The Antihero in American Television

Margrethe Bruun Vaage

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317503170
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Televisión

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano ( The Sopranos ), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White ( Breaking Bad ) and serial killer Dexter Morgan ( Dexter ) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction?

Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.

1 Morally Murky

On Navigating Fictional Worlds by Moral Emotions and Intuitions

DOI: 10.4324/9781315715162-1

Whenever Dexter Morgan has hunted down one of his carefully chosen victims, strapped him onto a table covered in plastic, and woken him up from the tranquilized sleep he induced until he is ready to kill, Dexter’s facial expression communicates the pleasure he finds in taking someone’s life. Furthermore, Dexter is the television series Dexter’s main character, and the spectator is encouraged to like and sympathize with him. And Dexter is not alone; the antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad), and serial killer Dexter are not morally good. How do these television series make us like and sympathize with their morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological makeup, and more specifically about the moral psychology of fiction?

This first chapter lays out the theoretical background for this book, which is cognitive film theory and media psychology. I explain the dominate theories of our engagement with fiction and the role morality plays in these. Moral evaluation has been seen as foundational to our engagement with fiction – it is postulated that the spectator works as an untiring moral monitor throughout her engagement with a story. These theories have recently come under critical scrutiny: the antihero trend challenges the assumption that the spectator continually evaluates the characters and events morally. Does watching Dexter entail that the spectator morally evaluates its serial killer protagonist? Who of us would actually defend vigilante killings, such as he routinely commits in this fiction? Current research in moral psychology, and most notably Jonathan Haidt’s and Joshua Greene’s work on the so-called dual-process model of (real life) morality, can shed light on this debate. With a clearer picture of how a moral evaluation functions, the question of which role such assessment plays when we engage with fiction will be easier to answer. According to this model, one way to a make a moral judgment is to go through deliberate, reflective thinking – a rational evaluation. Another way to moral judgment is quick-and-dirty and pre-reflective, going through our moral intuitions and emotions. My main hypothesis about our engagement in fiction is that we primarily rely on moral emotions, and circumvent rational, deliberate moral evaluation. The fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. In the final part of this first chapter I turn to one possible counterargument to my theory. I postulate that there is a relevant difference between the way we engage with works of fiction and non-fiction respectively. In the last part of the chapter I elaborate on this claim.

To avoid misunderstanding in relation to my use of the notions intuition and rational, a few preliminary remarks are in order. A critic could argue that it is far from clear what terms such as rational deliberation and intuition mean philosophically. Indeed, there is a huge literature on either notion. ¹ Michael Johnson and Jennifer Nado, for example, point out that

[t]he nature of intuition itself is notoriously difficult to pin down (…) we will just stipulate that by ‘intuition’ we mean to refer at the very least to spontaneous, not-obviously-inferential judgments.

(Johnson and Nado 2014: 69)

Johnson and Nado’s understanding of intuition is mirrored in Jonathan Haidt’s, who writes that moral intuitions are

the sudden appearance in consciousness of a moral judgment, including an affective valence (good-bad, like-dislike) without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of searching, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion.

(Haidt 2001: 818)

By presenting moral judgment as either rational or intuitive, I do not suggest that the latter is irrational, in the sense that the two must contradict one another. It can be perfectly rational of us sometimes to rely on moral intuitions. However, neither should intuitions be seen as the most reliable way to track what is morally right – as the appeal to intuitions in philosophical thought experiments has sometimes suggested. Indeed, the role of intuitions in philosophical methodology has become controversial, primarily because intuitions can be manipulated easily through various means (e.g., they are highly sensitive to order of presentation, for example Swain et al. 2008). To say that the spectator’s reaction of disgust toward a character is intuitive does not mean that her reaction is, therefore, justified. The antihero stories are indeed effectively designed to give rise to some intuitive moral responses that are, as a matter of fact, erroneous from a rational point of view. Moral intuitions and emotions are easily manipulated narratively, dependent as they are on narrative context. Deliberate moral reasoning would typically be more principled in nature.

Furthermore, saying that some moral judgments are intuitive does not mean that they are only “hardwired” – independent of social context and learning. Making an intuitive moral judgment simply means that an action in a situation strikes one as right or wrong, good or bad, and that this is a gut reaction, i.e., that one is not necessarily aware of having evaluated the situation with regard to right or wrong. It is a pre-reflective judgment, arrived at without reflective reasoning. Some intuitions may be hardwired – intuitions we are disposed to due to human nature – whereas others are socially learned. Some intuitions may be the result of prior rational deliberation: I may have taken a stand to be vegetarian, for example, because I have read up on industrialized meat production and found plenty of reasons not to support it. Over time, I have developed a gut reaction against eating meat, and need not reflect deliberately about questions relating to eating meat every time I encounter them.

My contribution is to show what the dual-process model can do in film and television theory, or more specifically how it can shed light on the spectator’s engagement with the antihero. One prominent line of critique against this model is that the dual-process model of morality – and especially in Jonathan Haidt’s formulation of it – is wrong in dismissing deliberate moral reasoning: the critic would thus point out that deliberate moral reasoning is more important than what the theory allows for (see e.g., Bloom 2010; Monin et al. 2007; Pizarro and Bloom 2003). For example, rational deliberation can be seen as of central importance in order to explain how our morality may change. However, I also rely on Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of morality, which is similar to Haidt’s, but which does grant rational, deliberate reasoning a more important role (as in the vegetarian example above). In my theory about the antihero series rational reasoning plays an important role, too. So this specific line of critique of the dual-process model of morality is less relevant for my use of it. Furthermore, if it turns out that the very idea that we rely most heavily on moral intuitions in real life is wrong, one could still potentially argue that moral intuitions play an instrumental role in our engagement with fiction. A critical discussion of the dual-process model of morality per se has, however, realistically been beyond the scope of the present study.

Finally, my use of the distinction between rational versus intuitive moral judgment is not normative. As I will reiterate later in this chapter, the dominate Western moral philosophies are all normative, and they prescribe rational moral deliberation. However, turning to moral psychology and its emphasis on moral intuition also entails or is at least compatible with a change from a prescriptive to a descriptive point of view: the dual-process model does not in itself prescribe what we should or should not do when we try to be morally good people. ² It merely describes how we typically judge a situation morally. So, with the aim to uncover the realities of our morality (how our morality actually works rather than how we think it ought to work), let us start with theories of spectatorship in cognitive film theory and moral psychology.

Traditional Theories of Spectator Engagement: Moral Evaluation is Foundational

Rather than surveying all theories of spectator engagement in cognitive film theory and moral psychology, I will concentrate on a few influential views. ³ Indeed, these accounts can be said to represent the dominant views of character engagement in these two fields. The gist of these accounts is that a moral evaluation is foundational to our engagement with fiction. ⁴ An early articulation of this idea is to be found in Noël Carroll’s essay on suspense (Carroll 1996a [1984]: 94ff), in which he argues that what generates suspense in film is a combination of morality and probability: if I desire a sequence to have a morally good outcome, but an evil outcome seems most likely, feelings of suspense can be expected to occur. ⁵ With this observation, the idea that morality plays an essential part for our engagement in films is planted. This idea is further corroborated in Murray Smith’s Engaging Characters (Smith 1995), a pivotal study instrumental in establishing character engagement as one of the central questions on which cognitive film theory is focused. In the writings of Carroll and Smith, the spectator engages most prominently with those she sees as morally good. In his seminal essay on suspense, for example, Carroll uses the notion allegiance, and defines this as when “we can agree with and root for a character in a film on the basis of shared moral commitments with that character” (Carroll 1996a: 116n.22).

From the 1980s onward, cognitive film theorists have criticized the psychoanalytic concept of identification for entailing an illusionistic fusion between the spectator and a character or film, and for insufficiently specifying what kind of engagement the term picks out (e.g., Bordwell 1996: 15ff; Carroll 1998: 311ff; Currie 1995: xvff, 165ff; Grodal 1997: 81ff; Tan 1996: 189–90; Smith 1995: 1ff, 93–4, 1996). ⁶ In the view of the cognitive film theorists, the notion of identification entails that the spectator is under a kind of illusion where she loses herself in the character and mistakes the character’s experiences for her own (see e.g., Baudry 1974–5). Thus, temporarily, the division between the self and other is abolished. The spectator is fully immersed in the character and experiences this as a fusion with her: the spectator’s responses are determined by the responses of the character.

As part of this move away from the psychoanalytical fusion view, Carroll and Smith hold that the spectator’s engagement with the characters on-screen is grounded in an assessment of the moral structure of the film. Carroll argues that the spectator does not unwillingly and unwittingly ‘fuse’ with the characters on-screen by mere use of point of view shots, for example, as psychoanalytic theorists such as Stephen Heath suggest, but “on the basis of holding similar values to the characters in question” forms an allegiance with them (Carroll 1996a: 166n.22). A central assumption in cognitive film theory is that the spectator actively makes sense of films, and that her response to film is rationally motivated: it is an informed attempt to make sense (cf. Carroll 1988, see also Currie 2004: 155). Emphasising the spectator’s moral evaluation of the characters can be seen as one facet of this claim.

Smith recasts the terminology used to describe the spectator’s engagement with films in psychoanalytic film theory, moving away from notions of identification entirely. Instead, any given film has a structure of sympathy, according to which a spectator is oriented (Smith 1995). The structure of sympathy has three tenets: first, the film establishes stable agents that the spectator identifies through a process of recognition. Also, the film narration filters the events of the story through one or several characters’ experience in a process of alignment: the narration can be more or less aligned spatiotemporally with any given character, and give more or less access to the experiences of any given character (e.g., giving us information about how the character feels and what she is thinking). Finally, through alignment the narration gives the spectator clues that she uses in order to evaluate the narrative, its characters and events morally in a process of allegiance.

Allegiance denotes that level of engagement at which spectators respond sympathetically or antipathetically towards a character or group of characters. It rests upon an evaluation of the character as representing a desirable (or at least, preferable) set of traits, when compared with other characters within the fiction. This basic evaluation is combined with a tendency to arousal in response to the character. That is, the level of intensity of the arousal may vary, and the type of emotion experienced will shift depending on the situation in which the character is placed, but both these factors are determined by an underlying evaluation of the character’s moral status within the moral system of the text.

(Smith 1995: 62, my emphasis)

Allegiance thus has both a cognitive and an emotional component – it is a moral evaluation and an emotional output. If I evaluate a character as morally good, I will form a sympathetic allegiance with that character, and if I see her as evil, the feelings triggered will be antipathetic. One important caveat to note is that the spectator’s moral evaluation is seen as intrinsic to the fiction – all it takes is that she sees the character as morally preferable to other characters in the narrative. Portraying someone as morally worse than the antihero is indeed common in the antihero series (see chapter 5 and 6).

Nevertheless, there are problems with this understanding of character engagement. The spectator’s response is seen as determined by her evaluation of the character’s moral status within the moral system of the film. Notably, Smith does not explain in greater detail what a moral evaluation is. In order to tease out what he means by it, it is important to take note of the relation between alignment and allegiance. A film’s moral structure or system of value is revealed to the spectator through alignment in a process Smith labels moral orientation (Smith 1995: 189). However, being aligned with a character does not mean that the spectator is encouraged to form a sympathetic allegiance with this character:

The most we can say is that the conventional association of alignment and allegiance – most narratives in practice do elicit sympathy for those characters with whom they align us – primes us to be sympathetic to character with whom we are aligned. If this relationship were necessary, however, it would be impossible to conceive of anti-heroes – protagonists around which the alignment structure of the film is built, but who remain unsympathetic.

(Smith 1995: 188) ⁷

Conventionally, the spectator is thus said to be aligned with those she is also encouraged to form a sympathetic allegiance with, according to Smith. However, Smith also holds that being aligned with a character does not necessarily lead to a sympathetic allegiance. ⁸ Smith denies a systematic relation between alignment and allegiance. This makes moral evaluation sound like an independent, perhaps even rational deliberation in Smith’s theory – otherwise, one ought to acknowledge that who the spectator is aligned wi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Morally Murky: On Navigating Fictional Worlds by Moral Emotions and Intuitions
• 2 Partiality: How Knowing Someone Well Influences Morality
• 3 Suspense and Moral Evaluation: How Morality Is Shaped by Suspense and Style
• 4 Why so Many Television Series with Antiheroes?: The Attraction of the Antihero’s Very Immorality
• 5 Crossing the Line: On Moral Disgust and Proper Villains in the Antihero Series
• 6 The Antihero’s Wife: On Hating Skyler White, and on the Rare Female Antihero
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index