A Glance Askance

How we identify with characters without knowing it

While it is true that most readers today like to identify wholly with the heroes of the tales we read and watch and hear, this is not the only way to do so.

The thought occurred to me while watching on DVD the 1951 British film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. The tale would like to be one of immortal passion, larger than life, a love story for the ages. ‘Pandora’ is played by Ava Gardner, still near the peak of her young beauty, and the Flying Dutchman of legend is played by James Mason, still in the brooding, tempestuous, dark lover phase of his career. The tale is handled at a distance; for one thing, the whole thing is told in flashback, narrated by the one man who knew the whole truth. This onscreen narrator stands beside us but also between us and the lovers, as we only approach them through him, what he knows (in large measure, though this rule is violated in key scenes the narrator never witnessed) and sees. The writer/director, Albert Lewin, also shows us point of view shots, though rarely (never?) of the lovers — rather he tells his tale in a fractured fashion, in the way I call the Pivot of Highest Drama. (This is when the talesman takes us as close as he likes to whatever character who at that point in the tale is in greatest danger, gravest temptation, deepest conflict. Wherever the point of greatest suspense lies at that moment, the talesman will go toward it.)

This tendency to show more intimately the minor characters rather than the major ones, undermines our ability to identify with either of the lovers. And yet we are given information known only to them, or only to them and the Narrator, and the subject of the tale is clearly their doomed and glorious love.

What then are we supposed to feel at the movie’s end? The final image is most curious: at the beginning of his narration of the flashback, and in a few scenes during the flashback, the Narrator is re-assembling an antique Greek vase, piece by piece. At the movie’s end he glues in place the final piece, and we hear his voice over the image proclaim, ‘The last piece is in place.’ This leaves us with at best an appreciation of the craftsman who has told his tale, piecing it together out of old fragments of lost masters. There is some humility, perhaps, in Lewin ending his movie this way. Maybe in this final scene he is apologizing for having proved unworthy of his theme.

If we are to feel anything from the experience of watching the movie, then, it will not come from diving into the role of one of the doomed lovers. Lewin won’t allow that. He treats them in a more dramatic, external, theatrical way, and this is the key to how we might, if we could, feel the joy and tears of identifying with these lovers.

On the stage, we cannot identify with any of the roles ‘immersively’ as we can in the ‘fictive dream’ that an intensely subjective narrative allows. We sit at a remove, we see the actors through the heads of other theater-goers, and everything happens ‘down there’ on the stage. There are no dramatic, huge close-ups or point-of-view shots, as movies can give us, to swallow us up in one of the characters.

Instead, we identify in an oblique way, underground, as it were, in our heads. What I think we do in these cases, is the following:

Connect the situation the hero undergoes with some similar situation we have endured in our own lives, then feel freely for the hero what inhibitions prohibit us from feeling about ourselves.

We cannot become either Pandora or the Dutchman, but we can empathize with their situations, and believe ourselves capable of so grand a passion that we would give up our lives, or our salvations, to appease it. We can recall some lost love of our own past, and think in a flash, which maybe we barely glimpse, ‘What wouldn’t I give to have another chance! I loved no less, and no less deeply, than they!’

This kind of ‘oblique identification’ or the Glance Askance, must lie at the heart of the catharsis Aristotle identified as being the chief emotive enjoyment of tragedy.

I believe this glance askance needs some elements in the tale in order to work.

1. The setting and other elements of the tale must be Earthereal, or at least half-way into shadows, penumbral. For such a setting touches upon the underground of our own minds, in the archetypal realm.
2. The characters must be larger than life, elemental, primitive or at least primeval. They are more types than the sort of characters we could imagine meeting in the grocery store. The characters are archetypes and represent emotional states, states of different ages in the life-span of Man, or the ‘humours’ of medieval conception, or the Five Types of Spirit in Chinese traditional psychology. Such characters are more easily lain over our own histories, as we wish we could imagine we were at such and such a point in our past.
3. The movement of the plot should be simple, and not complex. For too many twists and turns in the plot clutter up the tale in our minds, confuse us, distract us with ‘noise’ away from apprehending and focusing on the ‘signal’ of the tale at its heart. The great tragedies, and the great love tales of our histories, are always simple — too simple, indeed, to pass for a modern tale (and this is the point).
4. Ordinary, or ‘lesser mortals’ are helpful in the tale. These fulfill a few functions: first they contrast with the high, glorious characters, and thereby throw the heroes into starker relief. Second they allow us in the audience a middle ground, a way to approach the heroes. Third these lesser characters may well serve as Narrators of the action. Fourth they act as helpers and servants and go-betweens for the great characters. Fifth, in the way the Great look upon these lesser lights, they tell us how to regard the heroes, how we should feel about them. Sixth, the ordinary folk of the tale are around at the tale’s end to pick up the pieces, and resume daily life, for it is often the case that tales such as this are tragedies, and the heroes, like the lovers in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, quite often end up dead in some glorious way, or shattered like Oedipus.

Ending with the lesser mortals of the tale allows us in the audience a moment or two, before the house lights come up, to dry our eyes, control our sniffles, take ourselves in hand. For if the tale has had its way with us and succeeded, then we will have thrown our hearts in with great passion, and (often) lost; we are upset, adrift, lost. The ordinary folk or narrator who picks up the pieces and begins to make a new order of things, sets us in the audience also on the road to our former balance, at least so far that, when the lights come up, we can look one another in the eye and pretend that all is well.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, 3 July 2008)