Page - 53 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Punishment and Crime | 53www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 47–61 LEARNING TO RECOGNISE CHARACTERS: PROBLEMS OF ENGAGEMENT Murray Smith explains that spectators engage with characters on the basis of a mixture of information, emotion, judgment, time spent with the charac- ters and moral evaluation of their actions.10 Watching films is a process of get- ting to know others, some of whom become significant others whom we care about. In classical cinema this process is all perfectly aligned. We know who the main character, the hero, is and happily side with him/her. We recognise him/ her as having morals and inclination to act that we in turn would like to have in the situations that are portrayed. We think that our engagement with film characters is specific to film, but our impression formation, our liking or disliking of characters, stems from our everyday routines of judging and engaging with people. The indistinctness of art cinema problematises the spectator’s engagement and impression formation. In some cases this complication even generates mor- al stress for the spectator.11 The anxiety that is felt in watching The White Rib- bon does not come merely from engaging with immoral characters. The prob- lem is that our everyday moral compass fails us. The spectator is not complicit in the crimes but is complicit in the morals of the criminals. And on top of that, the spectator is constantly reminded of the suffering of the victims.12 In The White Ribbon, the process of engaging with the characters is seriously thwarted. For example, our initial sympathy for the doctor, who has suffered as a result of falling from his horse, becomes a burden when he reveals himself as an insensible, heartless, sadistic man who takes joy in destroying Mrs Wagner’s self-esteem and has sex with his own daughter. If we had seen him first as the sadistic man and child abuser, we would not have engaged with him, and would not have felt any sympathy or empathy when he fell from the horse. This is not to claim that the film tricks us into engaging with characters we come to loathe. Nor is the film, or the narrator, unreliable. The film presents the events as they occur, and how the spectator chooses to engage with certain characters is the spectator’s own responsibility. When those choices appear to have been poor choices, the spectator is regularly remindedof thet misestimation. 10 Smith 1995. 11 Van der Pol 2015. 12 Although in all fiction films characters perform acts and therefore both behave morally and demon- strate moral flaws, usually (in classical cinema) the moral imperfections do no harm to the specta- tor. The spectator stays on the safe (moral) side because the character’s intentions are usually good and/or the film obscures the effects of the immoral acts as much as possible. And even if we are engaged with evil characters, then we do so knowing that they are evil, in effect suspending our disbelief.