CHAPTER 26
Keith Oatley
Abstract
Most films are narrative stories about intentions and the vicissitudes they meet. Two themes of this chapter concern the emotions of people who read or watch these stories, and the psychological principle of projection. Empirically, it has been found that engagement with fictional stories, especially when they are artistic, enables people to increase their emotion-based empathy and their understanding of others. Two kinds of story occur frequently in films: stories of love and of angry conflict. Films have their own language, some elements of which must be learned. In plays and films one projects aspects of what one knows onto circumstances on stage or screen. One play and seven films are discussed to explore themes of emotion and projection, and how these relate to happiness and societal well-being.
Key Words: fiction, emotion, narrative, projection, cooperation, film
Introduction: Two Themes
Most films are fictional stories portrayed as narratives. Watching films, reflecting on them, and discussing them with others may contribute to human flourishing and to a sense of meaning and purpose across the human life span (Singer, 2004).
Two principal themes in this chapter are how we might think of the emotions of people who watch films and the psychological principle of projection. As we proceed, I will emphasize these.
Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) suggest a useful heuristic. They say that well-being (meaningful human flourishing, often thought of in terms of the theme of emotional happiness) depends on three main factors.
The largest factor is genetic. Each of us is born with a certain temperament based on a random throw of the genetic dice. Our temperament tends to continue throughout life. Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) estimate that genetics contribute about 50 percent to our sense of well-being and general happiness. Plomin (2018) cites the same 50 percent proportion of who we are, in ourselves, and says that this amount of variation among individuals, within any society, is predicted by large groups of tiny influences from DNA sequences. Extensive research on psychological genetics, reviewed by Plomin, suggests that the 50 percent proportion is approximately right.
For well-being, Lyubormirsky et al. (2005) suggest two other factors. They say that circumstance can contribute about 10 percent to well-being, and intention about 40 percent. Brown and Rohrer (2019) are very critical of these percentages. Perhaps they are correct. Imagine a married couple who decide to have a child (intention), then the child turns out to have a chronic disability (circumstance). Or think that if a war starts (circumstance) how a person’s decision to become a refugee (intention) will change this person’s life. This breakdown—10 percent, 40 percent—is based on averages, which may not always be helpful in analyzing any particular person’s case. Again, that’s where fiction can come in. Each novel or fictional movie deals with interactions between these two factors in a very individual way that can affect us emotionally, to help our understanding of the wide variety of others’ circumstances and intentions.
The focus on intention is important. Bruner (1986) proposed that: “narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions” (p. 16). He says it is a distinctive mode of human thought, about others and ourselves. So, in this mode, we come to understand intentions in the everyday world, in our lives with families, friends, and work colleagues. It’s different from the mode of thought that Bruner called “paradigmatic” about mechanisms in the physical and biological world. In the paradigmatic mode, if one watches a film about astronomy, one comes to know more about its subject matter, stars and planets. The subject matter of narrative is people.
Narrative, founded in human intentions, is the way we think about human beings and what we are up to together in the social world. An argument of this chapter is that films and other kinds of fiction are in the narrative mode, based on human intentions, with vicissitudes (some based in circumstance) portrayed, so that characters in the narrative and those who engage with it experience emotions.
There are transfers, back and forth. We use what we experience in everyday life to understand novels and movies. In the other direction, engagement in imaginative fiction improves our understandings of ourselves and those we know.
In this second direction research has shown that engaging with fiction enables us to improve our understanding of other people in the everyday world, which psychologists call theory-of-mind (Oatley, 2016; Mar, 2018a; 2018b). This research started with associations found between the amount of fiction that people read with measures of empathy and theory-of-mind. A meta-analysis of these studies by Mumper and Gerrig (2017) showed small but consistent positive effects. By subtracting out other possible influences, such as people who are more empathetic preferring to read fiction, the implication is that the causal direction is that fiction enables people to improve their understanding of others (Mar, Oatley, & Peterson, 2009).
After the initial studies, experiments were performed in which effects of reading pieces of fiction were compared with those of reading pieces of nonfiction. Some of these involved very short pieces of text, and effects of these very short pieces have not always replicated (Panero et al., 2017). There have also, however, been experimental studies of more extensive reading (e.g., Koopman, 2015), which showed that certain kinds of story can prompt pro-social behavior. A meta-analysis that included experimental studies, by Dodell-Feder and Tamir (2018), also found a small positive effect of fiction improving social cognition.
Although most studies of fiction’s effects on social cognition have been based on reading, similar effects have been found for films and other visual media. So, Mar, Tackett and Moore (2010) studied how much time preschool children had stories read to them, had watched children’s movie stories, and had watched regular children’s television. With controls for children’s age, gender, vocabulary, and parental income, time spent listening to stories from storybooks and watching movies was significantly associated with better theory-of-mind, as assessed in five tests. Watching regular children’s television (with its variety of input) had no effect. In adults, Black and Barnes (2015) showed that improved theory-of-mind occurred from watching an award-winning television series (see also Black & Barnes, 2020). In a parallel way, Green et al. (2008) found that absorption in a story (called “transportation”) happened similarly with stories told verbally or watched in films. Bormann and Greitemeyer (2015) found that people who played a video game introduced as a story improved their theory-of-mind, whereas people in a control group who were introduced to the game by asking them to attend to its technical aspects did not. So although plays, novels, films, television dramas, and video games have their own emphases, these different modes of story presentation seem to have similar positive effects on empathy and understanding others.
More people now seem to watch films and television series than those who read short stories and novels. Although they may do this to pass the time, or to escape from problems of daily life, when they do so, they are sometimes moved emotionally (Oatley, 2013), and this can prompt reflection: a step toward understanding others and themselves, a step toward well-being, as discussed in this Handbook’s Introduction (Chapter 1) by Tay and Pawelski.
Hogan (2003) analyzed stories from around the world that originated before European colonization. Three kinds appeared so often as to be almost universal. Each is based on an emotional theme. Most common is the love story, when, for instance, two lovers long to be united but are opposed by a powerful older male. Second, and almost as common, is the story of angry conflict: someone is in charge and someone else seeks to depose that person, so two people, or two sides, engage in a battle. Third most common is the story of emotional suffering in a community, which someone diagnoses and sacrifices her- or himself to save that community.
Empirically, based on reading, certain genres such as love stories and detective stories have been found to have the strongest effects in the improvement of social cognition (Fong et al., 2013), probably because to love another person one needs to understand them, and to discover “who-dunnit” involves recognition of motives, often emotion-based.
Research on how we organize films into series of events that have meaning is by Zacks (2013). In terms of Hogan’s first two kinds of stories (with two emotional themes), in Hollywood, a frequent circumstance is presented that love overcomes everything; a second frequent set of events is one of angry conflict. Because we don’t always quite understand these emotional issues in others or ourselves, we are invited to reflect. Might it perhaps be that, in order to flourish, we need and want to understand more?
Moments in the History of Film
In terms of history, here follow some steps in the development of film.
William Heise, The Kiss (1896): This eighteen-second film shows a man and a woman engaging in a kiss. It was denounced because it was disgusting for this to be seen in public, even worse for it to be seen on film. But the action of two people engaging in a kiss has continued, in the movies, to become the principal sign of love.
Edwin Porter, The Great Train Robbery (1903): The first movie constructed from scenes filmed separately and then edited together is said to have been this twelve-minute-long film. The opening scene shows a train dispatcher sitting at desk. Two men enter his office: men with guns. The film is one of angry conflict. A posse is formed. It finds the robbers and kills them in a shoot-out. The final sequence is a medium close-up of the leader of the robbers firing every round of his pistol at the camera, at us. By contrast with reactions to The Kiss, The Great Train Robbery was mainly received with respect.
In 1918, Lev Kuleshov showed that to depict an emotion in film, it’s best not to use a shot of an actor’s facial expression but instead to use two shots: one of an actor’s expressionless face and then cut to what she or he is supposedly looking at (see Mobbs et al., 2006).
Let us now see how, in 1925, an emphasis on the theme of emotion enabled the making of a famous film (in the second category of universal stories found by Hogan: that of angry conflict). This film is The Battleship Potemkin. In a 2010 review of this film I wrote that:
The Battleship Potemkin was directed by Sergei Eisenstein and written by him in collaboration with Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko. It’s a historical film that focuses on the mutiny, in 1905, of the crew of a Russian battleship against its officers, which was said to have been triggered by sailors’ objections to the rotting food they were given to eat. Really, though, the mutiny was part of a huge wave of unrest that spread through Russia at that time in response to repression by the autocratic czarist government. The unrest achieved concessions that included the establishment of a limited parliamentary system.
Psychologists who learn about film are told about apparent motion so that in consecutive frames taken by a movie camera of something moving, an image in one frame is displaced a bit in relation to the image in the previous frame. When such successive images are viewed in the cinema, this something does indeed appear to move. Herein is the perceptual mechanism of the movies. But Eisenstein suggested something in addition. It is that, with editing, there can be juxtaposition of different scenes, and this produces a new kind of effect.
Battleship Potemkin begins with shots of sailors on the battleship getting out of their hammocks, and shots of a large piece of meat being hoisted from the ship’s hold. Everyone sees that the meat is rotten. In an intertitle (in this silent film) we read what a sailor says: “The meat could crawl overboard on it its own.” Here are the next five shots, with approximate durations in parentheses (from Oatley, 2010).
1.Medium-range shot of a side of meat and a row of sailors’ faces looking away from the meat and scowling (one second).
2.Medium-range shot of the ship’s doctor, who has been summoned to declare the meat fit to eat. He removes his glasses (four seconds).
3.Close-up of doctor’s hands folding his glasses to make a double-lensed magnifying glass (two seconds).
4.Extreme close-up of doctor’s eye seen through the folded glasses (two seconds).
5.Close-up of doctor’s hand holding his folded glasses over the meat on which, without the aid of the magnifying glass, dozens of large maggots can be seen to crawl (two seconds).
So although, in this film, there is the usual effect of apparent motion, much of what’s important takes place between the shots—in the minds of viewers. Eisenstein called this effect “montage.” So film is a new language, which invites imagination. It may also be especially effective for prompting emotions (Westermann, Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1997). Film is not principally about action. It’s an invitation to audience members to engage in a meaningful flow of emotions, within themselves.
In film, one might think nothing would be easier than to have an actor depict an emotion, such as disgust. But, as Kuleshov and Eisenstein realized, it’s better to have audience members feel the emotions within themselves, by means of empathy. Bordwell (1985) wrote that in Eisenstein’s films, narration is “the process of making manifest some emotional quality of the story” (p. 130; see also Bordwell & Thompson, 2013). So although narrative films involve sequences of story-events, other sequences occur, of emotions experienced by viewers.
Cutting, DeLong, and Nothelfer (2010) measured shot lengths in Hollywood films from 1935 to 2005. In The Great Train Robbery, shots last a minute or so. By 1945, this time reduced to an average of 6.8 seconds. In succeeding decades, it reduced further to an average of four seconds, approximately the length of time that, in ordinary life, we focus our attention on one thing, then switch to the next, to understand cognitively and emotionally what goes on in our social world.
Stories of Human Lives and Intentions
Although “fiction” is a word often used for plays, novels, films, and television series, it is not quite the center. Following Bruner (1986) a better way of putting the issue is “narrative stories about human interaction.” These include not just pieces of fiction, but memoirs, biographies, and some kinds of history. So the real focus is not on etymology (“fiction,” from Latin, means “something made”), but on the content. When one comes to engage with narrative stories, one comes to know more about other people and ourselves.
Whereas a recent movement has sought to prioritize technological education at the expense of humanities, findings that engaging human stories can improve understanding of others, show that this movement gets things the wrong way around. As Tomasello (2016, 2019) and his research group have shown, we human beings are distinguished from other animals by our ability to make arrangements with others, to cooperate, and to form cultures. In cooperation with people and groups, shared goals become more important than individual goals. Of primary importance is that, for any kind of cooperation, we need to understand the other person or people involved. Improved understanding of others, that can occur by engaging with narrative life stories, in plays, novels, films, and television series, particularly of the artistic kind, which are subjects of the humanities, enable us better to join with others, cooperatively, to improve our societies, including our technologies—to improve human flourishing.
As Vittersø (2016) has argued, although hedonic emotions occur, with the experience of pleasure, these can sometimes be rather self-involved. Much more important are emotions that involve other people which, says Vittersø, can “reflect a kind of ‘complex goodness’ and are considered eudaimonic because of their ability to facilitate personal growth (interest) and civic virtues” (p. 253). In a similar way, Oliver et al. (2018) argue that there is growing research interest in how the content of films and other media enables us to look beyond our own individual concerns, to experience emotional connections with humanity and nature.
In a further kind of outcome of empirical studies of reading, narrative literature that is artistic has been found not just to enable us better to understand others; it enables us to change within ourselves (Oatley, 2016; Oatley & Djikic, 2018); these changes are mediated by the emotions of people as they read the texts. Narrative life stories that are artistic invite us to reflect, and intentionally to change ourselves, by small amounts, that perhaps can cumulate.
With a toaster, one can make bread turn into toast. Artistic stories don’t make anything happen. They are invitations that can enable us to understand others, and to change within ourselves.
The Love Story
Hogan (2003) found that the most common kind of story, around the world, was about love. It usually starts with the theme of projection: that a certain person is someone to whom a protagonist can devote her or his whole life. To understand how this works, we need to go back before the invention of film. At the age of about thirty-one, Shakespeare had the idea that to discern deeper aspects of life, especially our emotions, one needs something that we would now call a mental model. He called this model: “dream.”
The play he wrote based on this idea was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In it, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, has some juice of “a little Western flower” dripped into her eyes as she sleeps, the effect of which is to have her fall in love with the first person she sees when she wakes. This person is Bottom, the weaver, who has been turned into a donkey. He sings a little song and she says:
I pray thee gentle mortal, sing again.
Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape
And thy fair virtue’s force, perforce, doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee. (Act 3, Scene 1)
In the modern world, here’s how we might think about emotion. If you are an actor in a film, you have a script of words by means of which you depict emotion-based relationships with other characters. For emotions in our day-to-day lives, it’s the other way around. We have, within us, nonverbal emotion-scripts for several different kinds of relationships, and for each kind, as Titania did, we find words to fit.
At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare has Robin Goodfellow say to the audience:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream. (Act 5, Scene 1)
“Shadow” meant actor. In Elizabethan times, it meant both what it means today and also, then, a reflection as in a mirror. A word with which Shakespeare sometimes contrasts it is “substance,” meaning the inner being. Might understanding inner substance be enabled by presentations of certain kinds of shadows?
How Film Works: The Theme of Projection
Helmholtz (1866) showed that visual perception is the projection of our models of the world onto cues from the retinal input. As explained by Oatley (2013), as we look at the world, details of only a small patch about the size of an American quarter, at arm’s length, are available to the visual system in high resolution. Everything else is at very low resolution. Perception occurs by the visual system sampling from rapid successions of fixations from these tiny patches, to discern cues that prompt the construction and projection of mental models, such as those of objects and people, arrayed in three-dimensional space. Our conscious experience is thus based on a simulation.
Hippolite Taine (1882) put it like this:
So our ordinary perception is an inward dream, which happens to correspond to things outside; and, instead of saying that a hallucination is a perception that is false, we must say that perception is a hallucination that is of the truth. (p. 13, my translation, emphasis in original)
If we adapt this idea to film, we might say that watching a film is an inward dream, which corresponds to things suggested by the writer, director, and actors. And instead of saying that a hallucination is a perception that is false, we must say that engagement in a film is a hallucination that is of the story.
Some elements of the language of film must be learned. Sermin Ildirar (2008) studied people in a remote area of Turkey who had never seen film or television, and compared them with people who had five years’ experience of viewing film and television, and people who had ten or more years of such viewing. She showed participants film clips that included elements of the language of film: jump cuts, panning, ellipsis, establishing shots, parallel montage. People with ten or more years’ experience of film could understand the meanings conveyed by these techniques. Those with no film experience and those with only five years’ experience could not understand the meanings of jump cuts, panning, and establishing shots, but could understand the meanings of ellipsis and parallel montage.
It is not, however, that when we engage in a story that we are just carried away in a dream. What art does—and this includes artistic films—is to enable us to see the day-to-day world differently. It’s like having two eyes instead of one, or by moving a bit, being able to take two views of a certain subject. In Ingmar Bergman’s (1982) Fanny and Alexander, not far into the film, Oscar Ekdahl, the manager of a theatre, makes a speech at the theatre company’s Christmas party. He says:
I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse…. Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one so that we can understand it better.
Within each of us is a little world—an inner world; the purpose of that, too, is to reflect the big world.
In other words, what a piece of art (such as a play or a film) does is to offer us a view of the world (a kind of dream, or simulation) that is different from that which we usually perceive, so that the association of these two views can invite us to see things more deeply, as Ekdahl says, “better.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s (1958) Vertigo is about whether sexual love is projection. This film is also about how an audience projects onto the story’s events a conception that is incorrect.
The protagonist of Vertigo is Scotty, a San Francisco detective. The film starts with a roof-top chase (intention) in which Scotty slips and hangs by his fingers on a gutter (circumstance). A colleague tries to rescue him, but slips and falls to his death. Scotty is rescued. Traumatized, he retires from the police with an emotion-based phobia for heights. A college friend, Gavin Elster, asks Scotty to keep watch on his wife Madeleine who, he says, has been suffering mental absences, and seems to be possessed by her great-grandmother, Carlotta, who killed herself. Scotty falls in love with Madeleine and rescues her when she throws herself into San Francisco Bay. Madeleine tells Scotty she’s had recurring dreams of a place with a white church and bell-tower, where she has never been, but which is connected with Carlotta. It’s a Spanish mission 100 miles south of San Francisco. He thinks that, if she goes there, she will be freed from her suicidal impulses. They drive there and declare their love for each other. Then Madeleine runs up the stairs of the bell tower. Scotty tries to follow her but, because of his phobia of heights, cannot mount the stairs. Through a window he sees what he thinks is Madeleine’s body hurtling down, then sees her lying dead below.
What has really happened is that Madeleine (a woman hired by Elster) has run upstairs in the bell tower, where Scotty cannot bring himself to follow. Elster, who is up there, throws his wife, whom he has killed—clad in the same grey suit that Madeleine wears—from the top of the tower. When we viewers see this, it’s the turning point in the film: our model of the story world changes. For Scotty, the world changes again when he meets someone called Judy, who reminds him of Madeleine, so that he projects his erotic longing onto her.
Vertigo substitutes for our first projected interpretation of events a different one, of a crime that we did not know was being planned. An artistic aspect of this film is the question of whether projection of erotic fantasies may sometimes involve something in the nature of a crime.
Art
Collingwood (1938) proposed that an artist is strongly moved by an emotion which is important, but which she or he does not yet understand. A work of art is an expression of this emotion in a language, such as words, music, painting, or film. Its externalization, in this language, enables the emotion to be explored. Readers, listeners, or viewers, then, can also take part in this exploration, and come to understand the emotion better. According to this hypothesis (presented at more length by Oatley, 2003), we go to movies to be moved, and to understand our emotions more deeply.
Novels and short stories that seem to have the largest effect on enabling us to understand others are artistic. For many films we can say the same. Other kinds of films, which concentrate on displays of violence, can have an opposite effect, of promoting hostility to others (Bushman, 2016).
For artistic films, one can hardly do better than those of Yasujiro Ozu, for instance his 1949 film, Late Spring. In it, the twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives happily with her widowed father, a university professor. Her aunt persuades Noriko’s father to press Noriko to marry. Here the theme of projection is that the aunt and the father both project their desires onto Noriko. Late Spring invites us to put ourselves into the mind of Noriko. By artistic means that include gaps between scenes, we come to think of what marriage means for her. Because our interpretations of Noriko’s face are experienced one at a time, they are like cuts between shots—juxtapositions of different aspects—linked to our mental model of her, and to the emotional progressions of the story. Our interpretations take place in our minds, as spectators, not on the screen. We viewers experience our own emotions, as we have taken on Noriko’s goals and intentions. We remain ourselves but, metaphorically, also become Noriko.
Love need not involve projection. In Sarah Polley’s (2006) film Away from Her, Fiona is married and getting old; she starts to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease (circumstance). She decides (intention) that she should leave home, and live in a retirement facility, where she can be looked after. With the progression of her dementia, we viewers see Fiona’s husband, Grant, experiencing the person he loves moving away from him. Polley, who adapted her film from a short story by Alice Munro, wrote: “I had thought when I finished reading it the first time, that with all of this fictional marriage’s failures, this was perhaps not the greatest love story I’d ever read, but the only love story I’d read” (2007, p. xv). Grant had not been the most loyal husband. Twenty years previously, he’d had extramarital affairs. Now he’s almost forgotten them. So there’s a delicate balance, with a certain irony, which we viewers experience, between this kind of forgetting, and Fiona’s demented forgetting as she goes to live in the retirement home.
Art, including the art of film, can be thought of as an invitation to become thoughtful, reflective, human beings who, by experiencing emotions that relate empathetically to other people, can improve their theory-of-mind, sometimes by reducing unhelpful projections, and increasing abilities to cooperate. In this way, artistic fiction can contribute to society in ways that, perhaps, enable more people in society to flourish.
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