Characters as Symptoms: How Characters Interact with Reality

Chapter 12 deals with characters as symptoms and their relations to social realities. While symbolic interpretations focus on the meanings of characters, symptomatic analyses are concerned with their causal connections to sociocultural contexts. Characters emerge from reality and feed back into it, creating a reciprocal causal relationship that can be understood with the help of ‘context models of discourse’ (van Dijk). Among the main causes for the emergence of characters are the dispositions of their creators, the structures of media systems, as well as broader sociocultural conditions. Characters also have a wide range of effects, including observational learning, narrative persuasion, cultivation, identity formation, and various uses in education, advertising or politics. For example, in the Nazi film Jud Süß, the anti-Semitic characterisation of the anti-hero points to Nazi propaganda goals and prevailing cultural prejudices, and the character was used to incite racial hatred during preparations for the mass murder of Jews. The concluding example of Rick Blaine in Casablanca shows how symbolic interpretations (e.g. of Rick as the embodiment of US ideals during the Second World War) can be linked to symptomatic references (such as the character's production context, the anti-fascist intentions of its creators, or its later impact as a role model).