Jonathan Frome: Representation Reality
Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media
We read fiction because we enjoy the emotional responses it generates. Through fiction, we can delight at a clever and subtle use of language, deeply sympathize with characters, or marvel at a plot twist. Even tragic stories are, in some sense, enjoyable. Feelings motive us to engage with other dramatic media as well: we go to the theater, watch films, and play videogames in large part to feel emotions. Yet, the wide variety of media and the emotions they generate challenge our ability to understand exactly how media generate emotions. In this paper, I argue that current theories are inadequate for most fruitfully understanding our emotional responses to artworks. I propose an alternate theory that suggests we can understand our emotional responses to art by integrating a multi-level theory of mind with an analysis of the key differences between representational media and reality. Based on this theory, I present a model of emotion that can both describe our affective responses to a wide variety of representational media and help us compare different types of media in terms of their ability to generate emotions in different ways.
I. Current Theories of Emotional Response
Imagine that you are holding a lottery ticket, looking intently at it, and listening to the winning numbers announced on TV. Number after number matches, and when the final number, 'fifteen', matches your final number, you have won millions of dollars. You look up at the TV screen, and you suddenly realize that what you heard as 'fifteen' was actually 'fifty'. You have won nothing. Your overwhelming positive feelings are quickly replaced with a strong sense of disappointment. This scenario helps us understand the common-sense notion that our emotions are based on our beliefs about the world. You were thrilled when you believed that you had won the lottery, but when you came to believe that you had lost, your positive emotions quickly changed to disappointment.
The role of beliefs in emotion gives rise to a central question about fiction. Why do we respond emotionally to fictions when we don't believe that their contents refer to the real world? When you read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you feel great sympathy for the protagonist, and, if you find the novel moving, you are very sad when she dies. But you don't believe that there is or was a person named Anna Karenina, and you don't believe that Anna Karenina is an account of actual events. Given that you don't believe in the narrative, why should you respond emotionally to it? When you stop believing that you won the lottery, your happiness disappears. Why doesn't your sadness disappear when you attend to your lack of belief in the reality of Anna Karenina and her situation?
Two theories that attempt to explain this apparent paradox are the illusion theory and the pretend theory.1 Both are based on the premise that emotions are caused by beliefs. The illusion theory holds that when we engage with fiction, we are temporarily under the illusion that what we are seeing or reading about is real. Readers or viewers have emotional responses to Anna Karenina because, in some sense, they do believe in its reality. Unfortunately, this theory does not seem to accord with our experience of fiction. Consider someone watching the film Alien (1979) and being terrified of the film's alien monster. The illusion theory would hold that the viewer is scared because as she watches the film she, in some sense, believes that the alien is threatening and dangerous in reality. But if she truly believes that the alien is real, even temporarily, we would expect her to run out of the house and call the authorities to report the horrible deaths she just witnessed. She does not. Her lack of action precludes the explanation that she is under an illusion that the film is real and thus undermines the viability of the illusion theory.
The pretend theory holds that the viewer does not believe that the alien is real; she knows that it is fictional. Therefore, she cannot really be scared, because people can only be scared of things that they believe might actually hurt them. More broadly, since it is absurd to think that we actually believe in fictions, the pretend theory claims that our emotional responses to fiction are not really genuine emotions. Rather, they are part of a game we play with fictions. When we read a book or see a film, the theory claims, we engage in a game of pretend, much like children playing cops and robbers. Just as the children might pretend a cardboard box is a car, a film viewer pretends the images and sounds of the film are actually a threatening alien. The viewer's heart races, she thinks of the awful things the alien might do to her, and she screams. But this reaction is a response to her imaginative make-believe, rather than a genuine fear.
The pretend theory is unsatisfying because it conflicts with our intuitions about how we read books or watch films. We do not consciously pretend to feel emotions, and what we feel feels real. The pretend theory attempts to address these problems by positing that the viewer's pretend fear is involuntary and feels just like real fear. Posed in this way, the pretend theory offers a seemingly viable explanation of how we can feel emotions in fictions: what we think of as real emotions are not real, they are pretend, so they can plausibly be generated without belief in the things that inspire them. Yet this theory raises as many questions as it answers. When children sit in a box and pretend to be driving a car, their pretense is voluntary. Indeed, part of the concept of pretense is that the person pretending is consciously choosing to treat one thing as another. The notion that the film viewer is involuntarily pretending seems to stretch the meaning of pretense past its limits. Further, pretending is an activity that seems to invite wide variation. One child may pretend that the cardboard box is a car, while another pretends it is a fort, an oven, or a stage. In contrast, when faced with a horror movie, almost all viewers pretend to be scared of the alien. None pretend to be proud of the alien or in love with it. The pretend theory cannot explain why viewer responses based on games of make-believe would have so little variety.
The illusion theory and the pretend theory are both based on the notion that emotions rely on beliefs, yet they explain our responses to fictions through opposite strategies. The illusion theory holds that since we have emotional responses to fictions, we must believe in them. In contrast, the pretend theory states that since we do not believe in fictions, our emotional responses to them cannot be genuine. Since neither theory appears plausible, we may need to reject the premise on which both are based: that real emotions can only be generated by beliefs. Rejecting this premise is the central feature of philosopher Noël Carroll's theory of emotion and art, which he calls the thought theory.2 Carroll argues that emotions can be generated just by the thought of things, even if we do not actually believe in them. Carroll gives the example of vividly imagining that we are on the edge of a dangerous precipice. If we actually visualize this scenario, we can be genuinely scared by it even if we believe that we are firmly on safe ground. The thought theory can begin to explain the initial question of how we can be emotionally moved by fictions. On this theory, we can be made sad by just the thought of Anna Karenina dying; we can be scared just by the thought of a monster, without believing that it is actually a threat.
Unfortunately, the thought theory does not fully explain the scenarios described above that motivated the question of why we respond emotionally to fiction. If the thought theory is true, why are we not just as happy with the thought that we have won the lottery as with actually winning the lottery? Why are we not just as upset with the thought of a friend dying as we are by his actual death? Carroll provides no answer. The thought theory is also unable to answer two key questions about how we respond to media. First, why does the way an artwork is presented affect our response to it? Our response to Alien will be very different if we see it on a small portable DVD player than if we see it in a large IMAX theater. Yet both presentations prompt the same thoughts about the horrible deaths of the crew on the Nostromo, so according to the thought theory we should expect the same emotional responses rather than varied responses. A second unanswered question is, why do different media excel at generating different emotions? I think the premise of this question is intuitive, but I will motivate it with a few examples. Literature excels at generating rich characters with full mental lives. This is not to say that film cannot portray rich characters or that all literature does this, but literature seems to be best at this task. Our examples of characters who have a full, complex psychology that seem to approach the depth of real people come overwhelmingly from literature. Film excels at presenting exciting action sequences. Of course, literature can also have intense action scenes, and a brilliant painting may be able to evoke a sense of intense action, but films are advantaged in this task. It takes an exceptional book or painting to arouse the reader or viewer into an excited state through a depiction of action. Yet a second-rate Hollywood action film can do it easily. Or consider the emotion of regret. Can a film make you feel regret? Yes, in rare cases. A film might stir regret by reminding you of the romantic partner you let get away. But videogames excel in generating regret; it is common for gameplay to be punctuated with regret as the player realizes that different choices could have resulted in victory rather than defeat.
The thought theory does not help us understand why different media have different strengths in generating emotions. The concept of the alien in the film Alien and the book based on the film is the same, but our emotional responses to the two media are different. The failure of the thought theory to explain these features of our engagement with artworks suggests that we need a different, more nuanced theory.
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