American History X (hereafter AHX) has been accused by numerous critics of a morally dangerous cinematic seduction: using stylish cinematography, editing, and sound, the film manipulates the viewer through glamorizing an immoral and hate-filled neo-nazi protagonist. In addition, there’s the disturbing fact that the film seems to accomplish this manipulation through methods commonly grouped under the category of “fascist aesthetics.” More specifically, AHX promotes its neo-nazi hero through the use of several filmic techniques made famous by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. (...) Now most critics admit that, in the end, the film claims to denounce racism and attempts to show us the conversion of the protagonist to the path of righteousness, but they complain that nonetheless the film (perhaps unintentionally) ends up implicitly promoting the immoral worldview it rather superficially professes to reject in its final act. This charge of hypocrisy is connected to another worry: the moral conversion in the film is said to fall flat because the intellectual resources on display to support the character’s racism are not counterbalanced by equally explicit (but superior) arguments for the anti-racist position ultimately embraced by the character. In other words, just as the devil is said to get all the good lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in AHX the racists get all the arguments. This has been taken to be a morally problematic flaw of the film. Critics lament that Derek’s conversion seems to result not from relevant logical inferences and valid rational argumentation but from overly simplistic and arguably egoistic insights (e.g., “has anything you've done made your life better?”) combined, perhaps, with a hackneyed cliché (in prison, one of his best friends is a black person!) In this paper I’ll attempt to rebut these charges and defend the film as a powerful, and powerfully moral, work of art. I’ll be suggesting that the seductive techniques employed allow for many viewers a degree of sympathy towards the protagonist that is crucial, both for making that character’s more horrific actions especially unsettling, and also for making his eventual conversion plausible and ultimately compelling. I’ll also argue that the manner in which his conversion is presented is in fact subtler than many critics have allowed: Derek’s transformation is not artificial or implausible but is depicted as resulting from a cumulative series of emotionally powerful life events and personal engagements. It is certainly true that it is not represented in the way some would seemingly have preferred, i.e. as straightforwardly resulting from a process of gradual intellectual improvement in Derek’s reasoning on questions of race and politics. However, I’ll argue that the decidedly emotional basis of his moral evolution is both refreshingly realistic and no hindrance to accepting his conversion as rational. Finally, properly understanding the legitimacy of the emotional foundations of much moral thought will also allow us to appreciate the ways in which our initial worries about this film’s (not insignificant) ability to persuade viewers through the engagement of emotions need not, in itself, be seen as a barrier to endorsing the film as a morally praiseworthy work. (shrink)

The view that allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment, as developed by Carroll (1984) and Smith (1995), has the resources to respond to counterexamples proposed in the literature, including appeals to anti-heroes, rough heroes and other ‘reprehensible characters’ that garner our allegiance. It can even admit non-moral factors as subterranean influences on moral assessment. Nevertheless, the view requires that the characters we most favour are those with the highest moral standing, and this does not seem to (...) be true of the character arc story (Kelly, 2020). Rather, the mixture of good and bad impulses in the protagonist is set off by the unalloyed moral example of the moral centre, a supporting character whose fate may barely interest us. We conclude that narrative theory is better served by allowing the moral hierarchy of a story to differ from the rank order of its allegiances, and hence that audience affiliation is not simply a matter of moral assessment. (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and show how the (...) novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

This article lies at the intersection of two problems: the one concerning the potential of fictional works to inform us about our social reality and foster our understanding of its various aspects, and the one concerning their potential to engage with philosophical issues. I bring these two together by analyzing the hit television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. According to my interpretation, the series is informative about our social world, and it raises philosophical concerns about it. This makes (...) it well-equipped to fulfill the educative function attributed to mass art by Noël Carroll, and to stand out as an example of what he calls popular philosophy. To support this interpretation, I rely on contemporary views regarding the nature of our engagements with fictional narratives. I then explore how philosophical concerns are generated and I elaborate on the role they have in deepening one’s understanding of one’s social circumstances. I further show how the series provides innovative and independent philosophical knowledge by means specific to the medium of generic serialized fiction. The central part of my argument is an analysis of the narrative strategies which enable the informative and philosophical aspects of the series to generate the series’ educative function. (shrink)

Mindreading, simulation, empathy and central imagining are often used interchangeably in current analytic philosophy, and typically defined as imagining what the other wants and believes – to run these states “off-line.” By imagining the other’s beliefs and desires, one will come to understand and predict his emotional and behavioural reactions. Many have suggested that films may trigger engagement in the characters’ perspectives, and one finds similar use of these terms in film theory. Imagining the characters’ states – with emphasis on (...) mental states – has for example been labelled as central imagining (Choi 2005; Smith 1995), imagining from the inside (Smith 1997), and empathetic reenactment (Currie 1995). In a similar vein, understanding the meaning of a narrative event for a character is understood as empathy (Tan 1996). These accounts all point to ways in which the spectator understands the character and the situation the character is in. Nevertheless, one also finds a different use of the term empathy in film theory, namely as a matching feeling with the character. The emphasis here is not on understanding the character and the narrative situation, but on the emotional output of the process. Often automatic, hardwired affective matching mechanisms are emphasized. This matching feeling with the character has also been discussed as empathy (Grodal 1997; Plantinga 1999; Smith 1995). While all these authors discuss what makes a spectator experience aspects of a character’s state, they point to different kinds of character engagement, and discuss it using varying terms. There also seems to be disagreement as to how film may cue the spectator to engage in these different ways. Here I offer an integrative account of empathy, where all these processes are labelled as empathic. The differences and similarities between them are explored. I argue that, broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of film, each of which elicits its own kind of empathy. Nevertheless, the common core to these kinds of engagement in a character justifies us in calling them empathy. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: (...) the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice. (shrink)

The long-form television drama series Hannibal thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms (...) intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and... (shrink)

In this article we explore how female sympathy and solidarity can be forged between transnational subjects and spectators. In particular, we place cinematic depictions of minority female suffering in the contexts of current feminist and postcolonial praxes. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which world cinema can produce a transnational feminist solidarity through forms and narratives that reflect the experiences of women as gendered postcolonial subjects. Amongst the female and feminist theorists drawn upon, central to our understanding of (...) a transnational feminist solidarity is Sandra Lee Bartky's ‘mitgefühl’. From this understanding we suggest bonds of sympathetic solidarity between audiences and diegetic female subjects that bridge their ontological separation, without conflating the two, in relation to Rachida and Frontière. In combining film-philosophy, cinematic affect and feminist theory we formulate a radically new way of understanding and envisioning the construction of female suffering onscreen: as a means of producing transnational forms of spectator solidarity. (shrink)

Expanding the debate about empathy with human beings, animals, or fictional characters to include human-robot relationships, this paper proposes two different perspectives from which to assess the scope and limits of empathy with robots: the first is epistemological, while the second is normative. The epistemological approach helps us to clarify whether we can empathize with artificial intelligence or, more precisely, with social robots. The main puzzle here concerns, among other things, exactly what it is that we empathize with if robots (...) do not have emotions or beliefs, since they do not have a consciousness in an elaborate sense. However, by comparing robots with fictional characters, the paper shows that we can still empathize with robots and that many of the existing accounts of empathy and mindreading are compatible with such a view. By so doing, the paper focuses on the significance of perspective-taking and claims that we also ascribe to robots something like a perspectival experience. The normative approach examines the moral impact of empathizing with robots. In this regard, the paper critically discusses three possible responses: strategic, anti-barbarizational, and pragmatist. The latter position is defended by stressing that we are increasingly compelled to interact with robots in a shared world and that to take robots into our moral consideration should be seen as an integral part of our self- and other-understanding. (shrink)

This article examines the role of moods in aesthetic experience by focussing on film. It considers specifically the function of moods in relation to narrative and aesthetic perspectives which a film provides and which recipients are invited to adopt. I distinguish superficial transitory moods from profound enduring ones. This differentiation is important with regard to the question why moods in film matter and why they are different from emotions. I will focus on Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia” and claim that (...) the moods of the leading characters can at one and the same time count as moods and perspectives on the world. Their moods are strongly connected to how they perceive their world, evaluate it, and “are” in the world. By being put into a mood that assails human beings holistically, viewers get acquainted with a perspective of a fictional character in an encompassing manner that includes mind and body. However, it will be discussed whether the viewers feel profound or superficial moods when engaging in the moods of the film and the characters and whether they are infatuated or can remain aesthetic distance. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop an under-appreciated aspect of spectator activity: the way in which viewers make use of film to enter or sustain a project of bad faith. Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's account of bad faith in Being and Nothingness (1943), the article explains the aspects of bad faith that are pertinent to viewer activity, then explores the way viewers can make use of filmic depictions to facilitate self-denial. For example, spectators may emphasize the fact that persons are depicted (...) in narrow terms as corroboration for their belief that human nature is just as its depicted, thereby denying that we have the freedom to be otherwise. Or spectators may deny the relevance of problematic aspects of themselves when they find it depicted in characters who are admirable in other ways. I then consider whether films themselves can be described as being in bad faith. While technically they cannot, I identify ways that a film may encourage or discourage bad faith in viewers. I also examine how the immersive aspect of film enables viewers to turn attention away from themselves while they engage in self-denial. The case for this approach to viewer activity and film analysis is supplemented by a distinction between traits that do apply to film, e.g., being racist, sexist, or homophobic, and the resources it gives persons to be in bad faith about these social attitudes. I argue that a film can have traits like these while not encouraging bad faith and vice versa, demonstrating the unique perspective offered by approaching film and spectator activity in terms of bad faith. (shrink)

A long‐standing aim of cinema – in particular of ‘extreme’, ‘unwatchable’ or ‘feel‐ bad’ cinema – has been to acquaint viewers with extreme suffering. In this article I first offer an explication of that aim in terms of recent work in philosophy of mind, then exploit the resulting framework to examine claims to the effect that a new technological development, Virtual Reality, provides cinema's best shot at achieving that aim.

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as (...) a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary ) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies , both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is good reason to believe that we can be influenced by fictions in ways that matter morally, and some of the time we will be unaware that we have been so influenced. These arguments fall short of proving a clear causal link between fictions and specific changes in the audience, but they do reveal rather interesting and complex features of the moral psychology of fiction. In particular, they reveal that some Platonic worries about (...) the dangers of art cannot be dismissed lightly. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the application of contemporary theories of the imagination—largely drawn from cognitive psychology—to our understanding of film. Topics include the role of the imagination in our learning what facts hold within a fictional film, including what characters’ motivations, beliefs, and feelings are; how our perceptual experience of a film explains our imaginative visualizing of its contents; how fictional scenarios in films generate certain affective and evaluative responses; and how such responses compare to those we have toward analogous circumstances (...) in real life. (shrink)

What does it mean for an actor to empathize with the character she is playing? We review different theories of empathy and of acting. We then consider the notion of “twofoldness”, which has been used to characterize the observer or audience perspective on the relation between actor and character. This same kind of twofoldness or double attunement applies from the perspective of the actor herself who must, at certain points of preparation, distinguish between the character portrayed and her own portrayal (...) effected in her craft. We argue that this concept helps us to understand how the actor can empathize with her character. For the actor who must study and rehearse her character, empathy may begin with higher-order processes that provide a contextualized understanding of the character. This understanding eventually integrates with more basic empathic processes in her actual performance. (shrink)

Film viewers make sense of films first of all at a precognitive level, triggered by their bodi­ly responses. The key notion here is movement: the movements of screen characters, the movements simulated by the viewers who perceive these characters, and the camera move­ments that mediate between the two. This review essay evaluates two monographs: Maarten Coëgnarts’ Embodied Cinema, which expands conceptual metaphor theo­ry to account for film’s unique affordances to communicate embodied meaning; and Vit­torio Gallese's and Michele Guerra’s The Empathic (...) Screen, which buttresses embod­ied simulation by film viewers experimentally by demonstrating the workings of “mirror neurons.” The review ends by discussing how these two books tie in with other develop­ments in the study of gene-culture coevolution. (shrink)

Literary narratology has rightly devoted much attention to analysing the source(s) of verbal information about the story world, usually discussed under the label “narration”, and to any agent(s) that present(s) non-verbalized perspectives on it, usually discussed under the label “focalization”. Assessing the identity of narrators and focalizers is crucial for understanding what is going on in the story world. Which narrative agent is in charge? Is the narration and/or focalization layered? If the latter, is there any “colouring” by the higher-level (...) narrative agent of anything said, thought, or experienced by the lower-level agent? Is the information provided trustworthy? Nuanced? Prejudiced? Narration and focalization have supra-medial as well as medium-specific dimensions. Over the past years, the issue of how these concepts function in the medium of comics, which combines visuals and language, has begun to be systematically addressed. This paper aims to show how the visual mode can, on its own or combined with the written-language mode, signal the sources of narration, focalization, and joint narration-and-focalization, as well as distinguish between different levels at which these take place. (shrink)

A longstanding problem with the study of empathy is the lack of a clear and agreed upon definition. A trend in the recent literature is to respond to this problem by advancing a broad and all-encompassing view of empathy that applies to myriad processes ranging from mimicry and imitation to high-level perspective taking. I argue that this response takes us in the wrong direction and that what we need in order to better understand empathy is a narrower conceptualization, not a (...) broader one. I propose that empathy be conceptualized as a complex, imaginative process through which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other differentiation. I defend my view through an examination of three processes: emotional contagion, a process of self-oriented perspective taking that I call “pseudo-empathy,” and empathy proper. Drawing on recent findings in social neuroscience, I highlight the differences among these processes and discuss conceptual, empirical, and normative reasons for keeping them theoretically and conceptually distinct. (shrink)

Prior to the productive encounters that can be staged between Emmanuel Levinas’sthought and cinema at the level of reception, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne introducehis philosophy to their filmmaking at its moment of inception.1Luc Dardenne’s diary Audos de nos images documents their filmmaking from 1991 to 2005, and isinterspersed with brief but erudite references to Levinas’s work. While Levinasianthinking is one among many cited influences in this text, which also features quotationsfrom the writings of novelists, poets, and other philosophers, along with (...) detailedreferences to other filmmakers, his work is a signal point of inspiration and ethicalaspiration for their filmmaking. The Dardenne brothers seek permanently to unsettlereceived ideas of what cinema is. In this, their approach is bound up explicitly, but notexclusively, with the ethical underpinnings of Levinas’s thought. Levinas’s reformulationof ethics as first philosophy creates a fissure at the root of the philosophy of being. TheDardennes’ films, in turn, perform a Levinasian-inspired challenge to the being ofcinema. At its most extreme moments, to kill or not to kill is the key question that theircinema raises. This tacit rewriting of the interrogative opening to Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy, shifts attention away from a self-centered concern with being or non-being,and towards the survival of the other. The passage from being to non-being, whichwould involve the death of the subject, is displaced here by a preoccupation with killing,or failing to kill, someone else. This particular move from dying to killing lies at the heartof the Dardennes’ mortal ethics. (shrink)

How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an (...) intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. (shrink)

This paper presents a new, third-personal account of empathy that characterizes empathy as being sensitive to others’ concerns as opposed to remaining stuck in one’s egocentric perspective on the world. The paper also demonstrates why this account is preferable to its two main rivals, namely the simulation theory of empathy, and the direct perception theory of empathy.