Affective Involvement with Characters: Sympathy, Empathy, and Beyond

Chapter 14 looks at affective involvement with characters as a multidimensional, dynamic interaction of different affective responses evoked by cues at perceptual, narrative, thematic and reflective levels. Characters move viewers not only as depicted beings, but also as artefacts, symbols, and symptoms, each eliciting different responses. The chapter focuses on the perspectivised appraisal of characters as represented beings. From an external observer's perspective, a character's physical, mental, and social characteristics and behaviour can be appraised on the basis of intersubjective, especially moral values, but also on the basis of subjective desires or group-specific concerns, leading to more or less converging or diverging audience reactions. In addition to external appraisals, the audience can also experience a character's situations more or less from their perspective and develop similar feelings to them. Feeling-for a character and feeling-with them together form a basis for more enduring dispositions of sympathy or antipathy leading us to side with or against a particular character, to hope for them or to feel schadenfreude. Based on these distinctions, the chapter offers an overview of basic forms of affective involvement, from curiosity to empathy. It shows how films guide these reactions through narrative and stylistic means, and outlines typical development patterns of affective involvement in the course of a narrative. Finally, the complex interplay of affective reactions is illustrated in the case of the characters in Casablanca.