10章原文粗
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Moral Change
Fiction, Film, and Family
Introduction
Movies—by which I mean mass-market motion pictures (including televi- sion and other popular visual media)—are primarily aimed at arousing the emotions. Indeed, many movie genres are named after the predominant emotion that it is their function to engender. For example, horror, suspense, mystery, thrillers, and weepies or tearjerkers are labeled in terms of the affect they are predicated upon raising in viewers. Comedy does not name an emo- tion, but the emotion comedies are designed to provoke can be readily iden- tified as comic amusement. Of course, no movie, in the typical run of things, is intended to evoke one and only one emotion. Rather movies are structured in order to evoke an ensemble of emotions. You approve of the hero, you hate the villain, you feel suspense as the two lock in battle, and you feel relief and thenjoy when the protagonist prevails.
The emotions are evolved mechanisms for protecting and facilitating vital human interests. Fear alerts us to danger; anger to injustice; jealousy to loss of affection; and so on. Moreover, these emotions are not only engaged on behalf of our own interests; they can be extended to others whom we regard as belonging to our circle. Theemotions are mechanisms for protecting and facilitating the vital interests and concerns of me and mine—although the mine here can be quite extensive; it can encompass the whole human race when we are attacked by intergalactic zombies.
Given their connection with interests, the emotions are obviously value laden. They may prompt us to act in such a way as to protect or to en- hance what we value. Frightened, we prepare to flee, fight, or freeze. But the emotions are not only goads to action. They also shape judgments. One might think of them as embodied value judgments or appraisals.This aspect of the emotions is especially pertinent to movie viewing,which involves audiences in a virtually continuous process of issuing moral judgments.
Philosophy and the Moving Image. Noël Carroll, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190683306.003.0010
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Moral Change 175
Moreover, inasmuch as emotions are involved in value judgments, it should come as no surprise that the emotions are connected to morality in a number of ways. Some emotions have moral values as their formal object, such as indignation. Other emotions can be put in the service of morality, for example, fear and disgust. Because of the intimate connection that emotions as embodied value judgments have with morality, we find that theemotions movies elicit are, as a matter of empirical fact, generally bound up with mo- rality. Our affection for the hero is typically based on our moral approval of what he stands for; our indignation with respect to the villain is rooted in our moral disapproval of him. Indeed, this is reflected by our ordinary language tendency to call the protagonist the good guy and the antagonist the bad guy.
Movies do not create our emotions de novo. Rather moviemakers typi- cally play on the already formed emotions which we bring with us into the screening auditorium. Likewise, inasmuch as those emotions are bound up with our morals, the moviemaker will have to depend on igniting the emotions she desires by activating our antecedent moral convictions. But, if that is so, a question arises about how it is possible for fictions in general and movies in particular to participate in bringing about moral change in the audience. How can the creators of fiction, including moviemakers, induce audiences to feel positive emotions toward objects about which they previ- ously felt either nothing at all oreven, in some cases, where they felt negative emotions, such as fear and disgust? How can audiences be led to feel indig- nant about the treatment of persons whom they were previously disposed to regard with antipathy?
That is, how is moral change possible in response to fictions in general and movies in particular? That is the question I would like to address in this paper.
To repeat: I wish to begin to answer the question of how it is possible for movies to promote moral change in audiences where the moral change in question occurs at the level of the audience’s emotional response to the fic- tion and its characters.
In order to answer this question, I will first talk a bit about the emotions, their interrelation with morality, andthe way in which moral change appears to occur outside of fiction. After that, I will turn to two cases where fictions have been designed, arguably successfully, so as to abet moral change by redirecting the emotions toward different objects. This will involve a close look at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then the movie Philadelphia. In both cases, persons culturally regarded previously as objects of disgust are transformed into objects of moral respect. I will attempt the isolate the affective strategies
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176 Philosophy and the Moving Image
that make this possible. In the last section of the talk, I will discuss the way in which these devices can be mobilized for immoral effects as well as moral ones.
The Emotions, Morality, and Moral Change
The emotions are embodied value judgments or appraisals regarding the vital interests or concerns of me and mine. With respect to fictions in ge- neral and the movies in particular, the relevant “mine” includes all those to- ward whom we are inclined to bear a pro-attitude. Arguably, these are for the most part characters who win our moral approval or who, at least, do not encourage a strong degree of moraldisapproval. One thing to note about the judgments that we lavish upon such characters is thatwe usually size them up pretty quickly. Our approval of the character typically comes in the form of feelings of moral admiration, affection, and/or alliance. Our disproval usually comes in the form of emotions of dislike, hatred, or even loathing. The disproval is almost visceral sometimes. This is especially true of mass- market movies. We make snap judgments emotively that are typically pretty reliable, although we can be tricked, as we were in the last installment of the Dark Knight franchise.1
Of course, it is no accident that we reach these snap, emotive judgments almost upon contact with these fictional characters. Fictions, including the movies, are designed to bring that about. However, we also tend to arrive at a great number of our value judgments in the ordinary course of affairs with comparable rapidity and emotional urgency. This is not to say that all of our value judgments, including our moral judgments, are on such an emotional hair-trigger, but only that a great many of them are—more than most of us would probably suspect.
The emotions are in the main automatic. They were once called passions in order to acknowledge the phenomenological impression they impart as something that happens to us. This, perhaps needless to say, is, I repeat, not always the case. We can elicit an emotional response through deliberation. Nevertheless, it is generally the case that the emotions seem to be on a hair- trigger, frequently bypassing the frontal cortex and radiating out directly
1 See Noël Carroll, “Movies, the Moral Emotions, and Sympathy” in Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Motion Pictures, and Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 85– 106.
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from the amygdala. Moreover, this is what one would expect of biological mechanisms evolved to discharge the functions of the emotions. For the emotions were evolved to protect vital interests faster than the speed of de- liberation. This is the case of the emotions in general and by extension to the emotions in the service of the morality as well as the straightforwardly moral emotions.
Each of the emotions is concerned with a certain theme which is of vital interest to me and mine. Fear is concerned with danger. Sadness is concerned with loss. Moral indignation is concerned with injustice. And so on. The emotions maybe construed as bodily alarms that go off when these themes are detected—when we are threatened, for example, or wronged. The detec- tion of these themes may or may not involve the subsumption of the stimulus under a concept. These alarms maybe set off by matching the stimulus to cer- tain perceptual eliciting conditions or eventpatterns of the sort that Ronald de Sousa calls paradigm scenarios.2 That is, whether with regard to the non- moral or the moral emotions, an emotional episode maybe provoked by the detection of a certain pattern in the stimulus as well as by the application of concept. Indeed, it seems that there is mounting empirical evidence to sug- gest that this fast-track reaction to affectively relevant stimuli is the norm.
According to Jesse Prinz, our emotions are keyed to what he calls cali- bration files—roughly records, including perceptual records, of the sorts of saliencies that caused the relevant emotional alarms to go offin the past.3 Presumably, these calibration files would also contain paradigm scenarios and even concepts. However, for our purposes, the perceptual records and the paradigm scenarios are of greater interest, since it is likely that they are the major agencies in play that account for our rapid emotional response to fictions in general and movies in particular.
For an example of the kind of ingredients to be found in a calibration, con- sider the perceptual memory of a rattlesnake. Detection of a rattlesnake in the wild will immediately elicit a reaction of fear which formost of us will be accompanied by a tendency to freeze and then withdraw. Likewise, in movies there are countless close shots of rattlesnakes which send a chill down the spines of most viewers. We don’t typically categorize the rattlesnake as dan- gerous before the emotion ignites. Matching it to an item in our calibration file for fear is enough to cause a bodily response.
2 Ronald de Sousa, Emotional Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34.
3 See Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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178 Philosophy and the Moving Image
(At this point, I hasten to add that I do not believe that Prinz’s account of the emotions covers every case. However, I think that it is likely that it covers a very large number of cases, especially with respect to many popular fictions, and notably movies.)
This account, supplemented by the notion of paradigm scenarios, argu- ably handles the largest number of instances, although not all, of emotion- elicitation in popular fictions, particularly movies. Fictioneers and moviemakers rely on our possession of certain calibration files—including perceptual memory types and paradigm scenarios—that are already in place and which can be triggered by the imagery that they present to us. The giant spider enfolds the maiden in its hairy arachnid legs, its fangs slavering, and we flinch as reliably as a smoke detector starts ringing as the fire below mounts. Popular movies and fictions, as I’ve said, typically dependfor their success on being able, by means of a sufficiently similar stimulus, to activate some perceptual memory type and/or paradigm scenario that antecedently exists in the calibration file of the typical viewer. Indeed, in some cases,the pertinent items in the calibration files of the audience may be image-types derived from prior popular entertainments, including movies.
But this then prompts us to ask how moviemakers can engineer a change in the emotional response patterns of their audiences. There is no question that it can be done. We know that it has been done in the past. Yet how is it possible? The most plausible way to begin to answer this question is to look to how emotive change—and especially emotive moral change—is possible in everyday life.
Suppose we disapprove of the behavior of a colleague whom we regard as snobbish. Other colleagues find our judgment too harsh. They argue that she is not a snob, but instead that she is shy. In effect, they are attempting to re- calibrate our perception of our colleague by connecting or associating her to the perceptual memories and/or paradigm scenarios that comprise our calibration file for our sympathy toward shy persons. Perhaps we connect our colleagues’ behavior with our own previous response to episodes in which we felt immensely intimidated.
Of course, this gestalt change does not come from nowhere. Rather it involves a calibration-file switch. But for this to succeed, there must already
be another calibration file which can be accessed in order for the recalibra- tion to obtain.
Or, to speak less jargonistically, the object of our emotions needs to be linked with another already existing set of emotion elicitors. De Sousa
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employs the useful metaphor of cantilevering. In order to add a balcony to a structure, we need to support it from a wall that already exists.4 To change an emotion requires building upon emotions and emotion elicitors (calibra- tion files) that are already in place. We can be induced to have new feelings by redeploying sentiments antecedently in our emotive repertoire. In effect we are modifying our preexisting emotional economy. Emotive change occurs by reorienting our emotional responses by associating a previously indif- ferent or aversive stimulus with a different, preexisting paradigm scenario.
A simple example of this process might be the way in which we coax a child to come downstairs andjoin the party. We try to allay her fears by en- ticing her with an alternative scenario—one that describes the fun she will have and the old friends who will be there to play with. We replace her fear with expectations based on memories of good times. Or, in technical terms, we nudge her downstairs by recalibrating her party file.
Moral change in movies, I conjecture, follows a comparable pattern. Fictioneers and moviemakers expressly work on our calibration files by supplying us with the sorts of perceptual images and/or paradigm scenarios that dispose us to relocate various persons, situations, and events from one calibration file to another. This strategy I think can be very clearly illustrated by the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and film Philadelphia. In both cases, a deni- grated group is recalibrated as an object of moral concern. In each case,this ethico-moral realignment is cantilevered by accessing the audience’s para- digm scenarios regarding family relations.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
With respect to moral change, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is probably one of the most successful popular fictions of all time. As is widely quoted, but probably apocryphal, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Is this the little woman who started this great war?” The novel, along with its various dramatizations, brought about a reversal in the moral sentiments in many audiences. Whereas previously black slaves were often the objects of disgust, they become objects of sym- pathy. For example, the Bowery Boys—the name for street toughs including
butchers, firemen, newsboys, and other working-class types, distinguished
4 De Sousa, Emotional Truth, 34.
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180 Philosophy and the Moving Image
by their red shirts, boots, and rowdiness—who had a reputation for anti- abolitionism and violence against blacks—were observed applauding fugi- tive slaves and booing slave-owners at theatrical presentations of Uncle Tom’sCabin. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, was impressed by this ver- itable reversal in working-class values. He wrote, in The Liberator, “If the shrewdest abolitionist among us had prepared a drama to make the strongest anti-slavery impression, he could scarcely have done better. O, it was a sight worth seeing, those ragged, coatless men and boys in the pit (the very ma- terial of which mobs are made) cheering the strongest and sublimest anti- slavery sentiments
5
Of course, in many cases.Stowe was preaching to the choir. However, there can be little doubt that she also was able to influence the moral sentiments of a great many of her readers. The question for us is: how did she do it? In this, she appears to have relied upon two major strategies. Both involve altering the calibration file the historical reader deployed in response to black slaves. That is, Stowe recalibrated the reader’s emotional repertoire. Rather than figuring the black slave as a mongrel subhuman, she fielded a very different sort of imagery. Those were primarily of two sorts. The first, and perhaps less interesting from our perspective, was the emphasis on the Christianity of the slaves, especially the Christianity of Uncle Tom, whose New Testament commitments are not only saintly, but pretty clearly verge on the Christlike. His whipping at the hands of Simon Legree is unmistakably reminiscent of Christ’s flogging at the pillar by Pilate’s legionnaires.
The idea here is that if black slaves are exemplary Christians—and, there- fore, children of God—then there is something evil in the brutal treatment they suffer. Christians are not animals, nor should they be treated as worse than animals. This way of recalibrating the black slave probably drew forth an indignant response from Stowe’s Christian readers. And, of course,virtu- ally all of her contemporary American readers would have been Christian. But one thing that is striking about Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that it has not only stoked the moral emotions of its American readers. It has been for most of the time since its publication a book that has stirred the moral emotions of peoples around the world.
Moreover, I think that this is due to Stowe’s second major strategy in the book. This involves emphasizing the fact that black slaves are members of
5 Quoted in David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America (New York: Norton, 2011), 145–46.
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Moral Change 181
loving families and that slavery is a system which, Stowe observes, “whirls families and scatters their members as the wind whirls and scatters the leaves of autumn
6 Again and again, Stowe describes black families only to record the heartless ways they are torn apart to be bartered on the market.
This relentlessly recurring motif begins in the first chapter of the book, in which, Stowe says, “The Reader is Introduced to A Man of Humanity
The title is ironic. The “man of humanity” is a slave merchant named Haley. He is negotiating with Mr. Shelby, who apparently, given his financial woes, has little option but to agree to Haley’s demands. Haley is, in effect, calling for the dismemberment of two slave families, that of Eliza, her son Harry, and her husband George, on the one hand, and that of Uncle Tom, Aunt Chloe, and their children, on the other hand.
Stowe is very careful to emphasize the deep affectionate ties between black family members in order to undercut callous remarks by slavers like Haley that allege, “T’ant, you know, if it was white folks that’s brought up in the ways of‘spectin to keep their children, and all that” (13). Stowe takes every oppor- tunity to stress how genuine is the family love among the slaves. By invoking the image of loving families, Stowe is able to marshal the pro-family senti- ment in the reader in such a way that the sundering of families, which Stowe represents as one of the primary features of slavery, erupts into not only sym- pathy for the slaves but indignation about their treatment.
Although I have not done a statistical analysis of the book, I would specu- late that Stowe spends more ink on detailing the ways in which slavery tears families apart than she does on the literal physical brutality to which slaves are subjected.
Of course, the book starts off addressing this aspect of slavery. Upon hearing Haley’s plans, Eliza takes her young son Harry and flees from the Selby’s plantation. Her husband, George, likewise breaks away from his master. He says, “I saw my mother put up at a sheriff’s sale, with her seven children. They were sold before her eyes, one by one, all to different masters; and I was the youngest” (117).
The family—of Eliza, George, and Harry—is a sort of Holy Family, portrayed as an exemplary, loving Christian family in contrast to the heart- less, mercenary slavers who pursue them. As Eliza leaps her way across the
6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 438. This book was originally published in 1852. Henceforth page references will be given in the text.
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182 Philosophy and the Moving Image
ice floes in one of the most famous scenes in popular literature, any reader who has either had a loving family or has wished for one is on her side, as is the case in the scene where George stands off his pursuers. The reader is on the side of the fugitive family’s flight to Canada because the slaves have been calibrated as an ideal family whose unity is sacrosanct. All threats to itsinteg- rity are thus regarded as wrong. The slaves are recalibrated under the image of the good family, or, to use de Sousa’s metaphor of cantilevering, approval and alignment with the slave family are supported by the audience’s preex- isting moral commitments to the value of the family unit.
As already mentioned, Eliza’s story is not the only one that sounds the theme of the dismemberment of the slave family. Uncle Tom’s family is being sundered as well. Moreover, as his story unravels, not only is he never reunited with his kinfolk, but a stunning number of the slaves he meets in the course of his adventures also have been victimized in the same way. At an auction, a mother begs Haley to buy her after he has purchased her son, but Haley refuses (126). Before the auction, when Haley tells Tom about men he intends to buy, Tom wonders “how many of these doomed men had wives and children and whether they would feel as he did about leaving them” (123).
Later, Tom talks to another one of Haley’s prisoners, named John, only to learn that John has been separated from his wife (127). Shortly afterward, while the prisoners are being transported on a riverboat, we learn of the slavers kidnapping the child of a woman named Lucy, who, upon discov- ering the abduction of her child, commits suicide. Tom is sold along with Emmeline and Susan, a mother and daughter, but the mother and daughter go to different owners. Cassy, Simon Legree’s mistress, who eventually revolts against him, has a backstory in which she has been cruelly separated from her children. In short, it begins to seem as though most of the slaves Tom meets have been torn from their loved ones.
Although for the most part, Stowe makes her case by showing rather than telling, there are moments when she makes the point of the recurring motif of family dismemberment explicit—namely, that the dissolution of these black families is no different than the sundering of white families would be and that whites should regard it with comparable horror. Little Eva, worrying about what will happen to his slaves should St. Clare die, says, “Papa, these poor creatures love their children as much as you do me
Indeed, the death of the saintly Little Eva and its wrenching effects on St. Clare are, I suspect, meant to portray the impact that the loss of a white child can have on a white
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father in a way that we are supposed metaphorically transfer to black parents who lose their childrenthrough the vagaries of slavery.
In Stowe’s argument, the patent evil in separating loving families is a leading premise. The argument as a whole is rehearsed by two ladies on the riverboat where Haley’s slaves are imprisoned below. One of the ladies says:
“The most dreadful thing about slavery, to my mind, is its outrages on the feelings and affections—the separating of families for example
“That is a bad thing, certainly,” said the other lady, holding up a baby’s dress she had just completed and looking intently on its trimmings; “but, then, I fancy, it don’t occur often
“O, it does,” said the first lady eagerly; “I’ve lived many years in Kentucky and Virginia both, and I’ve seen enough to make anyone’s heart sick. Suppose, ma’am, your two children, there, should be taken from you, and sold?” (128)
Every once and a while in the text, Stowe will call upon readers, but espe- cially mothers, to consider the case the slaves and their families analogously to their own case. Implicitly, Stowe is invoking the golden rule. But, of course, for that line of argument totake hold, it is necessary that white readers accept that slaves are embedded in the sorts of loving families that these readers value. That is, they must recalibrate the slaves in terms of the paradigm sce- nario of the loving family in order to call forth the indignation that goes with the paradigm scenario of the loving family being torn apart.
I began by noting that Stowe had at least two major strategies for recali- brating the response toblack slaves. There is the Christian imagery and the family dismemberment imagery. Of course, sometimes these converge, as when the integrity of the black family is explicitly connected to their being goodChristians. However, I suspect that in many countries outside of Christendom and in our own times, the family paradigm scenarios are more effective. For one of the touchstones across cultures is what has been called the ethics of community which pertains to norms of communal order; and to these communal norms will be some value bestowed on the integrity of the family, however that is construed. Thus, by emphasizing the violence done to the family, Stowe manages to touch a nearly universal ethical chord, whereas the Christian motif lacks comparable reach.
This, of course, is not to say that the Christian strategy wasn’t im- mensely effective in its own time and place. But only that the more extensive
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184 Philosophy and the Moving Image
ethico-emotional response across continents and centuries is probably due to the use of the ideal family paradigm scenario in recalibrating the audience’s affective response to the blackslaves.
Philadelphia
One conceit that Stowe occasionally employs in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a call to the reader to imagine seeing the unfolding action. For example, we are told that Tom is studying his Bible and that “there we see him now” (149). Or we encounter sentences like “Miss Ophelia, as you now behold her, stands before you” (164). It is as if Stowe thinks that if the reader can be made to visualize the story, it will function as a more vivid image in our calibration files. Of course, when we shift from novels to movies, that advantage accrues automatically.
Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme’s 2000 film about AIDS, takes up a moral project analogous to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It proposes to state the case for the homosexual male suffering from AIDS. Like the black slave in the nineteenth century, the gay AIDS victim of the twentieth century was widely regarded as an object of disgust. Philadelphia sets out to recalibrate him as an object of sympathy whose unjust treatment merits our indignation.
As you will recall, Philadelphia is the story of a gay man, Andrew Beckett as played by Tom Hanks, who hasbeen illegally terminated by his law firm because he has AIDS. He is defended by Joe Miller (as played by Denzel Washington), the kind of lawyer we call in the United States “an ambulance chaser
Although initially leery of the case, due to his self-professed preju- dice against gays, Millertakes it on and, against all odds, wins a decision of unlawful termination for Andrew Beckett. A great deal of the drama depends on the trial and the suspense that comes with that format, including the duel of wits between the lawyers, especially the brilliant tactical victories that Joe Miller, the underdog lawyer, is able to score against the substantial stellar team of lawyers fielded by Beckett’s former employers.
However, even before the trial and Miller’s impressive maneuvers in dem- onstrating his client’s case, we are already on Andrew Beckett’s side morally. Interestingly, we—and here I have in mind primarily heterosexuals—are drawn to him, not only due to his personal qualities (he seems quite decent and considerate) but more importantly due to the way in which he is inserted into what we can refer to as the paradigm scenario of the ideal family.
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We are introduced to Andrew’s relation to his family in roughly the third scene of the film. He is on the phone speaking to his mother, reassuring her that his blood work is fine—something we quickly realize is a lie intended to keep her from worrying about his condition which we learnabout in a subse- quent scene flagged as “9 Days Later
The family theme is not only developedwith respect to Beckett. As he is watching an ad for Joe Miller’s law firm during which the camera moves in for a point-of-view shot of a lesion on his neck, the film crosscuts to a scene of Joe Miller’s wife Lisa giving birth to their daughter Clarice. An analogy is set up between Miller’s family and Beckett’s. Often when Miller is making some decision with respect to Beckett, the editing associates his deliberation with images of his family. The strong suggestion is that on those occasions, Miller’s decisions on Beckett’s behalf are made because he, Miller, sees Beckett as embedded in a family and its network of affections that is not different in kind than his own family.
When Beckett visits Miller’s office in order to ask him to represent him in his wrongful terminationcase, the first thing Beckett mentions is the picture of Miller’s family on Miller’s desk, noting that he has a new girl and adding that “kids are great
Miller, who appears to be willing to chase any ambu- lance, surprisingly declines Beckett’s case. Later, at home, referring to homo- sexuality, he confides to his wife that he “can’t stand that shit
Miller is intended to be a stand-in for certain members of the hetero- sexual audience, especially males. He, and presumably many of the people he represents, are swayed or, at least, are intended to be swayed by what we can label the rhetoric of the family.
This rhetoric appears in its strongest form in the sequence which begins with home movies of the Beckett family celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Andrew’s parents, but which then merges into a present-day family con- ference about Andrew’s decision to bring his case to trial. He is asking for his family’s approval, warning them about the unpleasant publicity that is likely to erupt. The family, with almost no reservation, voices unconditional sup- port, admiration, and love for Andrew.
As we can see, the scene represents the family as almost completely behind Andrew. His brothers affirm their support and love. The only brief hesitation comes from his sister Jill, who worries about whether her parents will be able to withstand the trial. But this allows the mother and father to weigh in with their support. Andrew’s father says he is proud of his son; his mother says that she did not raise her kids to sit in the back of the bus and that he should
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186 Philosophy and the Moving Image
fight. The scene ends with Andrew saying, in 1950sTV style: “Gee Ilove you guys
The whole scene has been articulated with tearful point-of-view shots between his assembled family and Andrew.
Next there is a cut to the statue of William Penn on the top of the City Hall in Philadelphia. The trial is on, and the thrust and parry, parry and thrust of Hollywood courtroom forensics moves ahead full throttle. However, there is an interesting feature in the way that Jonathan Demme and his director of photography, Tak Fujimoto, shoot the scene. They are very careful to fre- quently include not only Andrew’s lover Miguel in the background of the shots of Andrew sitting at the plaintiff’s desk, but also his family members. One gets the feeling that part of the purpose of the extended family con- ference scene was to familiarize us enough with what his family members looked like so that we would constantly recognize them sitting behind Andrew and giving him support. Sometimes the camera will pick one of them out for special emphasis; often it is the mother. Andrew will turn to them and communicate by hand gestures; sometimes they will respond by silently but forcefully urging him on. In any event, the filmmakers go out of their way to weave the presence of the family into the trial even though, from a strictly narrative point of view, it is unnecessary. For example, there is no narrative reason that we need to be led into a scene by following Andrew’s father re-entering the courtroom from the men’s room. But the filmmakers want to remind us that the family is there for Andrew. That is, it is key to the rhetorical strategy of the film to keep Andrew’s identity as a belovedmember of an ideal family in the foreground.
When Andrew is being cross-examined, he begins to waver physically, and we see his family’s concern etched in close shots. When he collapses, they rush forward. In an overhead shot, we see his sister bent over him.
Just before Andrew takes the stand in court,he holds a costume party. His friends arrive attired as everything imaginable—as if to suggest symbolically the inclusiveness of the gay population. Joe Miller and his wife arrive. There is dancing. It is very communal. Afterward, Miller and Beckett meet to go over the trial. Instead Andrew plays him an aria, sung by Callas, about the death of a mother, and the family theme is registered in a new key. Miller returns home and hugs his daughter.Then he goes to bed with his wife and embraces her. We are led to surmise by the cutting that whatever Miller is thinking about Andrew Beckett is being processed along with thinking about his own family. This is important since Joe Miller as the heterosexual everyman has
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more than once expressed his disgust with regard to homosexuality. But that disgust appears to be dislodged by his thinking about families.
Andrew wins his case but is in the hospital on his deathbed. After the fireworks of the trial are over, the film returns to its primary emphasis on the family. Miller walks into the hospital. One of Andrew’s brothers nods and Millers winks in a return close-up. Another brother embraces Miller. Miller enters Andrew’s room, where the Beckett family is encamped en masse with his sister Jill on the bed. After Joe Miller and Andrew Beckett exchange last sentiments, there is a parade of Andrew’s family offering last words. His fa- ther blesses him and repeats his love for Andrew. The brothers and sister say their farewells, and finally the mother leans over and whispers “Goodnight, my angel, my sweet boy
There is a short scene with Andrew’s lover Miguel. Andrew dies offscreen.
But then there is a coda. There is a party in Andrew’s loft, presumably after the funeral. What is so very striking about this scene is that it is dominated by family imagery. Andrew’s parents are visible, as are his siblings, most of whom appear to have acquired children. Joe Miller and his wife arrive with their daughter in tow. An older Latino couple enters who, given their beha- vior, we infer are Miguel’s parents. Gradually the camera homes in on some children who are watching a video on a monitor. There are unmistakably home movies of children, including undoubtedly Andrew, playing. The very notion of “home movies” reminds us of families and their cherished history. Finally, the video settles on a young toddler holding a picnic basket. We as- sume it is Andrew. The image freezes.
If there is any doubt that the family is a major, if somewhat subliminal theme, of Philadelphia from the onset of Andrew’s disease through the trial, by the end of the film there can be no denying that the family was always there as a persistent, latent image. Its function, moreover, seems to be to por- tray the gay victim of AIDS in a new light—not as the object of disgust, but as a beloved member of a family. In this regard, Philadelphia, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, employs the imagery of the family to recalibrate the audience’s ethico- emotional appraisal of objects previously loathed.
Of course, Philadelphia does not mobilize the paradigm scenario of the ideal family in exactly the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin does. It does not invoke indignation at the wrongness of destroying families. Rather, it ap- peals to Andrew’s right to be treated justly not in virtue of abstract human rights but in virtue of his concrete instantiation of the paradigm scenario of the loving family. Thus, in their different ways, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
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188 Philosophy and the Moving Image
Philadelphia appear to succeed in recalibrating moral attitudes toward cer- tain abominated groups by recalibrating representatives of those groups in terms of paradigm scenarios regarding the family. In this, they show how moral change is possible in popular fictions by building on moral sentiments that are already firmly in place—by claiming, for example, justice for black slaves, on the one hand, and for diseased homosexuals, on the other hand, by cantilevering those claims on the paradigm scenarios in our calibration file for the loving family—either the one we have been lucky enough to have or the one we wish we had.
Some Concluding Remarks
In this essay, I have proposed that one way in which moral change can be engineered in movies and other popular fictions is to emotively recalibrate the targets of the desired moral sentiments in terms of antecedently positive paradigm scenarios—ones already in the audience’s ethico-emotive reper- toire. In such cases, where the audience comes to an issue with a bias (such as racism or homophobia), the fictioneer will attempt to outweigh that bias with an even more entrenched one, such as the family.
I have tried to motivate this conjecture by looking at the way in which the paradigm scenario of the ideal family is mobilized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Philadelphia. Although the deployment of this paradigm scenario is some- what subtle in Philadelphia, I admit that the examples that I have chosen are of the “grab you by the collar” variety. I would nevertheless want to defend my choice of samples on the grounds that it is more productive to begin the- orizing with simple cases before going on to more complex ones. Moreover, I should add, of course, that I think that there are more available paradigm scenarios than only that of the ideal loving family.
I also acknowledge that this process of recalibration is no guarantee that the results will always be morally desirable. There are no such guarantees with any process of moral change. Recalibration can be employed by angels or demons. Leni Riefenstahl’s invocation of community in Triumph of the Will is perhaps the most notorious instance of the latter.
However, that does not entail that audiences are at the mercy of just any invocation of a positive paradigm scenario. For once the emotion process is set in motion by the invocation of a paradigm scenario, it is still open to deliberative monitoring in light of whether or not the scenario fits with or is
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coherent with our preexisting cognitive-emotive stock. Paradigm scenarios can be resisted. For example, I think that the use of the family paradigm sce- nario invoked by Socrates in the “Noble Lie” section of Plato’s Republic is (un- fortunately) unlikely to dispose many toward moral acceptance of the reign of philosopher kings.
Lastly, I do not claim that fictions, including movies, are able to bring off moral change on their own. One does not typically see a film like Philadelphia and suddenly undergo a conversion experience. Rather such films and popular fictions are usually part and parcel of a multichanneled cultural transformation.
The cause of the abolition of slavery was issuing from many different sources already when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. That novel did not bring about single-handedly the change in sentiment that resulted in the emancipation of the slaves. Stowe’s book was one factor in a larger multichanneled cultural move- ment which it both reinforced while, at the sametime, being reciprocally advan- taged itself by finding support from the very same movement it reinforced.
This is not said in order to disparage the potential contribution of popular fictions to moral change, but only to acknowledge that, in the main, they are only one force among many convergingforces in the process of moral trans- formation. Generally, overcoming strong moral biases, like racism and ho- mophobia, requires recruiting more powerful countervailing biases—more than once and along multiple, redundant, channels of communication and feeling.7
7 The author wishes to express his gratitude to the audience at the conference on Fiction and Morality, held in Trondheim, Norway, in September, 2012. Their comments have improved this paper, but the remaining errors are all mine.
