I certainly wouldn't say there's any encouragement to identify with the villains in the movies I discussed, if only because they tended to be repellently nonhuman--sometimes little more than a writhing mass of tentacles. How does one identify with that?
One of my responses went as follows:
Identification need not always connote one's sense of participation in a given character's bodily reality, although when speaking of erotica, that would be the natural assumption. It's equally possible to identify with a nonhuman creature, or even an inanimate phenomenon, by identifying it as an expression of a particular will to do something within the sphere of a narrative.
Most of my response in the essay dealt with the reader's potential for identification with various negative narrative presences, ranging from tentacled demons to dead girlfriends to "phenomena that don't really have benign or malign intent." Their effects within a narrative are all different from one another, but they would seem to share one factor: that it's difficult to imagine the reader investing any personal emotion in them-- which seems to have been Curt Purcell's yardstick for identification.
My current insights regarding identification, as well its consequences for gauging a narrative's centric will, don't invalidate anything I've written on these subjects to date. However, the revelation that identification has two distinct and often complementary aspects may serve to clarify the gulf between what Curt thinks (or thought) about identification and what I think about it.
The two complementary aspects I'll now label *investment* and *fascination.*
In a sense I've indirectly addressed these aspects of identification when I began writing about the centric will in two manifestaitons: the exothelic and the endothelic:
...I defined the philosopher's idea of "Will" as "the radical root of all literary activity." This means that, no matter what sort of viewpoint character the author may choose, he may focus as easily upon the "will" within the viewpoint character (or on some figure allied to him, or an ensemble of such characters), OR upon things, people, or phenomena that are perceived as "the other" to the viewpoint character's will.*Investment* is the form of identification that the reader experiences when the author has organized his narrative around some focal presence that the intended reader can engage with in a generally sympathetic manner. This does not necessarily mean that the reader endorses everything that the focal presence may think or do-- Humbert Humbert comes to mind here-- but nevertheless, the reader invests himself by participating in the focal presence's way of relating to the world.
*Fascination* better describes the form of identification the reader experiences when the focal presence is perceived as "the other" to the viewpoint character's will. This narrative strategy-- for which I cited EVIL DEAD as an example-- does not ask the viweer to invest any sympathies, critical or otherwise, with the entity that embodies the centric will of the film. Indeed, the film's demonic entities evoke fear because the viewer does not what to make of them or what they will do next. However, as the film progresses, and the viewer gets scraps of new information about the Evil Dead, the viewer becomes somewhat more fascinated with their alien nature, for all that he never really participates in it. This process of fascination becomes so pronounced that the characters in whom the viewer can invest sympathetic emotion, the victims of the Evil Dead, are soon subordinated to the film's monstrous entities. Patently, this is the reverse of what happens in many "investment' narratives, where the reader rejects everything about the protagonist's enemies and their will proves subordinate to that of the main focal presence or presences.
However, a crucial further insight is that investment and fascination can work together in coordinated harmony. In my review of EVIL DEAD II, I noted how Ash Williams, who in the first film is the last human survivor of the Deadites, becomes a force to be reckoned with:
EVIL DEAD 2 is certainly a much better film than its precursor, and a lot of that can be credited to Raimi's decision to give Ash a more slapsticky vibe, up to and including quotes from Three Stooges routines. Still, the improvement in Ash didn't extend to any of the other characters, who were just as much throwaway cannon-fodder... The film's highlight is Ash's decision to fit a chainsaw onto his missing hand, which is almost as much of a grabber as his final confrontation with the main demon.The viewer hypothetically starts out the film investing some emotion in Ash as a sympathetic character, who seems to have no advantages that will keep him from becoming "cannon fodder." However, his maniacally comical struggle against his own demon-possessed hand-- which he lops off to keep it from infecting his whole body-- moves the viewer's identification in another direction. Suddenly, it is Ash, not the malignant demons, who takes center stage, and his later feat of suturing a chainsaw to his arm makes his will even more fascinating. Thus the process of fascination becomes coordinated with the process of identification, so that Ash becomes the embodiment of the film's centric will and the Deadites become subordinate presences.
To be sure, most serial narratives don't change their centric will so suddenly from one installment to the next. Superman and Batman inspire both investment and fascination from their first adventures to their last. Fu Manchu never allows for full sympathy but the fascination of his character overrides the investment process represented by his goodguy enemies. And, as I've often noted on this blog, Frankenstein and his creation sometimes coordinate with one another in terms of the level of fascination they inspire, and sometimes one is subordinate to the other, usually in the same pattern as Fu Manchu: where "the other" proves more interesting that the familiar.
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