happen to them if they wander away with just anybody. Here, of course, we can see an immediate connection between the natural history of our emotions and our emotional responses to fictions. For are not many of the earliest stories that we tell (and show) children counterfactual, cautionary tales - such as what befalls Walt Disney's Pinocchio when he throws in with the fast-taUdng strangers on his way to school? That is, our capacity to respond to fictions emotionally is rooted in the capacity - endowed by natural selection because of its adaptive advantageousness - of the emotion system to be aroused not only by that which we believe, but also by that which we imagine.* Motion picture fictions are sense-bearing vehicles that mandate viewers to imagine the statcll of affairs and events that they depict audiovisually. With respect to (apL<Jin Horatio Hornblower, we see the actor Gregory Peck * 11le power of the imagination to engage emotions is also to planning. Th.lt we can envision alternative futures and gauge what our emotional responses would be to fmding oursdvcs in those states of affairs is dearly cxtrcmdy advantageous. Imagining how you would feel if your child hurt herself at play may encourage you to baby-proof your house. Human life flourishes in large measure because of our ability to live in the future imaginatively. The emotions, we may hypothesize, are sensitive to imaginings just because they appra.ise or evaluate those future, po!!Sible, counte.rfactual states of atTairs in terms of our abiding interests. Moreover, it does not make much sense to discount this capacity as irratioral. AFFECT AND THE MOVING !MAGI: 155 on screen in a three-cornered hat a.nd then imagine that the eponymous n<l\'al officer is steering his frigate out of harm's way becauu that is what, given the context of fiction, we realize we are intended to do by the director Raoul Walsh (and his team of fellow fictioneers) . In elfect, a fiction...! motion picture instructs its audiences to hold certain propositions bdore the mind unassertively - for example, to Imaaine th.lt Hornblower is w1dcr tire, or to suppose that Hornblower is being blasted, or to entettam the ufklS.UruJ thouahr (rather than the belief) that Hornblower is just barely eluding the enemy attack. And then, upon entertaining or imagining said state of all'airs, we feel suspense for Hornblower and his <..Tew. This is possible precisely because, due to evolution, our emotions are susceptible to imaginings as wdl as beliefs . The cultural institution of lktion, including the precinct of tlctional motion pictures, rests upon our irmate cap.1city to be moved cmotiona1..1) by representations of counterfactual st.1tes of affairs and events. The phenomenon is neither paradoxical nor irrational, but natural.* Furthermore, emotional states like fear, pity, levity, anger, sadness, and so forth - can be activated not only by mental occurrences such as bel.ievings that x and imaginings that .x, but abo by nonpropositional states such as patterns of perceptual or attention . That is, upon identifying the animal before me as a people-eating tiger a.nd, thence, believing it to be dangerous, l am reduced to fear and trembling. likewise, prompted by the visage on screen, I imagine that The Predator exists and then, recognizing all his malignant properties, my l1csh crawls with visceral revulsion. But, in addition, an emotional reaction may be thrown into gear before I have fully computed or re-cognized identity of that which I an1 in the process of encountering. For whatever it is may command attention just because it satisllcs a very general profile for that which is That is, we may not know what x is specifica1..1y, but perception registers that x is large and a<hancing toward us very quickly. And, as a result, sans consciow identification, our fear-alarms put us on red alert, prior to any further processing. Of course, once we recognize that it is a charging rogue elephant, that then reinforces * But, you may say, what of cases whtrc we quell tht child's fNr by his beliefs? Doesn't that establish that emotions require bdief! to take hold? No, for there are also cases on the other side of the ledger. For eumplt, we may overcome our disappointment at failing in some goal today by imagining dut we will succeed tomorrow. (I owe this observation to Rianna Odof110n.) 156 Al' l'lCT ANIJ TilE MOVIN t > IMAl;E our fright all the more. But the relevant point at this juncture is that there a may be enough information in these very early, very general stages of the traddng process to send the emotion system into a state of terror, even though there is not yet sulricicnt information to determine the exact nature of the threat. Emotions can originate near the site of perception and prime the body for at."tion without any further need for computation: the groom slips on a banana peel and we burst into laughter. Or the emotion may arise after being processed cognitively, either tacitly or consciously. Professional envy with regard to your colleague's executive bathroom privileges takes a lot of thinking. Motion pktures, of course, allord opportunities for the emotions to erupt through a variety of routes - some mediated by conscious cognitions, some by tacit ones, and others even more immediately. The quickly moving, dark shadows may send the icy rush of fear down our spine without our apprehension of whatever is casting those shadows. On the other hand, in order to admire the bravery of the hero, we must cognize his actions under the concept of courage and also recognize that th.lt satisties the pertinent LTiteria for admiration. Of course, whether a given motion picture involves a greater degree of primarily pen.--eptually motivated emotional states versus ones calling for more cognitive processing can only be determined on a movie-by-movie basis. Nevertheless, what these emotional states have in common is that they comprise appraisals or evaluations relative to certain recurring human themes, such as persona! dignity, which appraisals then engender bodily states of feeling that dispose the organism to behave in certain ways . The samurai, for example, appraises the mud splashed on his brother's sandals as an affront: this causes his blood to boil, and, in consequence, he draws his sword from its scabbard, with lethal consequences. Of course, with respect to motion picture audiences, the behavioral portion of the emotion scenario rarely obtains, since we are only imagining that such-and-such is happening. For example, we are only supposing that somcone's sandals have been muddied; thus, even if we arc partial to that character, we have no reason to act, since, among other things, no one has really been insulted. It is a remarkable fact about motion pictures that to an arresting extent they are able to elicit across diversilled audiences - roughly the same or converging general emotional responses to the fictions on screen. Suppose, as might happen any day of the week, that an ordinary couple is arguing on a street corner. The affective responses, if any, of real-world passers-by are likely to be all over the map. But, contrariwise, a couple argues onscreen and we all - or nearly all of us - feel indignation at the way in which the .HI'ECl :\ND lHl MUVINt; IMAGE I heroine is being demeaned . Wh-.:ther we are in Madras or Manhatt.m, whether we are Lutheran, Jew, or atheist, Republican or Dcmonat, any motion picture worth its salt can usually elicit roughly the emotion it intends from its target audience, no matter how far flung, most of the time, its members may be. How is this possible? To begin to answer this question, tlrst that emotions appraisals -- they appraise situations in light of certain interests. The emotion of fear appraises events, objects, and people with respect to concerns lor the safety and proteL'tion of oneseU, one's interests, and the interests of one's erates foremost in mind. Moreover, concerns, which we can sununariu as a preoccupation with harmfulness, funt-1.ion as the criterion UliCd to appraise or evaluate a predicament as fearsome . That is, emotional appraisals arc governed by criteria, as the emotion of fear can only he mobiliz(xl upon at least a suggestion of hannfulness. Upon detecting circumstances that are perceived to harmful or dangerous, fear takes over. It operates like a searchlight. It diret..'ts our attention, organizing the details bctore us into significant wholes or gesu.lts. In the ilrst instance, it throws certain of the elements of the situation into bold relief, leading us to attend to the mugger's knilc, tha.n to the striped design on his tic. Fear then further guides our scansion of the art'ilY to pid::. out further relevant features for notice - lor example, that the mugger has several large, equally well-armed companions. Note here that the presiding emotional state does not batten on these details wUly-nilly. They have all been chosen because they pertinent to alerting us to the level of danger that conironts us. That is, these dements all meet the evaluative criterion of harmfulness. The emotion of fear solves the problem of what we must attend to. It weighs elements of our circumstances in light of our intetests, specifically our intacsts in self- preservation and the avoidance of organizes situations in terms of the evaluative criterion of harmfulness. Like fear, our other emotions arc also critcrially governed. ln order to be angry, I must believe that me or mine h<lve been wronged. To pity someone, I must believe that they luve suffered misfortune. Envy rt.-quires that I think that someone else has something I want . And so on. The emotions appraise situations in terms of criteria. The bodily feelings that are then provoked by the emotional state, in turn, bias or organi:re our apprehension of the eliciting state of affairs in accordance with the criteria that govern the prevailing emotion. Our anger ftrst fixes our attention on the smile of the guy who has just insulted us and then directs us to each of the other laughing faces that surround us. IS!! AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE This is how the emotions work in everyday life. But what does it have to do with viewing motion pictures? ln particular, what does it have to do with the way in which moving pictures quite frequently dispose diverse audiencelj to vent extremely like-minded emotions in response to onscreen fictions - to the degree that all or most of us feel suspense, at the same lime, for example, over the issue of whether or not the diminutive protagonist will make the football team of his dreams or whether or not the over-the-hiU boxer stands a chance against Apollo Creed? In life, in contrast to fiction, our emotions have to select the pertinent objects upon which to focus from a plethora of largely unstructured stimuli. But in fictions, including motion picture fictions, things are different . Our emotions are not called upon to organize the situations before us, so to say, !h novo. To a much greater extent than usually encountered in everyday life, the situations in fictional motion pictures have a1ready been structured for us by the director and his team. We do not typically have to depend, from the first instant, upon our emotions to organize fictiona1 events for us as much as we rely upon the emotions to perform this task for us in the ordinary course of events. For, in the main, the states of a.lfairs and events in motion pictures have been, in a manner of speaking, emotionally for us by the creators of the fiction. ln.at is, the creators of the motion picture have a1ready done much of the work of emotiona1ly sculpting scenes and sequences for us through the ways in which the salient features of the tlctiona1 situation have been carefully designed to satisfy the criteria for drawing forth the emotiona1 state intended by the production team. Details that suit the conceptual conditions of the emotional response desired by the moviemakers have been selected, ftltered, foregrounded, and emphasized in the narrative, the dialogue, and the composition, and through the camera positioning, the acting, the musical commentary, and so forth. ln contrast to the way that the emotions have to start from scratch when it comes to managing our attention in daily life, when it comes to the general run of motion pictures, the events on screen have been emotively prefocused for us by the creators of the movie. They have selected the of the scene or sequence that they think are emotively significant and thrust them, to put it bluntly, in our face. The means to this end at the tilrnmak.er's dispoiial include: camera position and composition, editing (including the processes of bracketing, scaling, and indexing discussed in the previous chapter), lighting, the use of color, and, of course, musical accompaniment, acting, dialogue, and the very structure of the script or narrative . AFFECT AN[) THE MOVING IMAGE 1>9 Quite frequently in everyday We, when an ac<Ju.Untance or a l.-olicague slights us - perhaps by a passing remark - we are not immediately angry, even if we are hurt, because we may wonder whether the insult was an intentional wrong rather than merely a thoughtless gaff. But aJl sucb remarks recur, anger besets us and inclines us to begin to recogni.lc a discernible pattern of nastiness directed at us. However, in typical movie tictions, we rarely have to waver so long. So often characters wear the meanness of their actions on their sleeve, and if that were not enough, we abo have aa:ess to the disapproving judgments of the pt.'Ople who surround them in the fiction. From the outset, we not only have a pretty unmistakable gestalt of wrong- ness served up with arresting clarity, but we also have the reat.'tions of the characters around them to reflect and to reinforce our aliSeSSlllent of the situation. It is very difncult not to respond negatively to the snarling, arrogmt, cruel pronouncements of the dictator in V for Vrndetta, shot as they are in oppressive dose-ups and rasped out with gravelly harshness by the actor john Hurt. The performance is designed to elicit a gut reaction of political defiance, aversion, and even loathing. Generally in fictional motion pictures, the detection work that our emotions need to do for us in daily life is somewhat minimized, since the scenes and characters in these motion pictures have most commonly already been constructed from the vantage of the intended emotional point of view. The aforesaid dictator, for instance, was expressly designed from and for perspec- tive of loathing. Or, to say it ditTerently, the character was emotively predigested or prefocused for us. And the image was made in such a way that any distracting detail was winnowed or tlltcred out and features pertinent to the elicitation of the intended emotion were exaggeratedly fore grounded. But what does it mean for a or a scene, or a sequence to be emotively prefocused? Remember: the emotions are governed by criteria. To be happy for my cousin, l must believe that he is doing well . If he is doing poorly, then, all things being equal, happiness would be an odd response to his condition. Moreover, just as the emotions in daily life are governed by certain criteria of appropriateness, so too mUJt the emotions mounted in response to fictions be governed. Thus, motion picture is emotively prefocused by being criuriall.J prejocu.ud - that is, by being so structured that the descriptions and depictions of the pertinent objects of our attention in the movie clearly and deciaively satisfy the criteria for the emotional state intended by the creators of the moving picture. 160 AFfECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE The maker> of mummy-monster movies want to put us into the emotional sUte of horror. Horror is a compound emotion, involving fear and disgust. As we have seen, harmfulness is a criterion for fear. Impurity is a criterion for disgust . Thus, to elicit the horror response from viewers, the makers of a mummy picture will emphasize certain of his properties - namely, those that count as fearsome and those that count as disgusting. His capacity for harmfulness, of course, is satisfied by the lavish attention paid to his killing innocent people, while his impurity is esublished by elaborating on the fact that his dead body is rotting and badly in need of rejuvenation. likewise, is arguably an emotion with two criteria - improbability and the desire that the good shall triumph. When, due to the nefarious plot of rome Lex Luthor type the two trains steam toward each other on a collision course it is unlikely that disaster can be averted. Moreover, the death of all the pt."'ple on clte train is clearly evil. Can even Superman save the day? The narrative and the editing forcefully direct our attention in such a way that it is virtually impossible to miss the unlikelihood that good can come of this sUte of affairs, and, aJl things being e<lual, for the normal viewer the result is suspense. Once we perceive the objects of our attention under the criterially relevant categories - such as harmfulness and disgust with regard to horror fictions or the improbability of the morally correct outcome with respect to suspense - the intended emotion is apt to be raised in us. That is, as a result of entertaining the appropriate appraisals -- usually the ones implicated by the criteria} prefocusing - we arc likely to w1dergo the bodily responses, such as laughing, crying or squirming in our seat, that the moviemakers have planned. Of course, not all motion pictures aim at evoking such brash emotional responses as my examples so far might suggest. Some films may aspire to induce more complex, ambiguous, nuanced, and even ambivalent emo- tional states than horror or suspense movies do. In those instances, however, it is not the case that the process of criterial prefocusing has been retired, but rather that the fictional world may have been constructed so as to satisfy simultaneously the criteria for more than one emotional condition, including possibly even those that conflict. Or, in other instances, the satisfaction of pertinent emotive criteria may only be hinted at subtly; the audience may need to mull over and reflect closely upon the details of the depiction before it arrives at the emotional response the filmmaker intends. For motion pictures may trade in quiet emotions as well as loud ones. AFFECT AND THE MOVINC IMAGf: 161 2 Some Affective Relations between Audiences and Characters in Popular Movies The structure of emotional elicitation that wc have called crittrial prcfocusing can operate with regard to situations populated by characters or not. Shooting and editing a dark and stormy night can apprehension in an audience, since it meets the criteria of a place inhospit - able and potentially dangerous for people, even if no pt'oplc art yd in evidence in the motion picture. However, though allect can be raised in audiences where no characters arc in the vicinity, clearly among the most powerful ways for arousing affect and emotion in viewers, particularly in mass-market movies, is through our rdat.ion to the fictional characters, notably the protagonists and the antagonists . So in order to round oil our introductory and non-exhaustive exploration of some of the modes of affective address employed by the movies, a section ties that bind us to fictional characters is in order. But, as was noted in the previous section, there is not just one channel of alTectiw address htrc, but several. In this part of the chapter, we will first examine a way in which movies may promote our emotional connection with charactas and tht' n we will conclude by discussing what we call "the mirror reflex," a modt available to audio- visual fictions, but not literary ones, ldent!.flwti on A natural place to initiate a discussion about the emot1onal rclationslup of viewers to fictional movie characters is the notion of identification. There are several reasons for this. First, when asked lor an accoW1t of our emotive relation to fictional characters, the protagonists, most people arc likely to invoke some notion of identitlcation. Morco\'er, identification is probably the oldest ac(:OW1t in the Western tradition of our emotional relationship to characters, for it was first propounded by Plato, who feared that the goodly citizens would become posselii!Cti by Wldesirable emotions, such as the fear of death, when exposed to actors shuddering onsUge about the prospect of Hades. And this, of course, was hardly a desirable state to incite in potential militiamen. Today, similar Platonic anxieties are abroad, Wldtrlying the recurring suspicion that the representation in the of w1palaublc sexual feelings and aggressiveness will conuminate the hearts of audicn<:cs - most worrisomely, those of impressionable But identification i.s 162 ArHCT AND THE MOVING IMAGE not merely thought of as a source of antisodal tendencies. More often than not, identification is characterized positively as what bonds us to those most upstanding fiction.a! characters, the protagonists. Typically, it is supposed that to identify emotionally with a character is for one to feel predsely what she feels. By inhabiting the character from the inside, so to speak, her world becomes ours and we embrace her point of view as our own. We grow close to characters - or, at least, to the protagonists - because our hearts beat as one; identification is, in other words, the secret of the bond that we forge with the protagonists. Indeed, a common complaint - though perhaps, as we shall see, an unwarranted one - about popular movies is: "I couldn' t identify with the characters."* Of course, "identification," as it is used in common parlance, is somewhat ambiguous . It can signify a range of things, many of which are completely unobjectionable. However, the version of identification that concerns us is a very specific one. It involves the claim that the audience's aflective bond with the pertinent fktional characters is a result of the audience's suffering putatively the self-same, identical feelings to the ones the character is undergoing. But, this may not be what people always have in mind when they say they identify with fictional characters. Sometimes when talking about identification, people make no claim to any sort of identity, affective or otherwise, between the character and themselves. When I say that I identify with Aquaman, I may mean that I wish I were as fearless as he is, but I can't swim and am afraid of the ocean. I make no assumption that Aquaman and I feel the same way about the deep blue sea. I only wish that it were so. Perhaps this shouldn't even be called identification, but rather wishful fantasizing. And, in any event, it is not clear how much of this daydreaming can be indulged while watching a movie tlallh by without losing track of the story. Frequently, when folks, especially young folks, say that they identify with a character, they mean nothing more than that they think he's "cool." But you can be a nerd - and !mow and feel like a nerd - and still think Rico and Sonny are cool. At other times, all people mean when they say they identify with a character is that they've had a similar experience - like the character, they've been laid off, for example. But this really seems to come down to no more than feeling some affmity for the character rather than * As will hecome evident after our discussion of sympathy, I thinlc claims hlce I couldn't identify with character x" should be translated as "I couldn't or didn't care for chua<.tcr l ." Or, more colloquially, "I cuuldn ' t care less about soandso. " AFFECT ANil THE MOVINC IMAGE 163 endorsing the conviction that one has been infected by the scU'-l>a.me feelings that the onscrecn protagonist is now enduring. Might this not be more accurately termed "afllliation" rather than "identification"? Alternatively, "identHkation" is ofte.n parsed in terms of puttil1g myself in the place of the character. This is not a matter of putting myself in the character's shoes, as they say, but of putting the character in my shot$. But why suppose that this entails that the character and I are in the same atlcctive state? Shouldn't this be called "projection" rather than "identification"? In what follows, I am presupposing that the core concept of the leading version of identification and on many accounts, as well involves cl1e audience member in the same type-identical emotional state in which the viewer believes the fictional chara<-'ter finds himself. The protag- onist is indignant about the treatment of minorities and so art we; the heroine is uplifted by the sight of her Savior, as are we; the hero is terrified of the Alien -.. us too. However, identity of emotion-types, even if it is necessary, is not enough to constitute identification of the sott we are now considering. Why not? Consider this: the fans of a certain team at a soccer match may all b.., in the same emotive state they all hate the opposing team. Yet we wouldn't call this identification in the relevant sense . For with whom arc they identifying? Although they may all he inflamed to the same degree with hatred for the rival team, they are not idtntif)'ing with each other, since they may not even be aware of the presence of the others, so wrapped up are they in the game that they arc witnessing a.s it unfolds before them. Or imagine each is watching the game alone on television in solitude of his own den; they have no idea who else is watching; thus, could not be identifying with all those w1known others. Nor is it plausible to speculate cl1at thcSt' fans arc, in the identifying with any of the soccer - the players are prob.1bly too absorbed in the activity on the llcld to be emoting anything, and in any event most of them probably don't literally hate their opponents. That kind of sports-hatred is for the fans, not ior professionals. But if the sharing of type-identical emotional states is not sutlldent for identification, what needs to be added? That the viewers be in the emotional state in question because that is the state they think cl1at the fictional characters are in. That is, putatively, in this sense of identification, I identify with Ann Darrow when I am horrified by King Kong because she is or I imagine her to be - horrified by King Kong. In short, the version of identification on the table maintains: a viewer x identifies with a fictional character y if and only if (I) x is in tl1e same emotive state 164 AfHCT AN() THt MOVI N(; as)' is in, and ( 2) because y is in - or x imagines J to be in - that emotive state. To speak metaphorically, the viewer has been uinfected" by the ostensible emotive state of the character. For convenience, we can refer to this as the mjeawn modell!f' idamflcation. The lf!{ection mode./ <!F tdent!Jication This of identification, I submit, is the dominant notion that most people today have in mind when they speak of identifying with fictional characters . It is the relationship that many appear to think is their primary bond with fictional characters, notably protagonists, and it is emotional state that plain \iewers and professionals alike think explains why we cheer the protagonists on . Now I have no reason to belie,e that somt: thing like the phenomenon of alflctm: infection never occurs, especially in real life. There is empiri cal evidence that infants feel distn:ss when they detect distress in their caregivers. But I am not sure that this is a full-blown emotional state, rather than merely a certain kind of affective reflex called the mirror reflex which we will discuss at the end of this chapter. However, that notwithstanding, it is not the sheer possibility of occur - rences of the infection model that concerns us . Rather, we want t o ask the infection model is up to the task for which its proponents recommend it. That is, is it a comprehensive or nearl y comprehensi ve act'ount of our emotional relationship to characters in popular fictions ? it accowlt for our standard emotive relationships with fictional characters? Is it the emotional bond that typi cally tics us to them? .is)'mmetric cmoLions a cursory review of cases indicates that the infec--tion model of identillcation is unlikely to provide anything even approaching a general account of our emotional relationships to the fictional characters in motion pictures . Imagine: the candidate is pumped up by the adulation with which his acceptance speech has been greeted by the adoring crowd; but we know that he is standing in the cross-hairs of the high-powered, laser-guided rit1e of a merciless hired assassin. We do not !Cel the thrill that the candidate does; we feel suspense, even anxiety. Our emotional state is not type- identical with the candidate's . Nor should it be, since the movie mandates that we should fear for the candidate . Moreover, this species of asymmetry of atfect is rile throughout comic fictions . Every time the would-be suitor is discovered in a compromising ."..'rECT i\N D lHI: M U \'IN(O 165 situation, we are amused , while he is discomllted . Recall, lo r Mec:r the Parents. And with respect to the BBC series fuvei and li<oosrer, notice that in virtually every situation when.' Bertie is flustered , we arc merry. Situations in which the emotional states of dt<' diverge from those of the audience abound in motion picture fictions of all sorts. In a romance, for example, the wholesome and endearing daughter is head over heels in love with the handsome but we do not share her joy, since we know that he's a cad . The reason that such situatiom are so common in motion pictures is that there is generally a signilkant diilcrcntial between what we know and what charadcrs know, and , this , of course, can have a tangibly diilerent impact on what is felt on both sides of the audi ence/ fiction dividt. In many we know more th.m the characters; we tremble for them as they plunge ahead oblivious of peril. Curiosity draws them into the old dark house, into the attic, the basement, t.lw cave , or whatever, though we know better. They haven't got a clue of what awaits them, so they're cool, but we're already shivering with terror. On the other hand, the asymmetry can run in the opposite direction: Sherlock Holmes always knows more than we do, so we never slure his aplomb. Obviously, circumstances like these. arc not rare. They rna}" even predominate statistically. But, be that as it mav, there arc tnl>rt: than . ' enough cases of asymmetric affect like to establish that the inf(:ction model of identification cannot be very compreht:nsivc on readily observed empirical grounds. rurthermore, then are also conceptual considerations that invite us to suspect the inadequacy of the infection model. Quite often both the cause and the object of the audience's emotional state diller from those of the protagonist's afl'cctive condition . We are presented with a situation in which we learn that Martha's son Henrv ditd last year and we learn that this event is the cause of her grief; the ol)ject of he; grid i.s her son, Henry. But the cause of the t.motional state is Martha's bereavement and its object is the grieving mother. Our emotion organizes or gestalts a wider state of allairs than does Martha 's, while at the same time also including the objt.'C't of Mart!u's grieving as a constitutory component. Moreover, our emotion is pity for the mother, not grief - who is Henry to us? It is tht mother with whom we have become acCjuaintcd through the movie. In we han' in mind, Henry has been kept off scTeen throughout; we know of him through Martha. Thus, as the previous example indicat(s, our emotional states ohcn have different causes and take different than the putative mental states of the protagonists. Consec1uently. the conjecture that our cmotion.s always, 166 AFFECT AND THE MOVI NG IMAGE or even very frequently, perfectly match those of the pertinent characters is highly dubious. So, again, the infection model looks like it must be abandoned as a comprehensive picture of our emotive relations to movie protagonists . Indeed, there are certain cases, perhaps many, where the audience member's emotional state can only plausibly be thought to be that of an onlooker rather than one that could correspond to the mental state of its object, the fictional protagonist . When we feel nail-biting suspense as the protagonist claws his way to safety, he is highly unlikely to be feeling suspense or, lor that matter, any other emotion. He is probably numb with concentration. He is apt to be so caught up in and focused upon his task that his anxiety is on hold . In my own experience of extreme situations, such as skidding at high speed on ice in my car, I have noticed that I do not go into an emotional state, like panic, but react very deliberately, as if affectively anesthetized, and do what my driving instructor told me to do decades ago. If I were to respond emotionally - if I were racked with suspense - I'd crash. My passengers can afford suspense , but I can't. Isn't it likely that the same asymmetrical distribution of emotion occurs quite often with respect to motion pictures, partic--ularly action-packed ones? Nevertheless, the friend of infectious identification may retort that , even if there are many cases where the presumed inner states of audience members and those of the characters diverge, there are also a significant number of cases where the emotive states at issue would appear to be type-identical . The character recoils in contempt at the child molester 's ploys; so do we. Emotive symmetry obtains . Therefore, it may be maintained, even if the infection model fails to be applicable across the board, perhaps the argument can be made that it has compelling authority in cases like the preceding one, in which the emotions of the viewers and the protagonists correlate. How- ever, in order to probe this suggestion, we need to introduce a distinction between emotions that are held in common or coincidentally and emotions that are shared due to some intimate causal relation between them. Coincident versus connected emotional states American jet bombers have streaked past their fail-safe points and they are winging their way to Beijing. They are freighted with nuclear devices. Atomic warfare looms; millions will die. One of the protagonists, the President of the United States, is stricken with fear; us too. lsn 't this a case where the infectious identification holds sway? AFFECT ANO T HE MOVING IMAGE 167 No. Why not? Remember that the infection model of identification requires not only that our emotions match those of the protagonists, but abo that our emotions be a causal conscguence of the protagonists being in precisely the self-same kind of mental state. However, in a great many of the cases in which we Hnd ourselves in the same type of emotive condition as the protagonist, including the preceding example, it is pretty clear that we have gotten there by our own route, so to speak. We arc not anxious bec.wse the President is anxious . We are anxious because we have been encouraged to imagine that a nuclear armageddon, threatening a catastrophic number of deaths, is in the offu1g. Maybe some evidence for this is that the llction could be told without reference to the President 's anxiety and we would still feel anxiety. Were the President made of steel, I speculate that we would still fed suspense. We would feel the same species of consternation pnciscly because the fictional situation has been stru(.'tured in a way that makes certain features that are appropriately conducive to the state of fear salient - such .u; repeated assessments of how much explosive power those jet bombers are carrying, their capacity to evade radar detection, their imperviousness to any and all anti-aircraft defenses, as well as the putatively uneasy diplomatic relations between the United States and China. In other words, in the vocabulary of the llrst part of this chapter, the film has been structured emotively in terms of tTitcrial prefocusing. That is, by means of its visual depictions, ena(.1ments, and/ or verbal descrip- tions, its circumstances have been organized or filtered in such a way that the features the moviemakers have elected lor emphasis are predomi.nomtly exactly those suitable lor or LTiterially apposite to the emotional states intended to be excited by the work . In the Odessa Steps sequence of his film Potemk.in, the director Sergei Eisenstein selects out of the and highlights the callous massacre of old people, a mother and her adolescent son, and then another mother and her infant child - in short, he places brackets arow1d those persons who are culturally figured as harmless and defenseless. His sele<-"tion of these vignettes for emphasis -- rather than shots of tht clouds overhead -- was designed to activate the viewer's emotiorui of moral outrage. The sequence was compellingly crafted so that factors that arc criteria! to moral indigrution Wlavoidably command attention in a way that leads audience members, W1less they are Cossacks, to process the episode under the heading of cvu and, in consequence, to experience visceral distress . Most often, l guess-estimate, when the feelings of audience members are congruent with those of the prougonist, it is a result of criteri.ll 168 AFFECT AND THE MOVING I MAGI:: prefocusing, not infectious identification. The diUerence is that in the case where criteria! prefocusing leads to emotive uptake on the part of viewers, the correspondence between what the audience feels and what the char- acters are imagined to feel is co-incident or conjoint rather than causal. That is, the audience has been effectively led to the emotional state it is in by a pathway that can be causally independent of what, if anything, the protagonist feels. Thus, cases of congruent emotions between viewers and protagonists, though admittedly guite frequent, are typically not true-blue instances of infectious identification, but are better regarded as cases of coincidentally congruent emotional states engineered by means of criteria! prcfo<..'U.Sing. Indeed, it seems to me that postulating infectious identification in most cases is to take on excess theoretical baggage, since typically congru- ent emotional states, where they occur, can, all things being equal, be adequately explained in terms of criteria! prefocusing. For what it is worth, in all the ca.ses that 1 have examined, criteria! prefocusing gives a perfectly acceptable account of the rhyming emotional states. Thus, in the main, talk about infectious identification violates the principle of explanatory parsimony. Of course, it may be pointed out that often the way in which situations arc t.Titerially prefocused in movies tends to parallel the way in which the protagonist sees things. Even if the narration is omniscient and not channeled explicitly through the point of view of the protagonist, movie directors often depict the fictional world from the perspective of leading characters. The gloominess of the portrayal of the environment, for example, may echo the apprehensiveness of the hero as he enters the hiding place of the e,il wizard Voldemort . This is a fair point, yet it does not revive the model of infectious identification. For, on the one hand, the viewer need not be aware that it is the character's viewpoint that he is being invited to take on; rather, he may suppose it to be the perspective of the narrating agency (howsoever he understands that). And, furthermore, the criteria! prefocusing here will work in the same way whether or not it is crahed in a manner that rellects the point of view of the protagonist. Here it is interesting to thinll about cases where the tlction overtly establishes that the way in which events arc criterially prefocused is congruent with the emotive states of the protagonist. Striking examples of this are the usc of point-of-view shots in motion picture editing. The character looks ofl'scrcen, her face contorted with horror; then there is a shot of what she sces -- a shot of a suppurating creature, part reptile, part AHECT AND THl MOVIN\; IMAGl 169 arachnid, part lawyer, with a maw like a chainsaw and we are horriilt.>d too. Isn't that patently a case of infectious tdentitkationl Again, 1 think that it is not, for the reason that we would probably feel the same level of horror if the sequence wne shown without the character looking oflscreen. An interesting might be to the emotive povs from a movie like The Descent in ordN to assess whether our repulsion at the sight of those slimy, albino dwindles. Of course, this leaves open the question of why such pomt -ofncw shots - and other perspective-disclosing devices are used by fictionccrs. The short answer, I think, is that they are a means of priming or preparing or communicating to the audience in a very broad way the general kind of affect (dysphoric or euphoric) that the audience should bring to on objects, persons, situations, and events they arc about to ln this way, the point-of-view structures reinlorce the information avail- able on screen. But I will have more to say about how t!us communication works in my subsequent remarks about mirror rclkxcs . Vectoriallj' converging emowe stutcs So far the second condition of the model of infectious identi!kation been hammered on the grow1ds that, even if the audience is in an emotive state congruent with the imagined mental stale of the prot.agonist, that is generally the result of the viewer having arrived at that state by a process located in his or her own emotive -appraisal system, indl' pendcntly of any necessary causal input involving the fictional character being in the type- identical emotional state. ln other words, those jet bombers ran toward Beijing, 1 fear for humanity, because human Wt. as we lmow it is endangered in the Hction, and not lx>cause the fictional president fears lor humanity. My fear is co-incident or conjoint while, at the same time, being causally independent from it. Or, at least , th.i.s to be what is going on by and large in the most signitlcant number of cases. Nevertheless, it is important not to misinterpret this example. The claim is not that we are never emotivdy inlluenced b} the emotional states of characters, especially the proto1gonists and othas to whom we luvc favorable attitude. for example, at the end of Charlie Chaplin's The GoiJ Rush, the Tramp accidentally up with Georgia, the woman of his dreams. The two embrace, they kiss, and they fade out into the land of happily ever after. They arc in love, and successful match gladdens w. Scenes like this happen all the time in popular tlctions. Our prcviow objections to the inJection model of identitlcation arc not to be talcn as 170 AFFECT AND THE MOVING !MAGE a.n attempt to disavow them. For cases like these should not be taken as cases of infectious identification in the llrst place. True, the emotional states of the characters do cause us to be in a euphoric state. But our euphoric state is not precisely the same type of euphoric state that the lovers are in. Their emotional state is infatuation. That is not our condition; we are happy for the couple. I am not in love with Georgia nor am I identifying with that aspect of the Tramp. Were I m love with Georgia, I wouldn't be so happy. I'd be jealous of the Tramp. So I am not in a state of infectious idcntillcation. Yet I am in state of roughly the same emotive valence. They are, let us say, euphoric and I am euphoric as well. Our emotional states converge - they both belong on the positively charged side of the scale of the emotions . We are not in the same emotional states, but our conditions are in broad categorical agreement and we are in that vectorially converging state with the state of the characters because that is the condition in which we imagine them to be . Contrariwise, when the monster in the concluding scenes of Bnde C!f Frunkenswn is reviled by his reanimated betrothed, we feel sorry for him. Our emotion docs not match his. We do not feel the pain of an unrequited lover. Indeed, I doubt that any viewers, no matter how desperate, harbor any desires for the frizzy-haired, electrified corpse, played by Elsa Lanchester. Yet we do respond to the monster's misery with sorrow. It is in this sense that we share his misery. We are not miserable for being lovelorn, but we do pity the monster. Both misery and pity, of course, are dysphoric or negative emotions . Both sit on the distressful, discomforting, disturbing, or painful pole of emotional states . Agajn, our emotions arc broadly similar in their general valence. They converge vectorially in their negative directionality. Our emotions arc causally coordinated. But this does not count in favor of the model of infectious idcntitlcation, unless identiflcation means nothing more than a somewhat similarly charged feeling. However, why mobilize the notion of identity to describe that? Simulation theorJ We appear to be emotionally tied to movie ilctions predominantly through our relations to characters, particularly those called protagonists. But what is the lldture of that relation - at least in the largest number of cases? We have just been .u-guing th4t the concept of identitlcation does not seem to do it justice. Perhaps the relationship is an instance of what is nowadays called "simulation." AfFECT AND Hl!:: MOVING !MAGE \71 Simulation is a concept from the philosophy of mind that has recently been imported into aesthetics . ln the philosophy of mind, the idea is that we understand and explajn others, ascertain what they arc feeling, identify their intentions, emotions, and motivations, and predict their behavior by simulating them. That is, we input their beliefs and desires into our own off-line cognitive-conative system. Since, ex hyposchesi, our cogrutivc-conati,c architecture is the same as theirs, if we run their bdids-dcsircs program on ourselves - using their software on our hardware, so to spe.lc. - then we should be able to derive a reasonable fix on what people just us (l<l.k- psychologically speaking) are likely to t.h.inY., fed, plan, want, and so lorth. That is, we put them into our shoes -- or to talk in an equally metaphorical manner, we put their beliefs and desires into the blad. box that our emotions , decisions, and behaviors - in order to project what they are likely to fed, think, or do. This, moreover, is done on the presupposition that wiUl respect to processing beliefs and desires into emotions, intentions, and deliberations, etc., we are pretty nearly the same structurally. This theory - called simulation rhoory - is countcrpost.-d to another view in the philosophy of mind concerning the way in which we go about un<ltrstand- ing others. This alternative view is called the thwry-theory. This altcr11.1tive view is the thoorr that we understand what others arc about by applying something like a scientific rheory to their behavior. Simulation is thought to have several advantages over the tht.'Ory-theory when it comts to reading the minds of others. First, the theoretical framework ostensibly prl!llupposed by the theory-theory would be monumentally complicated - too complex to postulate with any confidence. Alter all, it would have to be bigger and better than our bt.--st existing social scientific theories, sin<..-e its would appear to be much greater. Do we really believe that most of us have in our possession such a powerful theory? And if so, why can't our social sdentUt.s access it explicitly? That would deal of dfort in the lab. Second, even if we ordinary folks did have such a mammoth theory at our disposal, if only sub voce, it would surely take an immense amoW\t of real time to apply it to particular cases -- simply figuring out which laws the case fell under and how the influence of related laws was to be cak--ulated would seem to take forever. But this docs not seem to match up to our everyday experience of reading the minds of others. Quite otten, we sU.e up people's emotional states and intentions in a blink of the mind; we don't spend hours crunching our way through an elaborate theory. Or so the simulation theorists contend. But what does all this have to with motion pictures - specifically with the question of our emotional relationship to the protagonists in popul.ar 172 AfFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE tlctions, like movies? In short: putatively our relationship with fictional characters is generally like the relationships we have with other people in the world outside the cinema. The movie fiction invites us to understand them, to apprehend what they are feeling and intending, to speculate about what they will do next, and so forth, just as we must mind-read our conspecillcs in everyday lilc. ln order to do so - in order to f<>llow the motion picture fiction (the unfolding of the intentions and feelings of fictional characters) - we simulate them, or at least the leading ones, primarily the protagonists. (Probably it is implausible to suppose that viewers simulate the situations of minor characters, like the plight of the lawyer in the outhouse in the first installment of Jur<mic Park -- or to think that viewers arc meant to do so). When we simulate a chara<..'1:er, like Spiderman, we are said to input their beliefs and desires into our cognitive-conative network and thereby to dis- cover what they are thinking and feeling by coming to think and feel broadly similar things as our own system runs through its paces on their steam. On this \'iew, wt are engaged emotively with motion picture fictions (as wei.! as other sorts of lk'1:ion) by being immersed in a virtually continuous process of replicating the emotions and desires of (especially) the protagonists. Unlike the proponent of infectious identification, the simulation theorist does not claim that the emotions allegedly reproduced in us are identical, either thoroughly or in part ( aspectually), with those attributed to the protagonist. At best, our emotions only approximate those of the characters . However, this still leaves the simulation theorist open to one objection that was le\'cled at the champions of in..kctious identilkation -- namely, the charge that simulation theory can be nothing close to a comprehensive theory of our emotional relationships to fktional characters, and this is so because of the indeilnitely vast number of cases where the emotions of the audience arc and should be different from and sometimes even opposed to those sullered by fictional characters. This is the asymmetry problem once again. When the protagonist rushes home joyously to tell her spouse that she's been promoted at the same time that we, the audience, know she will open the door only to find her family brutally massacred, our despondent stale is nothing like hers. Moreover, if at that moment we were simulating her psychology, we would not be following the story appropriately. We arc supposed to be feeling pity. But since similar asymmetries arc so often the rule in motion picture fk'1:ions, simulation cannot be anything like a comprehensive account of our emotive engagement with the fk'1:ional characters in movies. Of course, as we conceded earlier, sometimes the emotions of the audiences and the characters do con\'erge. Mr. Smith is outraged by 173 corruption in the Senate and so are we. Perhaps simulation explains cases of convergence. But this seems Motion proceed at a pace that would seem uncongenial for simulation. Supposedly one of the advantages of the simulation theory over the theory-them-:- is that simula- tion is more temporally suited to sussing out the emotive states of our conspeciflcs. But be that as it may, simulation takes time too and one wonders whether one typically has sufficient breathing space in which to simulate in reaction to a rapidly edited audiovisual atTay. Furthermore, another problem with simulation is that it i.s a llt-ml) established fact that people arc notoriously unreliable in idtntif:nng own emotions and intentions. So how likely is it that such unreliable subjects will be able to extrapolate correctly from what the, to be their own case to the case of another ? Moreover, where the other being is a tlctional ch.1.ractcr of the order of a movie hero, the likelihood that we are using simulation to predict their behaviors is especially implausible. Movie heroes don' t shirk their duty in the face of overwhelming odds. When surrounded, Rambo lights into ills assailants. How many of us - given the black box of our system -- would really reach the same decisions as Rambo does? Given his beliefs that these bruisers are bad guys and his commitment to jUSti<:e, Rambo goes on the warpath. Wouldn't the rest of us just decide metUy to be arrested? As we probably anticipate that Rambo will not go quietly. But it is improbable that most of us reach this surmise by simulating Rambo, since if we were actually simul.ning, we would that he would surrender, wouldn' t we? But an even deeper question of how the Simulation alcount can the right answers in cases like these is the of how often simulation can be supposed to occur in our responses to motion pictures. I contend that, if it ever occurs, it is w1likdy that, with respc._'1: to popular movies, it is occurring very often. Why? Simulation theory in the philosophy of mind is advanced as a about the way in which we go about determining wh.1t our conspccitlcs arc thinking and feeling - a way of understanding and predicting their not transparently fathomable behavior in the course of daily allilln. But popular motion picture fictions are not like everyday life. They arc designed to be understood -- indeed, they are designed to be understood quickly and clearly by untutored audiences. Needless to say, this aspiration extends to the way in which the lktion.al characters are constructed. Perhaps in our ordina.rv experience, our con- specilks strike us as opaque in a way that calls ll:lr simulation. I would not 174 AFfE CT AND THE MOVING IMAGE say that this never happens, though I am not convinced that it is happening all of the time. Nevertheless, I do contend that the kinds of situations that call for simulation occur rarely with respect to the kind of fictional characters who inhabit movies, because those characters are intentionally fabricated in such a way that they wear their feelings and their thoughts on their sleeves. Thus, there is little or no need to hypothesize the operation of simulation in response to popular motion picture fictions, since we usually lmow exactly what the fictional characters are feeling and thinking faster than it would talce to simulate said fictional beings . Does it seem impossible that we might penetrate into the heart of a fictional being so easily? To establish that it is not impossible, let us take a brief digression into literary fiction before returning to the case of movies . Most popular literary fictions employ the device of free indirect discourse. This means that the author can narrate what the character is thinking and feeling from both the inside and the outside. We have her context dest.Tibed for us, often in emotionally suggestive terms, her physical states delineated, and we are also made privy to her thoughts. In such circum- stances there is no call for simulation. We are just told what the character is feeling and thin1cing. Perhaps some readers use the text as a script for attempting to raise similar emotions in themselves. I don't, but I wouldn't want to claim that others are like me in this respect. Nevertheless, it should be dear that there is no pressure to mobilize simulation theory in cases like this in order to explain how we come to grasp the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. We are told them outright. Of course, this feature of literary fictions is not as common in audio- visual fictions (though there are exceptions, from Diary if a Country Priest to The Twil19ht Zone). That is, we do not typically enter the minds of protagonists as frequently in movies and TV as we do in literary fictions . But, on the other hand, it is true that quite often the characters in these artforms do tell us precisely what they are feeling and what they are thinking, often by way of dialogue with interlocutors. And even in those cases where the characters do not explicitly articulate their state of mind, I would still urge that the characters in movies manifest their feelings and thoughts so openly that simulation is efl"ectively beside the point. How is this possible? Perhaps one way to get at this is to ask whether with respect to everyday experience simulation and the theory-theory exhaust our way of gaining access to the feelings and thoughts of others. Arguably, they do not. Often - in fact, probably most often - we impute thougbts and feelings to others on the basis of schemas, scripts, prototypes, contextual cues, exemplars, and other heuristics, rather than by means of a AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE 175 theory or a simulation. These stratagems, in turn, enable us to inler the inner states of others. Confronted with a co-worker who has just been !Ired or friend who bas lost a loved one, we infer on the basis of a culturally shared saipt th.tt, all things being equal, they are down. lf their shoulders are slouched and their eyelids heavy, we recognize these as signs of distress in virtue of our prototype for distress . We have no need to perform a 11imulation, because, through experience, we have amassed a repertoire of schcmas, scripts, prototypes, and contextual and/ or recognitional cues, among other heuristics, to k.cy us to the inner states of conspecifics. When we hear that a relative has secured a long-sought-after job, all things being equal, we suppose that she is happy and we rejoice tor her. There is no need for simulation. We have access to a body of prototypes regarding emotional responses in certain contexts as well as recognitional cues, such as tacial expressions and postures, which enable us to as$CSS the emotional states of others. arc not theories and they are not applied by subsuming particuJar situations under nomological generalizations as the theory-theory might have it. Rather, th.:y are schemas, s<.Tipt.s, and recognitional cues -- employed by analogy (analogy rather thm sub- sumption) . In daily life, such strategies provide us with reasonably reliable means for tracking the emotional states and thoughts of corupccifics, md I, at least, am pretty conf1dent that we depend on them in everyday We far more than we depend on simulation. for, quite frequently, simulation would just be too time-consuming. Moreover, if this is right, then it has important ran1ilkations for popular Hctions like movies . Inasmuch as popular or mass tlctions, like movies, are designed to maximize accessibility, they gravitate naturally toward the u.se of the schemas, prototypes, exemplars, contextual and/ or recogn.itional cues, and other heuristics that the cultures of their target audiences. Indeed, it is part of the art of designing a character for the purposes of mass consumption that one be able to streamline the details of the character's persona so that it calls forth almost automatically the scripts, schema:;, recognitional cues, and other heuristics that are intended to fit it. In the situation comedy Se.a: and the City, the character Samantha snugly fits the schema of the carnal woman the sensual woman who loves sex (e.g., the Wife of Bath). When her eyes open wide as a handsome swain glides by, we do not need to simulate Samantha in order to determine her internal state. We can infer it in a split second based on our prototype for carnal women and the recognitional cues that Samantha supplies. 176 AfHoCT AND THf MOVIN(; IMAGE MorcoYcr, with respect to this particular TV series, our surmise will almost always be confirmed when Samantha slyly, albeit redundantly, confides her desires to her friends, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte. Nor does this seem to me to be a peculiar example of the way in which characters in popular motion pk1:ure fictions function . Instead it appears to be the norm. Perhaps supporting evidence for this hypothesis can be drawn from our reactions to movie villains. Movie Villains, especially very, very evil ones like Michael Meyers, are probably among the most psychologically opaque beings arow1d. By rights, then, we should try to simulate them. But I conjecture that we never do. Why? Because, we render them intelligible by means of our schema for stalker/slashers (though this is a schema that admittedly derives more from the movies than from daily experience - thank God) . The point of emphasizing the operation of recognitional cues and other heuristics in negotiating our emotive relationships to fictional characters in movies, of course, is to show that there is little motivation for hypothe- sizing the operation of simulation in response to the protagonists in popular motion pictures. For the problem that simulation is supposed to solve with respect to understanding the teelings and thoughts of others in everyday life does not gencra1ly arise with regard to popular motion picture fictions because movies intensively exploit the schemas, scripts, prototypes, exemplars, and contextual and recognitional cues that comprise our heuristics for discerning the inner lives of others. Movicmalc.crs build chara<:ters, economically sculpting their features, precisely to trigger quickly and efl'ortlessly the mobilization of those prototypes and heuristics by audiences. Thus, the need to postulate the operation of simulation as the means by which we apprehend the emotions and thoughts of others is largely otiose. But what, the simulationist might ask, of motion pictures of a more exacting sort - such as the art cinema of the 1960s? Those characters do not show their psychology so unabasht..-dly. Aren't they, at least, ripe for si.mulation?l suspect not- for the simple reason that most of those characters are simply too opaque to simulate. Their beliefs and desires are often far too murky for us to process through our own cognitive-conative architecture. We don't know what to put into our own off-line system. This is not said to chastise these motion pictures. Otten their point is that the human heart is ultimately too mysterious to plumb. Rather, my point is simply that even in these cases, simulation appears irrelevant . Therefore, once again, the need to posit simulation appears beside the point. But if we are not simulating the emotions of the fictional characters AfFECT AND THE MOVI NG IMAGE in moving pictures, then it is not the case th.lt wtn are typically bound emotionally to them by a continuous process of sharing congruent feelings. So what is going on here emotionally? Sympath)' We are emotionally tied to movies in large measure through our rdation- ship with characters, espedally the protagoni11ts. But neither the model of infectious identification nor that of simulation appears to explain satisfac- torily the general structure of this relationship in a compreheruive manner. Whether or not infectious identification or simulation ever occur, they occur far more rarely than is often supposed and, therefore, c.mnot aflord a comprehensive account of the emotive address of char.u:ters in moviell. A problem with the model of infectious identification and simulation theory in this regard is that they postulate a more, rather than les:;, closely shared emotional state between viewers and characters, whereu, as we have seen, so often the relation is asymmetrical. Consequently, perhaps the place to look for an account of our relation to fictional characters is a condition where what we feel and what the protagonists are thought to feel are categorically different. An obvious candidate for such a bond is sympathy. Sympathy is not an emotional state that persons bear to themselves. It is, by definition, directed at others. For our purposes, let us construe sympathy as non- fleeting care, concern, or, more widely, a non-passing pro-attitude toward another person (or fictional character, including anthropomorphized beings of a1l sorts) . Sympathy qua emotion is a supportive response. It provides an impulse toward benevolent action with respect to those to whom it bl directed, though, of course, that impulse need not and often is not acted upon, frequently because it conflicts interests that we might have. And, needless to say, with the fictional chara<.-'ters in movii!S, the sympathetic impulse cannot be acted upon. Perhaps, one reason why we are so free with our sympathies toward fictional characters is that, since we need not ever act on their behalf, their needs never threaten to fall afoul of our interests. Indeed, it is probably because such sympathies come so cheaply moralists, such as Augustine and Rousseau, have percnnia1ly distrustt.-d the benevolent feelings elicited by fi<.."tions. But, in any case, sympathy, conceived as an emotion, involves vi.llceral feelings of distress when the interests of the objects of our pro-attitude are endangered, and feelings of elation, closure, and/or satisfaction when their welfare is achieved. The emotion in question has as a component the 178 AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE endurtng weU-being of its object - a desire that things worlc. out " her. In order to be the object of this pro-attitude, the person tn qu must be thought to be worthy of our benevolence in light of our inter projects, values, loyalties, allegiances, and/or moral commitments. some fictional character so-and-so is appraised to be worthy of our passtng desire that things go well for her and this is linked to p feeling tones when gratified and negative ones when frustrated, we are in the emotional state that I am calling sympathy. If "sympathy" st:riles you a.s saccharin-sounding, then you are wek"'me to refer to it as "benevolence, or even more aridly as "a pro-attitude." Though sympathy may initially appear to be just another example vectorially converging state, it is important to note that it need not be. sympathy does not always -- and in any event does not necessarily - tt even vcctorially, the way in which the character feels. This is due to the. that sympathy concerns what we believe to be the genuine well-being of the character. Should the heroine fall head over heels for some lounge- lizardl Lothario, she might be in ecstasy, whereas our sympathetic response w uld be anxiety-ridden, since we surmise that she is headed for trouble. Altbou b on occasion, sympathy may converge vectorially upon the emotions of characters we care for, this is not required tor the state in question to unt as sympathy. The suggestion that sympathy plays a role in our emotional involvem nt with fictional characters is fairly unexceptionable. However, what is being claimed now is more than that . I am arguing that sympathy, along with antipathy (which we will discuss presently), constitutes the major emotive cement between audiences and the pertinent movie characters. But why suppose that sympathy holds this place of privilege? Obviously, during the course of a motion picture, the vi ewer undergoes many emotional states. One is angry for awhile, then sad, then happy, then gripped with suspense, some laughter erupts, some tears, and then we are happy again . Sometimes sympathy for the protagonist is so strong that you can feel it. At other times, it may appear to take the back seat for an interlude of comic an1usement. So why select out of this welter of affects sympathy as the premier emotion? ' . The first re.l.Son might be called its breath. Sympathy for the protagonist ts the most pervasive emotion from the beginning to the end of the movie. As soon as sympathy is secured, unless it is later intentionally neutralized by the creator of the motion picture, it stays on the alert, following the protagonist's fortunes throughout, registering distress as they waver, and pleasure as they rise. AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE 179 thy, once enli.sted, is constantly on call throughout the movte. y no other emotive stance - save perhaps antipathy toward the -is so long-lasting. 'The indignation we feel toward the surly prison , who cuffs the hero comes and goes . But our sympathy tor the endures . it provides the emotive optic through which we the narrative from one end to the other. Typically, each event in ry is weighed in light of our sympathy for the protagonist; of every ' n it is pertinent to ask: whether it advances or deters her fortunes, even some cases, the answer is neither. protagonists in motion pictures have goals and that are to miss. The narrative trajectory usually involves the accomplishment th goals and the satisfaction of these interests in the face of various es. We follow this quest from the per:spectivc of sympathy, cheering protagonists onwards as they advance a.nd feeling consternation when falter. Of course, as already noted, sometimes our sympathy for the ter puts us out of synch with them - as when believe the person protagonist trusts to be a scow1drel . But still we track the tmfolding narrative in terms of a sympathetic viewpoint, one that disposes us to care ut his best interests rather than his subjective assessment of them. Sympathy is the most persistent emotional bond that we have with r p t to the fictional protagonists; in this sense it generally possesses m r breadth than other emotions elicited by moving pictures. Furthcr- re, sympathy also has what might be called special depth. For it is our rmpathy toward the protagonist that shapes our overall reception of the When we are angered by the way in which the heroine is mi.s- tT ' d, that anger itself is subsidiary to the sympathy that we bear toward h r. That sympathy underlies and reinforces our anger. It is our symp.1thy for the character that disposes us to regard her as inside our ndwork of concern, and, therefore, to assess an done to her as something perpetrated against one of "our own." The negative emotions that we muster in response to the protagonist's setbacks are a function of our sympathy for her. Sympathy is the real foundation here. That is why we say it has depth, even special depth. Two considerations then can be marshaled to endorse the hypothesis that sympathy is the leading emotional bond between viewers and movie prot agmrists, namely, that sympathy appears to have greater breath and greater depth than any other competing candidate. The obvious exception here may be the antipathy, distaste, and hatred we often direct to antagonillts, a.k.a. movie villains. However, though more needs to said about this, since antipathy for the bad guys is usu.illy the reverse side of - and, indeed, 180 AffECT ANIJ THE MOVJNt; IMAGF. furu:tion of - the sympathy we feel toward their rival protagonists, the of antipathy is less of COWltercxample to ow- hypothesis than it i a corollary. Granting that sympathy is the glue that keeps us connected emoti to the protagonists, the question remains about the way in which are able to relTUit our sympathies as effectively as they do. In life u i the movies, our benevolent or altruistic attitudes toward others depend o factors such as lc.iruhip, group memberships of all sorts, and group inl! r- ests. Of course, for both artistic and ftnancial reasons, the creators movies are aiming at larger audiences than a single extended family d often at audiences that cross regional, ethnic, national, and religi boundaries. And even where their targets are less than global, they must be careful not to trigger the sectarian difl'erences that always exist in virtu.ally every large group. This clearly presents the creators of populilf motion pictures with a problem to be liolved, namely, how to enlist the care and concern - the sympathetic feelings - for their fictional prota- gonists from mass audiences of heterogeneous backgrounds and different; often potentially clashing, interests. That is, if sympathy is the crux of our relationship to the relevant characters in the movies, how is this sympathy mobilized? In everyday life, we extend ow- sympathies to those with whom we share interests or projects or loyalties, or to those who exemplify values of which we approve, or to those who fall under the protection of certain moral principles. But most of the interests, projects, and loyalties upon which we base many of ow- quotidian sympathies are highly specific to us. Needless to say, the movie- maker cannot hope to activate on behalf of the protagonists the individualized interests of every viewer. Rather, she must aim at engaging the audience at a larrly generic level of interests, projects, and loyalties. That is, she must fmd some common ground or touchstone amongst the diverse audience which will encow-age us to find the protagonists to be worthy of ow- good will. This is a design problem for the popular moviemaker. She must fmd a way in which to elicit from a disparate audience the converging desire that the protagonists do well - that is, she must elicit our felt conviction that it would be good for the protagonists to do well, or that they deserve to do well. What is the solution to this problem? As a matter of empirical generalization, l conjecture that the most common answer to thia challenge is the creation of protagonists who command the audience's moral endorsement. In other words, morality, of an extremely broad cast, provides the moviemaker with an interest, or project, or loyalty upon which viewers of diverse backgrounds can converge. AFFECT ANIJ THE MOVINt; tMAt;f 181 er, inasmuch as there are certain moral shared a.:.ross populations, the moviemaker has a lever on their allegiance . B presenting protagonists who are morally appealing, the movicmak.er ures the criteria! wherewithal to garner the sympathy that is requ.in.>d r intended audiences to be absorbed by the story. Such protagonists will meet the criterion of being deserving of our benevolence beU&use they morally deserving. It is no accident that the protagonists in movies are guys. Good guys are precisely what the movie doctor calls for - r s likely to a pro-attitude from hett:rogeneous audiences therwise varied and often conflicting interests and loyalties. Morality of fairly generic sort found in movies is just what people from ditferent ounds are apt to agree upon, at lea.lit roughly. For im;ta.nce, few ' uld disagree that Maximus is wronged when his family is sl.lughtcred in 1 diator, or that Cinderella is badly treated by her and sisters, that Superman is a very nice person or that Story in Lady m the m1w \! uld not be eaten by the Scrunch. Morality, especially of a fairly widely shared and often nearly u e, supplies the moviemaker with the interests, or projects, or loyal- ti or touchstones of affirmation which audiences from similar cultures, J d even, frequently, from dissimilar ones, c-.m agree. The protagonists, for pie, will typically go out of their way to protect the lantc and tht. halt, th helpless and the sick, the very young, the old, and the defenseless, \\ hile simultaneously treating them with dignity and respect. They a sense of fairness, justic-e, loyalty, honor, and honesty, and .u-e altogether pro-social and especially pro-family (in principle, even if they're single), at least where the families in question arc portrayed as wholesome ones (as opposed to the Texas Chai..nsaw Clan). These characters tell the truth and their keep their promises to good people, because they, themsclvc.s, .u-c what we calloood people. _ The protagonists in movies arc presented as morally righteous. This is undeniable in the greatest nwnber of But even so-called anti-heroes usually oppose some form of compromised moral order in the nanlc of a deeper sense of rectitude. Once you get past their gruiT hard- boiled detectives always seem to discover that society is even more disreputable than they. are. In the end, with respe<.1: to his girlfriend, Sam Spade seems almost Kantian in his sense of duty. Likewise, a.l.ienated gunslingers protect the little folk against greedy cattle barons, bullying railroad magnates, and, in the case of The Maan=Jicent Sel'en, marauding warlords. Disaffected teenagers, in turn, really care about problems that adult society culpably neglects or mi!iunderstands. And so on. No matter 182 AfFECT ANO THE MOVING IM ... Gf how anti-social the protagonist appears at llrst glance, he or she is qu1 revealed to be pro-social at heart. Moreover, this is bow it shoul<i sympathy is to take hold across a diverse audience whose likeliest point convergence is apt to be morality, very generously construed. By "generously construed," I do not simply mean that the audi shares some rough-and-ready principles or rules of thumb, but also a of what counts il!l virtuous. Protagonists win our approval and thence . sympathy, because they are typically portrayed as persons of a variety of virtues. Recognition of these virtues then precipitates in audiences yearning that the prougonists do well and that their rivals do badly. ur desire is usually so strong that we generally stay to the end of the filin j to make sure that things worlc. out this way. Of course, it must be conceded that it is not always the case that protagonists with whom we align ourselves are what we would call morall upright ; and yet they still get our sympathy. Consider, for example, tHms . However, when one examines the structure of these exercises notices that the fictional world has been constructed in such a way d the aforesaid protagonists are the most virtuous characters in evidence; The forces of everyday society are either k.ept off-scTeen so that their countervailing claims never impinge on our sympathies or they are shown to be venal and/ or inexcusably stupid. That is, where the universe in the moving picture is a fallen one, il!l it is in the TV series The Sopranos, a figure like Tony can warrant our sympathies, because, even though he is not moral in any absolute sense, compared to everyone else in the New Jersey where he lives he is the best of a very, very bad lot . Solidarity If sympathy ili as central to our emotional response to movie as has been argued, then instances of infectious identification cannot be very common, since sympathetic feelings, conceived as emotions, are not ones that we share with their objects. Sympathy, as mentioned earlier, is, by de!mition, directed at others. The protagonist does not feel sympathy for himself; were he to do so to any appreciable extent that would probably turn us olf. However, though essential to our emotional bonding with protagonists, sympathy pure and simple is usually not the whole story of our emotional connections to protagonists. It is generally supplemented by another emotional state wh.ich we may call solidarity. Some fictions have only protagonists . The fUm just My Luclt is an example . There are two major characters - Ashley Albright and Jake AHECT ANO THE MOVING I MAGE \83 n. Their names are dues to their most important attributes . She is llw the beneficiarY of delirioulilv good fortune . When sht leaves her without umbrella, it ' immediately stops raining. When she a cab, it arrives from nowhere . And so on. Jake is just the opposite. lf b bends down, his pants will split; if he picks up a five-dollar bill, it til be smeared with canine feces . But their luck magically dunges hands masquerade ball when they kiss, anonymously, while dancing. Now ling Ashley attempts leads to disaster, while jake becomes a very ful record producer. The rest of the story involves Ashley tracking J down in order to reclaim her good fortunt.' with another kiJ>s. H w er, they fall in love and kiss their way to some kind of prO\idential uilibrium; they will live happily and unhappily ever after in the normal pr rtions . . What is striking about just ,l1y Luck and this is also ol many other r 1 tic comedies - is that there is no real villain. There arc somt' people w present temporary obstacles to the m.un charactt:rs, but they not uU..fledged antagonists. They arc not on tht: S<:ene long cnoug.h lor ,our mlipathy toward them to take root, and, anyway, by the end ol the him, th all may turn out, by twists of fate , to be nice people alter a.ll . W1th j My Luck, we are encouraged to feel care and concern for Ashley and J . But there are no real bad guys. The majority of movies, however, arc not lih this. Most pit the protagonists and the other nice peopk against some adversaries. We are_ o t. only prompted emotionally to embrace the good people as members ol a generic "Us"; their opponents belong to "Th(m." thclie "Them" are not just regarded as the opposing team. lhcy a.n: usually presented as people we hate, indeed , often lme to hate. . . If sympathy toward "Us" is characteristically elicited by portraymg the protagonists and the other nice fiction as morally good, then the antipathy generated toward "Them" is generally provoked by repre- senting them as morally blemished. Whereas the protagonist ismce to nice people - treating good people with manners the_ vtilam as at least rude to those he perceives to be h.is inferiors .md very often what he docs to them is much worse. The antagomsts pillage, cheat, lie, rob, rape, kill, and so on. The hero pets the old sleeping dog on the doorstep; the bad guy kicks it out of his way. Movies arc generally political in the sense ddlmd by the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The fictional population in the motion picture is standardly partitioned into friends and enemies - into Us and Them: Sympathy, motivated by moralitY, disposes us to assimilate protagorusts mto Us . ' ' 184 AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE But that bond is then further strengthened by introducing enemies who, iD movies, arc customarily marked by being constructed as bad pe pl . I am now wring the concept of "solidarity," it is the name of the emotive relation of sympathy-for-the-protagonists plus antipathy, r- antagonists. This i.s a psychological condition that most moving pi strive to raise in audiences. They aspire to dispose the viewer to' f, emotionally allied to the protagonist and against the antagonist. "The mtagonist is designed to instill anger, indignation, hatred, and som timet moral disgust in us. Unlike sympathy in everyday life which we tend, all things being to extend quite readily to most of those around us by default, in m " our sympathy mU!It be won. The most efilcient way of doing this i to render the relevant characters morally appealing. Our bond with Lh characters can then be reinforced by setting an array of nemeses those whom we fmd repulsive, customarily because their various ailing from petty vices to outright viciousness - are emphatically for gr und I suspect that, in most cases, our antipathy for the villains is eng n red by their vices, whereas sympathy for the various positive characters; ' primarily elicited by their superabundantly evident virtues. However, in some instances, characters may secure our sympathy on rebound, so to speak. That is, we may be so appalled by the villain that ur care and concern goes out to whomever he opposes. In other words, sometimes solidarity in movic:l may result from the "enemy-of-my-enem - is-my-friend" phenomenon. This, furthermore, explains why it is that sometimes find ourselves siding with characters whose morals we do o t otherwTse share, Like Hannibal Lector. We side with Lector in Ridle Scott's Hannibal, I suspe<.1, because we fmd his enemies - those , h plan to feed him alive to pigs - to be so much more morally deprav d than he is. Solidarity involves sympathy and antipathy viscerally felt. Though our sympathetic feelings toward the protagonists are not shared by them, our hatred for the villains often is. But we do not hate the villain just because the protagonists do. Rather, we have detected co-incidentally on our own many of the same morally noxious traits of the antagonists that have impressed the protagonists so deeply. Thus, when our hatred is congruent with the protagonist's hatred of the bad guy, the antipathy component of our feelings of solidarity with the hero is essentially conjoint with his. We may air our hatred for the villain at the same time the protagonist does, but primarily as a result of our own process of moral appraisal which has been elicited by criteria! prefocusing. AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGF. 185 Mirror rq1exes been exploring several kinds of emotional between and movie characters. These have induded circwnstances: our emotions may be type-identical with those of the protagonists, to our own independent appraisal of the rclevmt situations (in r to criteria! prefocusing); (2) where our emotions vcctorially ,, ge on the emotional states of characters; (3) where we ith the characters (which, of course, may, but need not, be an in11tance of a, ri lly converging emotion); and (4) where we emote in solidarity wuh the protagonist (where the antipathy component may be a response ru t with the protagonist's though one we find ourselves in as a result of ur own appraisal of the situation). None of these cases corrCJ>ponds lo pular model of infectious identification which requires that the member be in an emotional state that is type-identical with thAt o tb protagonist just because the pertinent character is in that state . But I t us conclude by briefly examining a tlfth afiecthe relation one which m closer to the model of infectious identification, and whose very xi t has probably lent some credence to the ubiquitous talk about id till tion and simulation with movie characters. What I have in mind here are what may be called mirror By 3lllng them "reflexes," I mean to signal that they are not full-fledged tional states. Consequently, the existence of mirror reflexes does not rroborate the model of infectious identification, though it is upderstand- abl that some might think it does. But, at the same time, no of ur affective relationship to motion pictures would be adequate without a ion of mirror reflexes . So, what arc mirror reflexes? Occasionally when speaking to another person, we suddenly reali:re that we have adopted their facial arc frowning; we start to frown. Or, they are smiling and we Hnd ourselves smiling. We have an wunistak.able tendency to ape OUT interlocutors- to mirror them. 1bis is the case not only with facial expressions, but also with gestures and postures. We tend to fall into step with our companions; when they're walking tall, so are we. If our informant bends toward us conspiratorially, we bend towud them in response. When we watch the outfielder stretch to intercept a fly ball, the muscles in our arm tug slightly in that direction. And so forth. We have an involuntary tendency to mirror automatically the behavior, especially the expressive behavior, of our conspecifics. Putatively, we do this in order to gain some sense of what they are feeling. By configuring our own facial expression after the fashion of a 186 AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE fellow conversationalist - grimacing when she grimaces - we secure some inkling of her inner state. The feedback from the disposition of our facial buzzes our autonomic nervous system in a way that is presumably tsomorphic to what is going on in her system, so long as she is not dissembling. This does not give us full access to her emotional state but it provides an important clue, since it yields something like a facsirru'te of the bodily-feeling component of her overall state. It does not tell us her precise appraisal of the object of her state, but it does relay the visceral sensation that goes with that appraisal . . gestures and postures are also mimicked - though usually only m a highly truncated manner - in order to gather information about what is percolating inside our conspecifics. If everyone around us starts looking upward, we do too. This mimicry is predominantly automatic, not inten- tional. It is, in all probability, part of our biological heritage. Children on their caregiver's knee evince mirror reflexes in abundance. Clearly this behavior is a boon for learning the emotional repertoire - and much else - of one's culture, for it enables the child to discern the situations the caregiver associates with feelings of distress or elation. Among adults, mirror reflexes are also highly adaptive, since they facilitate social communication. Albeit subliminally, one can intuit - at least very -,the temperament of a room or the disposition of one's spouse by usmg one s body as a detector of the kind of internal sensations that are apt to be associated with the manifest expressions of others. These communi- cative advantages, moreover, are so adaptive that they are probably bred in the bone . When hy mimicry 1 "catch" the negative vibes or feelings of distress of another, I immediately survey the environment in order to locate the source of 1m discomfort. His negative affect alerts me in my own muscu- lature to the likelihood that I may soon need to mobilize some vectorially convergmg emotton, such as fear or possibly anger. Mirror reflexes, which may be linked to what neuroscientists call mirror neurons, are not only relevant for gleaning information about what surrounds other people. By relaying to us something of what they are feeling, mirror reflexes help us cope with others. Detecting that one's boss is in a foul mood via mirror reflexes is useful in deciding when to ask him- or not ask him- for a raise. And, in addition, mirror reflexes are immensely functional for coordinating group aL--tivities - for getting the troops reeved up as they march otf into battle in lock-step camaraderie. In sum, the human capacity for mirror reflexes is, in all likelihood, a sturming asset from the perspective of natural selection, since it is a means for gathering affective information about AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE un p cities and for synchronizing joint ventures, from facc-to-tacc nversations to cheerleading to military maneuvers. . Aestheticians have been aware of the phenomenon of mirror retlexes at t since the writings of Theodor Upps . And the filmmaker Sergei Lein explicitly attempted to exploit Upps' insights not only in bis th ry of filmmaking, but in his practice as weU. Though neither he nor Upps employed the terminology of mirror reflexes, Eisenstein i.nduded close-ups of stereotypical facial expressions and body parts, such as clenched fists, in the hope of inspiring the sort of mimicry in viewers that would prepare them viscerally for the ltinds of emotional states that he wished to arouse in them. Less theoretically inclined motion picture makers also discovered the importance of such affective modeling intuitively and it has been a staple of popular cinema since the 1920s. This is a legacy, furthermore, that fUm ha.s bequeathed to TV. Undoubtedly, a significant amount of the affect stirred up by audiovisual entertainments is connected to the way in which they educe muscular mimicry in their audiences . Watching a videotape of Ril'erdance, the audience taps its feet, accessing a simulacrum of the spirited pulse of the dancers . As Bruno in Hitchcock's Stranaers on a Train reaches for the lighter that he hal; dropped into the sewer, our arm muscles flex, within the circumSLTibed ambit of our theater seat, in a manner echoing his in order to help u.s fed his intention within our body. It is not that we identify with Bruno morally or emotionally, but we ape bis gesture in order to help u.s determine a glimmer of what he is feeling. At the conclusion of Al1en &surrect1on, we get a feeling, strangely enough, for the monster's pain that results from his mother's betrayal, not because we identify with rupley's progeny but because we involwtt.uily mimic his facial expression.* And even before we see the monster displayed on screen, the SLTeaming visage of its victim, inscribed with framed in dose-up, prompts us to tense up our faces analogously in a way that signals through our muscles that things are about to get unpleasant. The activity on primes mimicry of a partial or limited variety which can deliver informa- tion about the internal states of charru.:ten which we sample in terms of similar sensations in ourselves. Though not full-scale emotions - but only feelings sans objects and, thus, without appraisals thereof -- these sensa- tions may nevertheless be a serviceable source of the aficctive grip such motion pictures have on us in at lea.st two ways. * I owe this example to Amy Coplan. 188 AFH:CT ANO THI' MOVING IMAGE fint, these mirror contribute to keeping the excitement I v I in our bodies elevated, thereby realizing one of the abiding prom.ise$ popubr movies. And second, they may mae available information can integrate into our more encompassing emotional responses to characters. The bodily feelings of distress that are imprinted on the contorted features of the protagonist are relayed to us by ow- sel ti imitation of his expression so that we can use the dysphoric taste of t sensation as a recognitional cue for the kind of emotion that is appropri on his behalf - a$, tor example, sorrow would be appropriate were we t detect by motor mimkry that he is feeling some sort of pain. That , mirror retlexes may function as sub-routines in the formation of ur emotional responses to fictional chara<.."ters, not only alerting us to general valence - whether positive or negative -- of their mental states, but also calibrating the kind of passion we need to send back their way. Mirror rctlexes are not examples of emotional identification since they do not involve the replication of complete emotional states by only the feeling component and, in tact, they need not duplicate precisely the same feelings, but only vectorially similar ones. Nor are they what are sometimes nowadays called simulations of the emotional states of charac,. tcrs, since they do not employ beliefs and desires. On the other hand, they are important elemenu of affective address in motion pictures. They can make our bodies vibrate with feeling in the presence of certain character11, and, even more importantly, they can facilitate our recognition of charac ter emotion and modulate our own emotional response to it. In this regard, it would appear that motion pictures, including movies and TV, have resources for exciting the affective reactions of audiences that literary tkt.ions, popular and otherwise, lack. .. This capacity is perhaps particularly evident with respect to a struc- ture alluded to several times already in this chapter, namely, point-of- view editing. This figure, at bare minimum, comprises two shou - what have been called the point/ glance shot and the point/ object shot. The point/ glance shot involves a character loolti.ng (glancing) offscreen; then the point/object shot shows us what (the object) the character is looking at. The hero in Rear Window looks toward the camera - presumably acroaa the courtyard in the world of the fiction; then there is a cut and we see what he sees - a man in an opposite apartment mauling the onlooker's fiancee. This cinematic figw-e can be put through its paces either progressively (starting with the point/glance shot) or retrogressively (starting with the point/object shot and backing up to the point/glance shot) . The figure can AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE: be iterated; the editor can repeat the Hgurc several times progrcs ly, retrogressively, or in some combmation of the two. ln early cinema, w filmmalcers were somewhat anxious about whether or not people would understand this cinematic figure, it was often reiterated through ral cycles. However, today, repetitions are less pronounced, except for tic effect. The comprehensibility of point-of-view editing rests, first and foremost, n certain biological tendencies of the human organism (as well as other m Is) - specifically, the tendency to track the glance of our conspe- 1 (and, indeed, of other animals) to its target. This is a way in which to rive some insight into what is going on in the minds of others - we fqUow the gaze of the hostess of the party J.S she ket.ps stealing glances ill th door and then we speculate that she is expecting someone. This tr pism is inborn; a child on his mother's knee naturally follows her eyes wherever they point. When a caregiver introdm:cs a word, the child loou what mother is looking at, thereby, in the process, being inducted mto the conceptual scheme of the culture . But the point-of-view editing structure does not only exploit our inn.tte tendency to trace the gaze of our conspeciflcs for the of mind reading. It also mobilizes the mirror-reflex system for tlw sake of cinematic communication. For, when the character's face in close-up on screen, the viewer has an automatic tendency to imitate her expression, thereby getting an intimation of the range or of her imler state. lf mimicking the charat'ter's demeanor causes unpleasant turmoil within us, we ready ourselves - we calibrate our expectations -- to muster some dysphoric emotion, such as anger, fear, horror, or the like. The character's face in the point/ glance shot, in other words, functions as an emotional range-finder, demarcating the valence of the emotions appropriate to the objecu we are about to see in the shot and suggesting the approximate scope of the emotions we need to enlist in response. ln this way, point -of-view editing capitalizes upon an evolutionary adaptation that took. place countless millellllia before the birth of cinema. Although the moving image is a cultural invention, it is useful never to lose sight of the fact that in many ways it succeeds as well as it does bc.cause it freely avails itself of our biological heriuge. The motion picture is an artform, but, as with art in general, we must not suppose that it is solely an affair of the mind. Motion pictures address our bodies as well. Though we have seen this phenomenon in evidem:e in other chapters, the way in which moving images interact with our bodies is perhaps never more blatant than with regard to the hold motion pictures can exert 190 AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE over our affective life, including, notably, our emotions, that nexus of mind omd body. Movies can, so to speak, reach under our skin and stir up our feelings. Moviemakers, in this regard as in others, are amateur psychologists, experimenting intuitively with the human sensory apparatus for the purpose of art, fame, and money, but often with results that sometimes reveal how we, as incarnated beings, work. This is not said in order to attempt to reduce the moving image to a repertoire of biomechanical triggers. The moving image is undeniably a cultural creation. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that culture, including our affective and emotional life, is constructed out of the biological possibilities deliv- ered up by natural selection, often for purposes never dreamt of on the sprawling savannahs where those possibilities took root. Suggested Reading with respect to motion pictures and the emotions is Passionate edited by Carl Plantinga and Gregory Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) . Though not devoted to affect in motion pictures in particular, but to art and the emotions in general, another very important volume is Emocion and tht Arcs, edited by Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) . On the range of affect in motion pictures, see jinhee Choi, Startles: Cognitivism Revisited," Journallf .Aesthetics and .tire Crilicism 61 :2 (Spring 2003), 149-57. The contemporary discussion of the paradox of fiction was introduced by Colin Radford in u How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina? ," Proceedinas d the Ariscocdian Sodtey, supplement 49 ( 1975), 67- 81. One of the most important attempts to solve the paradox of fiction is Kendall Walton's "Fearing Fictions," Journal of Philosophy 75:1 (jan. 1978), 5- 27. Interesting comments on Walton's article include Alex Neill, "Fear, Fiction and Make Believe," Journal lj Aesthetics and At! Crnicism 49: 1 (Winter 1991), 4 7--56, and Richard Moran, "The Expression of Feeling in The Philosophical Review 103:1 (jan. 1994), 75- 106. Kendall Walton responds to some of his critics in his article in Emotion and the Arcs. Concerning the relation of the emotions to movie genres, sources include Flo Leibowitz, "Apt Feelings, or Why 'Women's Films' Aren't Trivial," in Post- Theory: A.econsuuctina Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (Madison: University of WiJcoruin Press, 1996), and The Philosophy of Horror, by Noel Carroll (New York. : Routledge, 1990). Carroll's view is criticized in many places, including Bcrys Gaut'a "The Enjoyment of Horror: A Response to Carroll," British Journallf Aesthaics 35 : 3 (july 1995), 284--9. On suspense, see Noel Carroll, "The AFFECT AND THE MOVING IMAGE 191 Paradox of Suspense," in his &yond AestheCJCJ: PhJiomphJCal E=ys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ) . On the issue of identification, see Amy Coplan, "Empathic Engagement in Narrative Fictions," Journal lj Aesthetics and Art Crrtlcum 62:2 (Spring 2004) , 141-52. See also Berys Gaut, "Identification and Emotion in Film," in P=onau Views, ed. Plantinga and Smith. Criticism of Gaut and Coplan can be found in Noel Carroll, "Sympathy for the Devil," in Phil0$0phy and che Sopronm, by Ridurd Greene (LaSalle, ILL: Open Court, 2004), and id., the Ties th.u Bind: Characters, the Emotions, and Popular in and lnurpral.ltion ljPopular Culcure, edited by William Irwin and Jorge Garcia (Lanham, MD: Rov.m.m & littlefield, 2006). The most seminal articles regarding simulation theory with respect to aesthetics are Gregory Currie's "The Moral Psychology of Fiction," ,iustr.Uasian Journal lj PhilosopJy 73:2 (1.995), and :\esthcT Meets Cogruuve Soence, m Mental 5rmulacion, edited by Marun Davies and To!y Stone (Oxford : Black. well Publishing, 1995) . Critidam of this view IDA) be found in Aaron Mesk.in and jonathan Weinberg, "Emotion, Fi<..1ion .and Cognitive Architecture," BritiSh Journallf AesthtticJ 4 3: I Uan. 2003), 18 H . See also Carroll , "On the Tics that Bind," and also his "Simulation, Emotions, and Morality" in 1m Beyond Aesthteics. The major lxXJk. -length study of the emotional relation of audimces and movie characters is Murray Scnith, EneuiJinB Cha.runm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199S) . On mirror ret1exes, see Carl Plantinga, "The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face," in Passionau Views, ed. Plantinga and Smith. For psychological background on this phenomenon, read Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University PreM, 1994), especially chapter 2 . For an up-to-date philosophical di!!(.:w.sion of the emotions, see Pruu, GUI &actions (Oxford: Oxford Univenity Press, 21X>4). On art .llld the emotions, see jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than 1\ea.wn (Oxford: Oxford University PrCSI>, 2005) . One aspect of affect not discussed in this ch.lptcr is mood. For a.n introduction to this topic, see Noel Carroll, "Art The Monm 84:4 (Oct . 2004), 521 - 55 . See also Gregory Smith, Film Scructurc ond Emorion Sysct.m (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003)_