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By Joe Magliano, Ph.D., and Stephen Briner, Ph.D., guest contributor
Blockbuster movie season is upon us, so it’s time once again to munch on candy and popcorn, and watch explosions play out on the silver screen. But even the biggest fireball aficionado could tell you that a good movie is a about more than explosions. If you want to make your audience members really care about the explosions, you have to make the audience care about the characters—even when they set off those explosions and walk away without looking, because they are oh-so-cool villains.
Of course, it’s easier to root for some characters than others. No one should be surprised that we’d sympathize with an adorable robot like Wall-E, but not every main character is as instantly likeable. Take Bruce Willis’ character “Butch” from “Pulp Fiction.” In our first few scenes with Butch, he agrees to take a dive on a boxing match, kills his opponent in the ring, yells at his girlfriend, and guns down another main character. And yet Butch comes off as one of the most sympathetic characters in the film. But how? What techniques do filmmakers use to make us feel for characters, even the skuzzy ones?
There are two key ways filmmakers can use cinematography techniques to help viewers understand their characters, and each of them may tap into the basic processes that help us understand the emotions of others. First, savvy filmmakers often use facial expressions to convey mood and elicit sympathy.
Paul Ekman’s research (Ekman, 1992) has found that many facial expressions seem to be universal across cultures, including surprise, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Since these facial expressions convey the same emotions in nearly every culture, a director can take advantage of emotive actors to give audiences a window into what a character’s thinking, even if it contradicts what the characters themselves say.
Close-ups may do more than just show how a character is feeling. Moods can be contagious, and our moods tend to align with those around us, especially when we see strong emotions revealed through facial expressions (Hodge & Wagner, 1997). This may engender a strong sense of empathy and caring for the characters we see in film (Tan, 1996; Zillmann, 1995)
In “Pulp Fiction,” after Butch has killed an opponent, a curious cab driver asks him what it feels like to be a killer. Butch says he doesn’t “feel the least bit bad” about killing his opponent. Not exactly something to inspire empathy. But even though his words are cold-blooded, his face tells a different story. The outside corners of his eyebrows turn down and his inner eyebrows knit together, a classic expression of sadness. Is this enough to make the audience sympathize with Butch even though he explicitly states feeling no remorse for the death?
The second technique involves helping the audience see the narrative world through the eyes of the character by using point-of-view (POV) shot sequencing (Bordwell & Thompson, 2006). POV was pioneered and championed by the Russian filmmaker and theorist, Lev Kuleshov. POV sequencing involves alternating camera shots of a character’s face with shots that are roughly matched to that character’s eye-line sight of the narrative world. We see the world through the eyes of the character.
Looking back at Butch, there is an interesting flashback scene in which a young Butch learns of his father’s death in Vietnam. One of his father’s fellow POWs explains his father's death, and the viewer sees the events as Butch sees them through POV sequencing.
Kuleshov famously argued that POV sequencing was so powerful that actors didn’t have to emote. Show the audience a neutral face, and pair it with a young child, and the audience might feel a sense of parental love. Pair it with a villain, and the audience might interpret the same facial expression as conveying a sense of contempt.
Kuleshov’s thesis has been much debated in film theory, and there is little empirical support for the strong claim that there is no need for actors to act. However, Mobbs, Weiskopf, Lau, Featherstone, Dolan, & Frith (2006) showed that pairing the same facial expression with emotionally-charged or neutral images leads to different interpretations of the target’s emotional state. Moreover, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the brain, they showed that pairing faces with emotionally charged images leads to activation in the amygdale, a structure in the brain associated with emotion. Neutral images did not lead to activation in this structure, suggesting this effect is due to emotional processing.
So, this summer, when you are sitting in that dark theater and wonder why you cringe when something bad happens to the main character, or why you cheer loudly when she viciously kills the bad guy, you may have some insights into why you feel such strong emotions toward completely fictitious characters. We see the world through their eyes, and we understand how and why they feel the way they feel.
So, then, why is it enjoyable to have these emotional experiences in reaction to completely fake events? That’s a question ripe for research.
Joe Magliano, Ph.D., is a Presidential Research Professor of Psychology at Northern Illinois University. He teaches courses about cognitive psychology and the psychology of language. His research focuses on how we understand narratives across different media (text, film, graphic narratives) and how we can help struggling readers.
Stephen Briner, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Sacred Heart University.
References
Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2012). Film art: An introduction (10th Edition). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 169-200.
Hodges, S. D., & Wegner, D. M. (1997) Automatic and controlled empathy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Mobbs, D., Weiskopf, N., Lau, H. C., Featherstone, E., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2006). The Kuleshov effect: The influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 95-106.
Tan, E. S. (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film: Film as an emotion machine. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zillmann, D. (1995). Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama. Poetics, 23, 33-51.
