How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy Read Free Page B

that the apprehension of the bomb is more powerful than the feelings of sympathy or dislike for the characters involved. . . . Let’s take another example. A curious person goes into somebody else’s room and begins to search through the drawers. Now, you show the person who lives inthat room coming up the stairs. Then you go back to the person who is searching, and the public feels like warning him, “Be careful, watch out. Someone’s coming up the stairs.” Therefore, even if the snooper is not a likeable character, the audience will still feel anxiety for him. Of course, when the character is attractive, as for instance Grace Kelly in Rear Window , the public’s emotion is greatly intensified. 2
    If Hitchcock’s right, then we can identify with characters we deeply dislike or even find repugnant. We can’t help identifying or engaging even with Hitler when he’s about to be blown up, in spite of the fact that we find him morally despicable. If identification is imagining oneself in the fictional character’s situation, then we can certainly imagine ourselves in an evil character’s situation. After all, there’s nothing evil about the evil character’s situation .
    And, presumably, the same goes for Barney: the reason why we don’t find it difficult to identify with Barney is because this amounts to imagining being in Barney’s situation and it is Barney himself and not Barney’s situation that is evil. So this way of thinking about our attitude towards Barney would not rule out our identification and engagement with him. We have made some progress.
    Or, have we? It is possible to put oneself in someone’s shoes, even if this person is evil, provided that there is nothing evil about the shoes, that is, about the situation one imagines being in. But this does not explain the appeal of identifying with Barney. On the imagining from the inside account it may not work against identifying with Barney that he is awful, but it doesn’t explain why we are drawn to do so either. And what is striking about the reaction Barney triggers in the audience is not only that we can, if we really want to, engage with him emotionally, but that we are drawn to do so. The imagining from the inside view fails to explain why this would be so.
    5. Emotional Contagion
    An alternative to the “imagining from the inside” view is the emotional contagion account: when I see a sad fictional characteron scene, I do not need to actively put myself in her position or imagine myself being in her situation. All that happens is that I get infected by her sadness. 3
    This is a case of emotional contagion, a phenomenon we know from ‘real life’, that is from our emotional engagement with real people around us. From a very early age, our own emotional state is influenced by the emotional state of the people around us. And this influence is mainly unconscious: if, for example, faces of different emotional expressions are presented to us in a way that makes it impossible for us to become conscious of this stimulus (because they are flashed very briefly or because the stimulus is masked), it still influences our emotional state. 4 So the suggestion is that something like this happens when we are engaging with Barney.
    As emotional contagion is mainly unconscious, automatic and unreflective, we react this way emotionally to other people regardless of what we think of their moral character. Even if we know that Barney is the emotional equivalent of a scavenging sewer rat, we just can’t help feeling sad when he’s feeling sad (setting it aside that Barney, of course, never feels sad; he feels awesome instead . . .). 5 This is an automatic emotional reaction that undercuts any assessment of Barney’s moral character.
    While this is clearly part of the story when it comes to understanding how we engage emotionally with real people and with fictional characters, again,