The sounds of popping electricity and
the sizzle of a Jacob’s ladder greet you as you step into the darker corner of
The Writer’s Lens. A quick scan of the dark corner shows you are not alone, but
that a body lies on a metal gurney. Electrodes run from the body to machines.
You wonder if you have fallen into a Hollywood remake of Frankenstein.
As you step closer to the body, the
smell of formaldehyde grows with each step as goose bumps and chills run along
your nerves.
“Oh, hello!” I said as I step from a
shadow. “Please ignore the science experiment. I am just recreating a real
experiment that may have given Mary Shelley the idea for her famous horror
novel. Unfortunately, I can’t quite kill my naysayer, unlike the man who was
ramrodded in a murder trial and execution so his corpse could be used for such
an experiment. But alas, we must use the material we have. No?”
“However, you are not here to talk
about Mary Shelley or the experiments of her day into electricity. You are here
to talk about how Alfred Hitchcock created character empathy. So, pull up a
seat. Let me pour you some coffee and let us begin. Don’t worry about my
naysayer, he is bound to wait for us to finish exploring the spark of empathy.”
Please excuse the macabre humor. One
of the hardest goals of a good writer is to create reader empathy with your
character. Readers need to connect with our protagonist, antagonist, and
supporting characters in order for the story to be considered to be truly well
written or told. There are three
emotional states that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies and he had the
screenwriters work with on the script. The first one was empathy.
How do you create reader empathy for
your character? There is something called
the Hitchcock paradox, which is the phenomenon where the audience’s emotional
entanglement with a fictional character is stronger if the mental states of the
audience member and the fictional
character are less similar than it would be if they were more similar. To the
reader, as to me, this would seem counter intuitive. When I first learned of
this paradox—and there is not much written on it—the first question that came
to my mind was: “Wouldn’t I want to be putting my reader into the mental state of
my character and thus create empathy?”
The more I thought of this question
and the more interviews with the Master of Suspense I watched and read I began
to understand that the paradox is correct.
Before I go into the how, let me use a scenario to explain it using a
non-Hitchcock movie. (huge spoiler alert)
Have you ever seen the movie “What
About Bob?” If not, I recommend it highly. In this movie, Bill Murray plays a
very naive and warm hearted man (Bob Wiley) with practically every phobia that exists. Meanwhile Richard Dreyfuss plays a
psychiatrist with an (huge) ego problem (Dr. Leo Marvin). In this story Bob
needs help—lots of mental help—to become a fully functional human being in
society. If you sit back and think about his mental state, this character is
pathetic and really shouldn’t deserve our empathy. (Sympathy, maybe.) He is his
own worst enemy.
Dr. Marvin is determined to make a
name for himself. Actually, in the film he is going to be interviewed
nationally by a morning talk show. He is defining success and is finding
himself being stalked by his patient—to the point the patient (Bob) has somehow
invited himself to Dr. Marvin’s family vacation, sleeping in his house and
being everywhere underfoot. In fact Richard’s character tries to have Bob
committed and eventually attempts to blow Bob up.
This drastic attempt to kill Bob
actually cures Bob.
Sitting back and looking at this
content, this movie should be a serious dark story with a lot of sadness that
these two men should be driven as they are. Guess what? This movie is a comedy
that will evoke your empathy for these characters. How does that happen with
such serious content?
Alfred Hitchcock answers this by
telling us that content doesn’t matter. He didn’t care about content at all.
What he was more interested in was in how to build his audience’s empathetic
and emotional response. He focused on the material of the story and used it to
the greatest extent that it could be used for.
Some examples:
*
Rear Window—James Stewart’s character is a photographer. He then uses a
camera’s flash to defend himself. So you
have to use who the character to the fullest.
*
North by Northwest—Cary Grant is trapped in the auction room and can
only get out by bidding—crazy bidding. But he is in an auction room, you have
to use the auction room to its fullest..
It’s how you handle this material that
creates the emotional and empathetic response. You begin doing this by asking
yourself, what it is about the material that your reader would feel empathy for
the character? Let’s go back to Rear Window (spoiler alert).
In Rear Window, LB Jefferies
(James Stewart) is a wheelchair bound cameraman who is recovering from an
injury that occurred when taking a very dangerous photograph of a racetrack
accident while it occurred. He is involved with a woman who loves him, but he
thinks would never fit his rugged, adventure going live style. He has been a
peeping tom and discovered one of his neighbors is a murderer. The murderer
discovers what has happened and has decided to kill Jefferies to tie up loose
ends. What is the material we have here and how can it be used to build empathy
for the character?
1. Jefferies is an adventurous type
who is always on the go.
2. Jefferies is trapped in his
apartment for almost two months with nothing to do.
3. Jefferies is a photographer. As
such, he is used to “photographing the world around him” as an ultimate version
of a voyeur.
4. Jefferies doesn’t see being a
voyeur as an issue. In fact, his attitude about it makes him seem to be justified
in providing commentary on the world around him.
5. Jefferies neighbors live out their
lives in the courtyard and open apartment windows that surround his apartment.
From his window he can see their lives played out like a drama.
6. Jefferies only contact with the
outside world is his friend who is a detective (and doesn’t buy the murder story),
his girlfriend who seems more the runway model type than the adventurous type,
and a home health care provider who is determined to see Jefferies married off
to his girlfriend.
7. When he is attacked by the
murderer, he has no way to defend himself—except with his camera’s flash.
In all of this, can you see where the
empathy is coming from? As a spectator of the movie, you are not in the same
mental state as Jefferies. Jefferies is trapped. He is trapped physically by
his injury and bored out of his mind. He is trapped in a relationship that he
doesn’t see going anywhere. He is trapped by his lifestyle of world wide
adventure which is better suited to have an on/off girlfriend (or a girl in
every port) than to be “tied down” in a serious and potentially life long
relationship. His only source of interaction with his world is his rear window
that looks out onto his neighbors, who he has never met and knows nothing about
except what he observes!
As an audience member, we know what it
is like to be bored and trapped. Hitchcock and the screenwriters are feeding off
the empathetic response to being bored and trapped, folding it into the
suspense of the story like an omelet (which Hitchcock would not of eaten as he
was disgusted by eggs) and out of this comes this story of suspense and danger
where we empathize with the characters, even if the protagonist is being a
peeping tom and needs to have his head examined thinking he shouldn’t settle
down with Grace Kelly.
Hitchcock does this analysis of his
material he is working with for each of the characters in the story. It is from
this material his story is able to shine and be remembered by the audience. It
is by squeezing the material for the last usable drop that makes Rear Window
and many of his other movies classics.
Are you doing this with your stories
and poems? If not, shouldn’t you be? I know I should be and need to work on
this more with each draft of a story. As I write each of these blogs, I am
learning as I hope you are as well.
Thank you for reading
and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com and www.thewriterslens.com. You can also follow me on
twitter @Owlkenpowriter and the Writer’s Lens @TheWritersLens. Fiction is the
world where the philosopher is the most free in our society to explore the
human condition as he chooses.
