Empathy and Character Engagement

Abstract

Character engagement is a central topic in the philosophy of film that has implications for several other philosophical issues. Although discussions of character engagement in film studies and philosophy tell us a lot, they are often confusing for at least two reasons. First, a variety of explanatory concepts gets used in these discussions, and few of these are used uniformly. Second, the experience of character engagement itself is highly complex. It refers to all and any elements of spectatorial experience that are based on or relate to characters. This encompasses several distinct types of relationship, a number of additional types of response, and connections among all of the different experiences. There are two major theoretical approaches to questions about spectatorship: psychoanalytic film theory and cognitive film theory. Psychoanalytic film theory, as the name suggests, draws extensively on psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, as well as on Marxist theory, Saussurean linguistics, critical theory, and the work of several recent postmodern and postcolonial thinkers. Cognitive film theory is based largely on research in empirical sciences related to the mind, such as cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience. Most cognitive film theorists also share the assumption that our cognitive and perceptual experience when watching film is more or less like our cognitive and perceptual experience of events in ordinary life. In this essay I will survey some of the leading explanations of character engagement developed in psychoanalytic and cognitive film theory. These explanations vary greatly in their operating assumptions, their theories of human psychology, and their sources of evidentiary support. What unifies them is that all are attempts to answer the question of how viewers engage with fictional characters in film.