Screening Characters

Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media

Johannes Riis, Aaron Taylor, Johannes Riis, Aaron Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429749162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Characters are central to our experiences of screened fictions and invite a host of questions. The contributors to Screening Character s draw on archival material, interviews, philosophical inquiry, and conceptual analysis in order to give new, thought-provoking answers to these queries. Providing multifaceted accounts of the nature of screen characters, contributions are organized around a series of important subjects, including issues of class, race, ethics, and generic types as they are encountered in moving image media. These topics, in turn, are personified by such memorable figures as Cary Grant, Jon Hamm, Audrey Hepburn, and Seul-gi Kim, in addition to avatars, online personalities, animated characters, and the ensembles of shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.

part one
the importance of actors

one
seeing and hearing screen characters

stars, twofoldness, and the imagination

ted nannicelli

A number of theorists have identified an apparent paradox about star acting in screen fictions.¹ One the one hand, our appreciation of typical, mainstream screen fictions demands that we focus our attention on the work’s representational properties rather than what I will call variously its presentational, design, or configurational properties. That is, it requires us to bracket our knowledge of plot structure, genre conventions, and so forth for the purposes of imaginatively and emotionally engaging with the fiction. On the other hand, there would seem to be a potentially insurmountable impediment to this task—namely, the ubiquitous presence of familiar screen stars. Furthermore, as Noël Carroll astutely observes, our appreciation of screen fictions sometimes actually requires us to draw upon our knowledge of star personae.

This essay critically reviews a proposal, offered by Carroll and Murray Smith in different contexts, to draw upon Richard Wollheim’s concept of “twofoldness” in order to dissolve the apparent paradox of star acting. I highlight an ambiguity in the concept of twofoldness that threatens to confuse rather than clarify our understanding of star acting and our experiences of screen performances more generally. I argue that although there is a broad sense of twofoldness that may accurately describe some of our imaginative engagement with screen performances, we would do well to use another term so as to avoid confusing this with the sense in which twofoldness is a necessary component of our perceptual experience of screen fictions. “Seeing-as,” a term that Wollheim borrowed from Wittgenstein but ultimately abandoned, more precisely describes the way in which our experience of screen performances involves the exercise of our perceptual and imaginative capacities. In relation, I propose that our experience of screen performances also typically involves an analogous experience of “hearing-as.” Nevertheless, I conclude that “seeing-as” and “hearing-as” are typical rather than necessary components of our experience of screen characters.

the puzzle elaborated

A good place to begin is with a somewhat more perspicuous description of the general tension inherent in star acting in film and television—as Paul McDonald aptly puts it, the tension “between the representation of the character and the presentation of the star.”² Some readers might immediately wonder whether the apparent puzzle with which I am concerned depends on at least two tendentious assumptions: (1) that form and content can be prized apart, and (2) that the experience of viewers of mainstream, popular screen stories is correctly characterized by some sort of diegetic absorption, in which viewers attend only to “content,” whether this experience is conceived strongly as a form of “illusionism” or weakly as “immersion” or “transportation.” Perhaps some readers might think that if one is disinclined to accept these assumptions the problem of star acting simply dissolves.

With regard to the first assumption, the form/content question is, needless to say, beyond the purview of this chapter, but I would emphasize that I am after a somewhat different distinction between a work’s representational properties and its presentational properties. A work’s representational properties include, for example, its representing a fictional character, such as Han Solo; its representing a fictional object, such as a Death Star; and its representing fictional features, such as Solo’s wry grin. Any nonrepresentational property of the work is a presentational or a design property (or, in Wollheim’s terms, a configurational property). Such properties include, for example, the work being an instance of the science-fiction genre, being shot on 35mm film, being written and directed by George Lucas, starring Harrison Ford, and having a narrative structure modelled on the so-called “monomyth.”³ It should be clear that the form/content distinction does not map neatly onto the distinction between representational and presentational properties. The latter distinction is neutral about whether representational properties are (or can be) formal properties, and it assumes that works may have presentational properties that are neither part of the work’s form nor its content (at least as content is traditionally conceived—i.e., as fictional content).

With regard to the second assumption, it seems to me that much depends upon the background aims and goals with which one views a mainstream screen story. Moreover—and I shall return to this point presently—it seems plausible that viewers can, at different moments during the same viewing, focus their attention to a greater or lesser extent on the work as a designed artifact or as a fiction. Nevertheless, the contemporary literature in media psychology certainly suggests that, as a matter of empirical fact, nonexpert audiences (i.e., audiences not including film and television critics or scholars) regularly experience something like absorption in the story world, which, I take it, necessarily involves focusing attention on the work’s representational properties.⁴ Furthermore, it is surely the case that most mainstream screen fictions are intentionally designed to afford viewers just this experience. Without adverting to “clichés like ‘transparency,’ ‘seamlessness,’ ‘invisibility,’ [or] ‘concealment’ of production,” about which David Bordwell aptly warns, it seems plausible that, whatever account of classical narration and style one prefers, one characteristic aim of mainstream screen fictions is to imaginatively and affectively engage viewers in a narrative and, thus, to direct attention to the represented fiction.⁵ This is not to deny that viewers may need to attend to the work’s formal properties or its presentational properties in order to do so.⁶

Nevertheless, it is to claim that, in Carroll’s words, “many of our responses to fictions, including fictional films, depend upon restricting our attention to the story world of the movie and to what it presupposes.”⁷ For us to be imaginatively absorbed in a screen fiction like Back to the Future (1985), we need to be focused on what is happening in the fiction—Marty is racing to get the time machine in contact with a powerline at the precise moment lightning strikes the clock tower—rather than thinking about how mainstream film conventions practically ensure that our hero will succeed in the nick of time. Carroll points out that a paradox arises when our appreciation of screen fictions also partly depends upon viewers’ knowledge of an actor’s star persona, which seems to be, at first blush, just the sort of extra-fictional knowledge we normally need to set aside to become absorbed in the story. Bill Murray’s performance in Lost in Translation (2003) provides us with a poignant example. Much of the film’s humor, such as in the Suntory whiskey ad shoots, stems from the sardonic, world-weary wit commonly associated with Murray’s star persona. So, too, much of the film’s poignancy turns on the way in which that very feature of Murray’s star persona seems, to some extent, a façade, an act designed to protect the “real” Murray, who is, deep down, sensitive and good-hearted—although this is simply another dimension of the Murray star persona (even if it also happens to be true of the man, Bill Murray).

However, it is important to acknowledge that star acting involves this sort of tension even when our appreciation of the work does not depend upon viewers’ employment of knowledge about star personae. In the Back to the Future example, it is plausible that our appreciation of the film requires no particular knowledge of Michael J. Fox’s limited prior performances. Yet because of his subsequent stardom, viewers of the film are hardly able to imagine Marty McFly’s escapades in isolation from their recognition and knowledge of the Fox star persona.⁸ In this sort of case, we are not faced with the apparent paradox of needing to make use of “extra-fictional” knowledge (e.g., of star personae) while simultaneously needing to bracket such extra-fictional knowledge (e.g., of typical plot structures) in order to properly appreciate screen fictions. Nevertheless, a puzzle remains about how our affective engagement with fictional screen characters can be so sustained and powerful despite the fact that those characters are inhabited by bodies that are familiar to us as those of real people.

seeing-in, twofoldness, and seeing-as

Given the undeniable fact that screen acting typically involves a kind of actor/character duality, one intuitively appealing approach to the puzzle draws upon Richard Wollheim’s concept of twofoldness—a concept that strongly informs relevant proposals by Carroll and Smith, which I shall review shortly. For Wollheim, “seeing-in” is, roughly, the experience of attending to a pictorial representation’s presentational properties in such a way that allows one to apprehend what is depicted. Wollheim calls this experience—or, to be more precise, the ability to have this sort of experience—“seeing-in” because, in his words, “[it] is the experience of seeing in the pictorial surface that which the picture is of.”⁹ According to Wollheim, “what is distinctive of seeing-in … is the phenomenology of the experiences in which it manifests itself.”¹⁰ More specifically, it is a particular feature of the phenomenology, which Wollheim terms “twofoldness.”

My claim that there is an ambiguity in Wollheim’s use of the term “twofoldness” is indebted to Bence Nanay, who has written about the issue in detail. In many cases, such as that cited above, Wollheim explains twofoldness, in Nanay’s words, as “the simultaneous visual awareness of two different entities (the surface and the represented object).”¹¹ For example, in one essay, Wollheim writes that he uses the term “twofoldness” to characterize seeing-in “because, when seeing-in occurs, two things happen: I am visually aware of the surface I look at, and I discern something standing out in front of, or (in certain cases) receding behind, something else.”¹² So, for example, in looking at Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, one sees an arrangement of oil paint on canvas and, in that arrangement, also sees a depiction of Frida Kahlo. This is sense a. Twofoldness in sense a is specific to visual perception.

However, Nanay points out that Wollheim also uses the term “twofoldness” to mean “that one is visually aware of the represented object and the way it is represented simultaneously.”¹³ Twofoldness in this, sense, according to Wollheim, describes “a single experience with two aspects,” which he calls “configurational and recognitional.”¹⁴ Importantly, Wollheim claims of these two aspects, “They are neither two separate simultaneous experiences, which I somehow hold in the mind at once, nor two separate alternating experiences, between which I oscillate.”¹⁵ That is, according to Wollheim, the phenomenology of our visual experience of pictures is not best understood as involving a mental flipping back and forth between two distinct perceptions, as happens when we are confronted with perceptual illusions like the rabbit/duck picture famously discussed by both Wittgenstein and Gombrich.

Yet there are reasons to think that higher-order cognition enters our experience of twofoldness in this more expansive sense of the term. Nanay persuasively argues that twofoldness in this sense is supposed to characterize the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. Wollheim indicates as much in a passage where he suggests, “in Titian, in Vermeer, in Manet we are led to marvel endlessly at the way in which line or brushstroke or expanse of color is exploited to render effects or establish analogies that can only be identified representationally.”¹⁶ Clearly in cases like these, the perceiver’s experience involves the exercise of higher-order cognitive capacities in a way that is not necessary to discern a pictorial representation of a three- dimensional object in the marks on a flat surface.

Furthermore, Wollheim suggests that twofoldness in this se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• list of figures
• acknowledgments
• foreword: consorting with characters
• introduction: screening characters
• part one the importance of actors
• part two social types, social contexts
• part three medium-specific features and constraints
• part four emotional and moral engagement
• part five the character within genre
• about the contributors
• about the american film institute
• index