Thursday, January 21, 2010
Hero? Should we care?
This movie has an interesting pull on the viewer. It makes them root for the "hero" when they aren't really the hero in history. As many people know, The Confederacy lost the Civil War and they are considered by most people incorrect in their decisions. Now I would never root for The South if the movie took place during the Civil War, but for some reason this movie is an exception. I can't help but to like the engineer. The comedy overrides the dislike I have for The Confederacy. Why might this happen? Does the comedy make you forget about who the hero of the movie truly is? Is it the fact that the movie portrays the north as abductors? Is it because the engineer is so clumsy and hilarious that you can't help but to like him? What do you think?
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Hmm... that's a fascinating question. I think that this might be so because we tend to empathize with the person from whose perspective we're hearing/seeing the story. We see the engineer as the positive character because we're seeing the story from his eyes, and his side of the story is that he's the good guy and he's being chased by a whole army! I think we're empathizing with the engineer because we see (and therefore sort of experience second-hand) all his feelings; the North comes out as a faceless perpetrator--and how could we ever empathize with somebody whose emotions we have not experienced?
ReplyDeleteSo, I guess as humans we're all pretty empathetic creatures: after hearing about/seeing somebody's feelings we start thinking as if we were on their side, even if in real life we would have a different opinion.
Maybe this an excessively naive way of looking at this issue? How do you think film directors exploit human nature in order to influence and manipulate audiences?
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ReplyDeleteI agree with Maya that we as an audience want to empathize with the good guy. I think that the comedy adds to our liking of the conductor because he can't help but be clumsy and still have things work out for him. The comedy in the conductor’s actions takes our focus off of which side we should rooting for. It makes us focus more on his mission of helping the army and getting the girl instead of the actual sides fighting each other.
ReplyDeleteAlso I think that it becomes somewhat of a love story because the conductor is doing all of this to get the girl, he just happens to play a major part in the war. Overall there are more sub-plots going on that it directs the audience away from the fact that the south did not win the war. Love stories and characters that are heroic in the end pull at our heartstrings in this type of movie. Therefore it does not matter who won the war, as long as the character we were pulling for succeeds. In the Last Laugh, the conductor does succeed; he gets the girl after saving her and also helped his comrades of the south. He proved himself as a character.
The General requires us to take a different perspective on history. The film was made with the intention of being viewed by pro-southerners, the filmmaker’s bias conflicts with our own (assuming everyone in our class is retrospectively pro-Union). The point of the film is the south prevailing and being shown as heroes, if we consciously reject this possibility, we miss the intended effect of the film. The easiest way to relate is to mentally flip the North and South so that the main characters are the northerners and the shadowy opposition are the southerners. I found myself doing this unintentionally during the film (forgetting that the empathy I have is for what we perceive as the “historical bad guys” and subconsciously assuming they are pro-Union) because the confederate characters (like Johnny Gray) are likable and easy to relate to, but the historical confederacy in general is not as much.
ReplyDeleteWe must also take into account that when we root for a side in the film, we root for the soldiers, not the ideas they fight for. In The General both sides consist of a bunch of guys in uniform, and their purpose is never directly stated. The two sides are ostensibly the same. Why they are fighting is implied, but we can cheer the south in this film without necessarily supporting secession and slavery.