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Stretching the Limits of Character Identification
Audiences identify with characters who are in difficult situations and with characters they like or wish to be like. This identification is useful because it quickly simplifies the relationship between the audience and the story. The audience enters the story through the character with whom it can identify.
Identification also provides an umbrella of tolerance. Once involved with a character, viewers tend to overlook the more subtle issues of story credibility and are forgiving of the occasional use of coincidence. Writers don’t want their viewers to become too aware of the various manipulations that are the mechanics of the screen story. This awareness is always a danger when identification with the main character is moderate or absent.
But what happens in a screen story when the main character is less than admirable? What is the balance between character exploration and audience empathy? Is there an underside to viewer identification? When does identification turn to voyeurism? We explore these character-related issues in this chapter.
Sympathy, Empathy, and Antipathy
Viewers relate to characters for different reasons. They relate to Sophie (Meryl Streep) in Sophie’s Choice out of sympathy. She is a concentration camp survivor and her situation invites our sympathy. Sympathy means caring but not necessarily identification. Do we empathize with her? Do we identify with her? No. The same can be said about Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) in The Pawnbroker and Lena (Isabelle Huppert) in Entre Nous.
The factors that prevent us from becoming more deeply involved with these characters are different in each case. We don’t empathize with Sophie because she is never very forthcoming. Whether one considers this withholding or lying is semantic. In the case of Sol Nazerman, he is too enraged, too angry at the whole world, to invite us to know him beyond his anger and his pain. In the case of Lena, she is a woman who makes a choice to marry in order to save her life. Later, she wants to escape from the man who provided her with her married life. We feel sorry for Lena, but we also feel sorry for her husband. There is little room for empathy.
In each case, the characters are trapped by past events, and their present life is hell. They escaped from one hell (e.g., the Holocaust) only to find another. The high level of tragedy in each of their lives precludes an empathetic identification and keeps our involvement with them at the level of sympathy.
Empathy is the step beyond sympathy. Empathy implies an identification with a character. Not only do we feel with them, often we feel like them. Wes Block (Clint Eastwood), a troubled detective in Tightrope, is a concerned single father as well as a professional with personal doubts. His flaws make him all too human, and, as a result, we empathize with him. The same can be said for Isabelle (Amy Irving) in Crossing Delancey. She is a professional person with no personal life. When an unorthodox opportunity arises to become involved with a man who cares about her, she doesn’t know how to respond. Her vulnerability in this circumstance makes her appealing and empathetic. We care about her, just as we care about Wes Block.
In the majority of cases, the writer will use an empathetic, or at least sympathetic, main character. Occasionally, the writer will develop a character for whom our dislike outweighs our like. Antipathy for a main character is not as rare as we might think. We might feel ambivalent about Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) in 52 Pick-Up, or hostile toward the manipulative Richard Boyle (James Woods) in Salvador, or loathing toward the cowardice of the conformist (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in The Conformist, but in each case, there is something about the character that involves us. The actors are portraying characters we like to hate—philanderers, manipulators, and cowards. Yet, we do get involved with them on some level. Harry Mitchell, in 52 Pick-Up, is being blackmailed about an affair. The twist is that his girlfriend is part of the blackmail scheme. At risk is his marriage to a high-profile local politician. His wife’s career is also at risk. His behavior is not admirable, but at least we can understand his desire to save his wife’s reputation. Here lies the key to this type of character—there must be one redeeming quality that humanizes him. We can relate to that element.
When we look at Richard Boyle, in Salvador, we see the same quality. He will do anything for a story, but his love for a Salvadoran woman (he has a wife in the United States) is so intense, genuine, and different from the rest of his behavior that we can relate to this relationship and begin to see a more positive side to Boyle.
In the case of The Conformist, the title character’s strong emotional relationship with a woman other than his wife is the quality to which we relate. The other woman is the wife of a political dissident in Paris, who the conformist must set up for assassination. His desire to save the politician’s wife is so strong that we see a commitment for another not reflected elsewhere in the film. The fact that he allows her to be killed, despite her pleas to him, re-establishes his cowardice and is the most troubling moment in the film. Until then, however, this relationship is an attempt to reach us.
Identification vs. Voyeurism
Our relationship with main characters isn’t always straightforward. Perhaps the person who understood that best was Alfred Hitchcock. He wanted us to be involved, to identify with his characters, but he also wanted us to see them, physically and emotionally, from a detached view—as if we were voyeurs. If we can sympathize with their plight, empathize with their positive attributes, yet objectively observe their obsessive tendencies, we become implicated in their downfall; we share their guilt.
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho and John Ferguson (James Stewart) in Vertigo are obsessed characters who steal or manipulate, and yet we are, in a complex and not always comforting way, involved with them. These two characters have a great deal in common with the most voyeuristic of Hitchcock’s characters, L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) in Rear Window. All three characters are straightforward, outwardly normal people who are trapped. In the case of Marion Crane, she is trapped in an extramarital affair that will only move ahead with enough money. So she steals the money and is then plagued by guilt. This guilt suddenly turns into expiation when she decides to return the money. Finally at peace with herself, she is killed by Norman Bates, and we are left in the position of voyeur and so are implicated in her death.
John Ferguson, in Vertigo, falls in love with a woman he has been hired to follow. As a policeman and now as a private detective, his fear of heights is exploited when his subject, Madeline (Kim Novak), falls from a window atop a tower, an apparent suicide. Riddled with guilt, he finds a woman who looks like Madeline, and in reality is Madeline, and makes her over to look like the woman he lost. When he discovers she has duped him, he returns to the scene of the first “death,” but this time she does slip, fall, and die. His guilt is rekindled, and he is left standing atop the tower, looking down at the dead Madeline. He is a man suspended above the Earth, immersed in the realization that he has now caused the death of his loved one.
In both Psycho and Vertigo, each character has positive and negative characteristics. Through their negative actions, we are distanced from the characters and assume the position of voyeurs. As we distance ourselves, we begin to feel guilty, as if we were abandoning people to whom we had started to relate. Our guilt becomes particularly acute as the situations deteriorate (death for Crane, death of a loved one for Ferguson). Hitchcock has succeeded in implicating us in their guilt. Of course, this type of balance is not exclusive to Hitchcock, although it is most often found in this genre. Bedroom Window, Blue Velvet, and Dead Ringers are other examples of films that use this technique.
Another approach to overcome the negative qualities of a character is to provide him with an opportunity to reveal his real self. We generally see the social or public side of people. In everyday socializing, a person’s true feelings, true self, is concealed. Hence, if a character is a rogue, writers usually give him some charm, and we come to think of him as something of a rascal, not as an evil or totally negative person. But if he is not charming, the moment of revelation is a very useful device to gain our understanding, complicity, or tolerance for the character. If this moment is particularly unexpected, the writer can even generate empathy for the character.
A good example of this type of character is Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) in Champion. This Carl Foreman screenplay chronicles the rise and fall of a world champion boxer. In the first half of the film, we sense that Kelly is a restless, ambitious man who wants to rise above his childhood poverty. He is opportunistic at every turn. Halfway through the film, Midge talks about what it was like to be a poor boy. The humiliation he suffered remains a vivid scar, and at that moment, we begin to forgive, or at least tolerate, his cruelty to those closest to him.
In Blame it on Rio, Matthew Hollis (Michael Caine) takes a vacation with a divorced friend and their teenage daughters. Matthew’s marriage is foundering, and he takes solace in his friend’s daughter. The affair that follows is kept from his friend but not from his own daughter. Matthew is not an admirable man in this Charlie Peters–Larry Gelbart script, but the writers give Matthew many moments of revelation. From the beginning of the film, Matthew begins to confess directly to us, and this continues periodically throughout the film. The result is that we tolerate his character.
Another approach to the moment of revelation is taken in True Believer. Edward Dodd (James Woods), a famous civil rights lawyer of the 1960s, is now a lawyer primarily for drug dealers. His moment of revelation comes when a new assistant, Roger Barron, chastises him for not taking on a controversial murder case. He is no longer the man whom Barron traveled to New York to work with. This is a humiliating moment for Dodd, who is hungry for the glory and publicity of those early days and now has to settle for less idealistic clients. We learn about Dodd’s past and we sense who he was. Can he be that person again? Until this point in the story, Dodd is presented as a mesmerizing speaker in court but as a lawyer who has fallen from grace. He has talent but conviction without idealism seems ignoble. Can Dodd once again be noble? Although he is energetic, it is not possible to sympathize or empathize with him. Only when we learn who he was do we hope that he can recapture his idealism.
A moment of revelation is important for a less-than-sympathetic main character and is a device writers often use to involve us with character. These moments can also apply to more than just the main character. Virtually all the characters in John Patrick Stanley’s Moonstruck have their moments of revelation, and the three key characters in David Mamet’s Things Change have their moments as well. It is important to remember that the moment of revelation is very often associated with a story point in which the characters have undergone a humiliating experience. When they are vulnerable, they reveal their private sides. Then, whether saint or sinner, we are hooked by the character.
Heroism
A moment of revelation, particularly when a character is feeling vulnerable, requires courage. We don’t mean Arnold Schwarzenegger’s commando-type heroism but rather courage on a more human scale. Main characters, whether we identify with them to a greater or lesser degree, require a good measure of heroism in order to overcome the dramatic hurdles that stand in their way. Heroism can be defined, for our purposes here, as a main character’s attitude plus action in surmounting challenges that prevent the character from achieving a goal. The use of heroism provides a means of viewing the character in a more sympathetic light and offsets our lack of empathy for the main character.
One route to heroism is the quality of the challenge. The challenge can take the form of a remarkable antagonist, like the Joker in Batman; it can be the setting, such as the land in The Emigrants and the desert in Lawrence of Arabia; or it can be class rigidity, as in Pelle the Conqueror. In each case, the level and quality of the challenge make the main character heroic.
However, not every character is as tenacious as T.E. Lawrence or as rich and talented as Batman. When we look at the rigid Colonel (Alec Guinness) in The Bridge on the River Kwai or the selfish captain (William Holden) in the same film, we find their behavior in the second half of the film no less heroic. The angry father (George C. Scott) in Hardcore is faced with the heroic search to find a teenage daughter who has run away from a religious home life to become an actress in hardcore pornographic films. The father has to overcome many qualities in his own background in order to proceed with his search.
One character we recognize as neither sympathetic nor empathic is Lyn McAdam (James Stewart) in Winchester ‘73. We don’t know much about Lyn, other than that he is angry and is an excellent rifleman. Only as the story unfolds does the character have a number of moments of revelation. Each time, he tells us a little more. Then, in Act III, we finally learn the true source of his bitterness—his brother killed his father. In his attempt to confront and kill his brother, he has to overcome many challenges. During the course of his plight, he makes the transition from angry protagonist to vengeful hero. His challenges—outlaws, Indians, and more outlaws—seem increasingly daunting, yet his ability to overcome these challenges makes him increasingly empathetic.
Whether a main character is empathetic or antagonistic, a quality that can be as useful as heroism is the elusive charisma that makes everyday people attractive. Although charisma is more often thought of in connection with politicians and movie stars, it can also be used in the development of characters. It is particularly important in the character, who, on first meeting, comes off in an unappealing light. Good examples of this quality range from the eccentric T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Both are men with a mission seemingly beyond their own means. Screen stories naturally gravitate toward characters who have power (Patton) or who want power (The Candidate), and toward the famous (All the President’s Men) and the infamous (The Last Ten Days of Adolph Hitler).
What is charisma, and how can it be developed in a character? Irvine Schiffer, in his book Charisma,1 suggests certain characteristics that create charisma. They are as follows:
- An element of foreignness
- A subtle imperfection
- A calling or sense of mission
- Polarized aggression or intensity
- A sexual dimension
- An ability to convince others
The charismatic character, then, is somewhat different from other characters; he arouses our curiosity and attracts us with his intensity and sense of mission. Charismatic characters have a powerful sexual dimension, and they are not perfect. They might have a bad back, wear glasses, or be exceedingly short. The key element is that we quickly notice that they are different, but we are not put off by them; instead, we are curious about them. Charisma is helpful in balancing negative and positive characteristics, and it helps us get involved with a character.
The Tragic Flaw
Very often when a central character is portrayed in a negative light, our acceptance of him hinges on a tragic flaw in his character. Not dissimilar from Macbeth’s sense of invincibility (some might call it susceptibility to delusion) or the lean and hungry look of Cassius in Julius Caesar, there is often an extreme quality that is the source of both strength and duplicity in these main characters. Lonesome Rhodes’s (Andy Griffith) earnestness in Budd Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd is the basis for his wide appeal in small groups and then large groups (on television) but is also the source of his duplicity. Steven Gold’s (Tom Hanks) immaturity in David Seltzer’s Punchline is the source of his rage with people on stage and off, but it is also the source of his strength as a comic. The audience is attracted to the power, but repelled by the nature of the tragic flaw.
In order to better understand how the tragic flaw plays itself out in screen stories, it is useful for us to acknowledge that this quality is played out in a literary manner. A tragic flaw adds subtext and is the link between the character and the society that has produced this character. For example, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is a New York press agent in Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success. Falco lives in a tough city in which he must depend on the kindness of gossip columnists to make a living. Unfortunately, there are no kind gossip columnists in New York. Sidney Falco’s tragic flaw is his ambition. He will do anything and sacrifice anyone in order to succeed. On the other coast, Joe Gillis (William Holden), in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, wants the good life of Hollywood. He takes advantage of Norma Desmond’s self-myopia and tries to rewrite her script for Mr. DeMille. Here, too, ambition leads Joe to desperation, opportunity, and finally to his own death.
The worldviews of Falco and Gillis, and the implicit worldview of the entertainment industry, are treated no more kindly than are the characters. In both cases, the viewer has a fascinating insight into character pathology and the cold ambition needed to succeed in the industry. And in both cases, the language and the dialogue are brittle, hard, and brilliant. The dialogue alone creates for us the excitement, the dynamism, of being inside the industry.
Falco and Gillis are men of their time and place. Other places and other times yield other memorable characters. King (George Segal), in Bryan Forbes’s King Rat, lives in the world of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Whereas others die, King, thanks to opportunism, thrives. Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas), in Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman’s Ace in the Hole (later retitled The Big Carnival), is even more blinded by ambition than is Sidney Falco. Tatum is a New York newspaperman exiled because of his alcoholism to work in New Mexico. While there, he encounters a story that may take him back to New York. A man is trapped deep in a cave. The man could easily be rescued, but Tatum convinces the sheriff and others to delay in order to get some publicity for the town. Although the man slowly dies in the cave, a wave of pity carries the story to the national airwaves. People drive to the site; large equipment is set up to start the digging; admission is charged to gain entry to the site. Charlie finally makes it to the national airwaves and back to New York—until the man dies in the cave. Then, his story begins to unravel, and Charlie, the brilliant reporter, is turned into a murderer—all because of his immoral sense of ambition.
There are numerous other wonderful examples of the character with a tragic flaw—among them are the self-absorbed Blume (George Segal), in Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, and the mad Rupert Popkin (Robert De Niro), in Paul Zimmerman’s King of Comedy. The use of the tragic flaw attracts and repels the viewer, all the while making an unappealing main character tolerable.
A Case Study of Charisma: White Hunter, Black Heart
White Hunter, Black Heart is the story of John Huston (as played by Clint Eastwood) in the making of The African Queen. Peter Viertel’s novel is adapted by Viertel, James Bridges, and Burt Kennedy, and the focus of the screenplay is Huston’s indifference to making a difficult location film in Africa and his total devotion at that time to shooting elephants. This ultimately leads to the death of a devoted black guide, and only then does Huston turn back to the purpose of his being in Africa—to make the film.
The screenplay does not dwell on the famous participants in the film—Bogart, Hepburn, Spiegel, and Harry Cohn. Rather, it stays with the character of Huston and his obsession. What is fascinating about the screenplay is Huston’s vigorous narcissism. He loves to talk, challenge, bully, decide, contradict, all just to hear the tonal rhythms of his own speech. It’s as if he’s making up dialogue rather than behaving out of an ethos, a humanity. His speech on London and Nazi sympathizers during the Blitz, a tale told to an anti-Semitic British expatriate during an elegant dinner, is a classic example of liberal ideology and cynical manipulation. His is a character who loves to watch, and so do we. Whether it is his love of language or outrageous behavior, Huston is energetic, deterministic, and flawed— the perfect charismatic character.
The question here is whether these qualities are enough to draw us into the story. They certainly fascinate us, but the tragedy that befalls Huston (the loss of the guide) does not strike us as tragic for him, but rather tragic because of him. Consequently, we remain outside of his character, impressed by his energy but never identifying with him. The result is a bold experiment where we see what the character does but not how he feels.
A Case Study of Charisma and Tragic Flaw: Raging Bull
Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), in Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin’s Raging Bull, is a charismatic, but flawed, character. He is an intense Italian-American who, physically and emotionally, is always attacking. He has a primitive, animalistic aggression that is both the source of his power as a boxer and the poison to all his personal relationships.
As LaMotta moves toward the championship, he loses two wives and a brother—the people closest to him. Consequently, he loses everything. His impulsive aggressiveness results in the loss of his material goods as well as in his imprisonment. The film ends with LaMotta rehearsing his nightclub routine. He is the warm-up act for strippers—a far cry from being the champion boxer of the world. This character attracts and repels us at the same time. We are attracted to his restless energy, but we are repelled when it is used to beat up his wife. We are attracted by his ability to remain standing in the ring, no matter how badly he is beaten, but we are appalled by the savagery taking place. LaMotta is charismatic, but he is also terribly flawed. His flaw destroys him, leaving no more than a pathetic, second-rate comedian living off the remains of his sullied reputation.
A Case Study of Self-Revelation and Heroism: The Manchurian Candidate
Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey), in George Axelrod’s The Manchurian Candidate, is not a likable central character. He is arrogant, rude, and angry. He is also a man who has been brainwashed in Korea to be a Communist assassin. He is particularly dangerous because of his skill as a marksman, because of his unawareness of his chosen role, and because he is beyond suspicion. He is the stepson of a United States Senator, chosen to be the vice-presidential candidate of his party, and he is a Congressional Medal of Honor war hero.
Raymond’s character, however, is of greatest interest to us. He is a negative character, and yet, by the end of the story, we empathize with a man who has killed at least five innocent people, including his own wife. This comes about in one key scene. The scene occurs when Raymond is drunk and opens up to his friend and commanding officer, Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra). In a state of utter despair, he repeatedly tells Ben that he knows he is not a lovable person. He then describes a time in his life when he was lovable. He describes meeting the woman, Josie Jordan, with whom he fell in love: As her father was the Senator that Raymond’s mother once slandered as a Communist, the two families were at odds, but with Josie, Raymond laughed and became lovable; however, his mother finally broke up the relationship, and Raymond returned to his unlovable self. In this scene, Raymond also expresses his hatred for his mother and his inability to go against her.
Both his breakup with Josie and his relationship with his mother become critical in the second half of the film. Josie re-enters his life and Raymond enjoys a brief happiness when they marry. Then, his mother re-establishes her special hold over Raymond, and we learn that she is the Communist agent who controls Raymond, the assassin, in the United States.
The fact that Raymond reveals his inner self to us, the fact that his self is so totally different from the Raymond we have seen so far in the story, both shocks and moves us. He evolves from assassin to pawn, and we empathize with a character who was, up until that point, negative in every sense. As a pawn, we see Raymond in his Act III struggle with and against his mother, a heroic struggle of a weak son attempting to overcome an overpowering mother. At the end, in his struggle against his mother, Raymond becomes a real war hero who the Communists created.
A Case Study of Identification and the Negative Main Character: Paper Mask
The negative main character has a great deal in common with the classic main character. Each has energy, appeal, charm, and a goal, but the negative main character differs in the nature of that goal. Through an identification process, we understand and can share the positive goal of the classic main character. But through the same process, we can identify with the negative main character despite the nature of his goal.
Matthew Harris (Paul McGann), a hospital orderly in John Collee’s Paper Mask, really admires the hospital’s doctors: they own the hospital and have the respect of the women who work there. One night, Harris witnesses an automobile accident in which a young doctor is killed. He moves the body into the mortuary and steals the doctor’s identification papers. The rest of the story is Harris’s attempt to create a career as a doctor in two hospitals. At first he is awkward, but, helped by a veteran nurse, he almost succeeds, until an old acquaintance, a fellow orderly, moves to his new hospital. At this stage, so close to success, Matthew refuses to give up. He kills his friend, and the pretense goes on.
As one might imagine, Harris can be undone at any point—faulty medical practice being the primary problem. Equally possible is that he might slip up and reveal his false identity. There is also the recognition factor: How long can one hide from the past? Clearly, Harris’s goal is to lie about himself and his profession. Even without proper training, he hopes to put himself in a position where people will trust him with their lives. Because of his lack of training, of course, they are at far higher risk than they realize. His goal makes him a negative main character.
Nevertheless, the vigor, the charm, and the relentlessness with which he pursues his goal create a certain amount of empathy for him, but not enough for us to identify with him. How then does writer John Collee create an identification with Harris? He uses the plot structure to create the necessary identification. Collee constantly puts Harris in danger of being caught—by a nurse, a hospital administrator, and a friend from the past; Harris is a man in constant danger. By using this plot device, we have no choice but to identify with him, because we identify with people who are in constant danger.
A Case of the Negative Main Character: The Conformist
The Conformist, Alberto Moravia’s story of the making of a Fascist in Mussolini’s prewar Italy of the 1930s, is the classic portrait of a negative main character. Marcello Clerici is an upper-class gentleman from an unorthodox family—his mother is a drug addict, and his mad father is confined to a mental institution. They once were people of standing, but Marcello does not identify with them; he wants order in his life. Hence, he becomes engaged to a flighty, nouveau riche young woman, and he wants to become a member of the Fascist party. Marrying the young woman requires only that he go to confession, a temporary return to the Catholic Church. Joining the Fascist party is more complex—he must go to Paris to trap his former professor, Quadri, a radical Fascist dissenter. Marcello agrees.
On his honeymoon in Paris, he goes to see the professor, befriends him and his wife, Anna, and then betrays them. Quadri and Anna are assassinated en route to their rural home. At the end of the war, Marcello decides that he no longer wants to be a Fascist; hence, so he betrays the blind friend who first introduced him to the party.
There is nothing admirable about Marcello. He is a coward and morally a cynic. He joins the Fascists to be empowered in the new society. He marries a woman for whom he has only contempt. And when he does fall in love, with Anna Quadri, he does nothing to prevent her death.
How, then, do the writers create empathy for Marcello? First, they show his scarred past—he is raped by the chauffeur, whom he believes he has killed in anger. In his present life, it is clear that neither his mother nor father were role models for him. Finally, the writers show us that Marcello knows what he is doing, but his self-contempt is so great that his negative actions fit in with his self-image. The writers show a level of consciousness, of choice, rather than desperation, in Marcello’s actions. In this way, empathy is created for a character who has no admirable qualities, who is not charismatic, and whose goals are reprehensible.
A Case of an Ambivalent Main Character: “A Serious Man”
Although the classic main character and the negative main character share many qualities–except their goal–this is not the case with the ambivalent main character–often posing a distinct problem for the dramatic impact of the narrative.
In Joel and Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man” (2009), Larry Gopnik (Michael Stulburg) is a Midwestern physics professor. He has a wife, two children and is up for tenure. But life brims with dread for Larry Gopnik. Although he lives in Minnesota, he’s never really left the shtetl. It’s not that Larry Gopnik fears the worst. The worst is what happens to him. The question is how will he survive?
In short order, his wife announces she will leave him for a widower, the widower write anonymous letters to his tenure committee recommending Larry Gopnik be denied tenure, his son Danny is in trouble around non-payment for drugs, this in the year of his bar mitzvah, Larry’s brother Arthur, with a record of transgressions, may have transgressed. Life seems to be piling on and it gets worse. An Asian student given a poor grade offers a bribe for better. He gives Larry an envelope, it’s full of money. Not long after the boy’s father arrives suggesting he take the money and change the grade or he’ll have Larry charged with blackmail.
Although his competitor Sy dies in a car crash, Larry’s wife insists he, Larry pay for the funeral. In despair Larry seeks out rabbinical counsel. Can religion, more belief save Larry from total destruction? The answer never comes clear and we are left with a Larry Gopnik neither saved nor condemned; ambivalence has infected the narrative as a whole. And it’s in that state that we leave Larry Gopnik.
A Case Study of Identification and Voyeurism: Blue Velvet
Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, seems to be a nice, middle-class young man in a small town. He is intelligent and curious. When he finds a severed ear in a field in Lumberton, he wants to find out to whom it belongs. His search leads him to a beautiful nightclub singer. Aided by the local police detective’s daughter, he infiltrates the singer’s home and begins to watch her. But he watches her not as a man with a mission but as a man in lust. He is aroused by her, and when she discovers he’s broken into her apartment and has watched her undress, she turns the tables on him and rapes him.
This description of Act I begs a number of questions, not least of which is: Where is this story going? Of direct interest to us is that Jeffrey is a character with whom we can certainly identify; he has all the qualities we admire. But then he begins to behave like a voyeur. The events that Jeffrey watches are so violent, so unusual on the screen, that we are repelled and yet drawn to them.
As the story progresses and we return to the mystery (the missing ear), the behavior becomes more predictable. Jeffrey is again a protagonist we can admire, even if we don’t fully understand why he is so driven (curiosity is not enough of an explanation). In this film, the role of the antagonist, Frank (Dennis Hopper), is important. He is a criminal, cruel, and misogynistic; he is unpredictable and vengeful. When Frank beats Jeffrey because of their mutual interest in the singer (as a jealous suitor would), we sympathize with Jeffrey’s Boy Scout behavior. Jeffrey is earnest again, just the opposite of Frank. The antagonist takes over the voyeuristic dimensions (we become fascinated and repelled by him), and we identify with Jeffrey.
Lynch plays with identification and voyeurism throughout the film. As he is robbing us of our illusions of the sanctity of small-town life, there is little, if any, solace for the viewer. The best we can do is to identify with Jeffrey, even though he has raised our suspicions of his goals and motivations.
A Case Study Beyond Voyeurism—The Discovery of Empathy: The Boys of St. Vincent (Parts I & II)
The Boys of St. Vincent, written by Des Walsh, John N. Smith, and Sam Grana, is an excellent example of the discovery of empathy in an absolutely vile character. The film is set in a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland. In the first part of the two-part film, the focus is on the boys, and particularly on Kevin and his abuse at the hands of the orphanage director, Father Lavin. The first part concentrates on the investigation of suspicions of sexual abuse, how it is discovered and then covered up. The second part of the film, set 15 years later, focuses on the trial of Father Lavin. The main character in Part II is Father Lavin (Henry Czerney), who has now left the church and made a life in Montreal. He has two children, a wife, and a job—in sum, a new life. The charges and the trial pose questions of responsibility for both victim and victimizer. By focusing on Father Lavin, the film humanizes the perpetrator as it carries us beyond a voyeuristic position into a relationship with a character whose actions are despicable beyond description.
Although the writers do stay with Kevin and his struggle over whether to testify, they also create another main character in Father Lavin. His struggle is over whether to hide his past or to own up to it, particularly with his family (his wife). In terms of a negative main character, we have seen in Part I Lavin’s goal, his sexual satisfaction, and his sadism played out in terms of his love object, Kevin. The Father Lavin we meet in Part II has a temper, but he seems to have overcome his desire for young boys. But what creates empathy for Father Lavin are his meetings with a psychiatrist, who has to assess him for the purposes of the trial. Those sessions create a good deal of empathy because Father Lavin provides us with a private moment, a confession, where we learn that he, too, was adopted and sexually abused as a young child. He did raise himself up in terms of class, education, and status, but the neglected child in Lavin is filled with the pain that fuels the adult Lavin’s rage. That moment takes us past viewing him strictly as a repellent perpetrator and into a relationship with him. That empathetic relationship is shocking because of how negative our sense of the man, and his abuse of power and privilege (vis-à-vis young helpless boys), has been. Although he returns to his angry state when his wife at the end tells him she’s leaving him, we remain acutely aware that this man is no longer a conventional negative character. He is complex, vulnerable, and sadistic. We have a relationship with him, empathy having replaced the distance of voyeurism.
Conclusion
The use of empathetic and energetic main characters is more widespread than it first seems. To establish the audience’s identification with the main character, the writer can either create sympathy for the main character or present the vulnerable side of that character, to invite empathy. The writer can use a main character who challenges the audience’s positive relationship with him and stretches the limits of identification. In order to do so, certain conditions must exist that allow the audience to become involved with such a character.
First, the main character should be charismatic. Jake LaMotta and George Patton are good examples. Second, the sense of mission the character exhibits implies an aura of heroism that is particularly appealing to audiences. These characters also generally have a tragic flaw that prevents them from being successful human beings. Generally, these characters exhibit an aloneness that implies a sense of tragedy. Finally, these characters tend to exhibit their flaw through self-revelation. This moment creates a vulnerable main character who may be unlikable, but who briefly becomes a fuller human being. Although these characters revert to their former selves soon thereafter, the audience’s feelings toward them are never the same.
It is possible to use main characters who stretch the limits of identification. Certain conditions should prevail, however, to allow for the audience’s engagement with the main character. If those conditions don’t prevail, the writer will ensure that the viewers are voyeurs rather than participants.
Stories can function and remain interesting when the viewer is a voyeur. Particular filmmakers—Hitchcock, Lynch, and Godard—prefer that the viewer occupy both positions, voyeur and participant. The balance of the two positions depends on the narrative structure of the story as well as on the nature of the main character. If the writer wants the viewers to occupy the voyeuristic position, a more distant and unappealing main character will ensure that outcome. On the contrary, if the writer wants to place the viewers as participants, their identification with the main character must be challenged. The result is that the audience will relate to a wide range of main characters.
Reference
1. I. Schiffer, Charisma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).