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Films

Rope

Les Jones has a Nietzschean take on a Hitchcock thriller.

It’s shrouded by darkness, but it is there: the tear that wells in the eye, then slowly rolls down the cheek, silently drops and splashes into the already soggy bag of popcorn on the cinema-goer’s knee.

Cinema can often create this ‘sadness’ effect on people – as well as elation, excitement, or magic. But why? This is known in philosophy as the paradox of fiction: how can we experience genuine, sometimes powerful, emotions towards characters that we know perfectly well are not real?

Often such emotions arise from movie directors’ deliberate cultivation of their audience’s propensity for sympathy or empathy. This raises questions about manipulation or emancipation, and about the ethics of storytelling. As that tear in the eye tells us, film is far from passive.

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