Screen Acting and Moral Understanding

Abstract: How does screen acting contribute to moral understanding? The most influential narratological theories of characters have been predominantly formalist in nature, focusing almost exclusively on attributed personality traits, behavior, dialogue, and/or visual appearance as the primary means of determining screened beings’ expressivity. Consequently, such theories fail to account for the aesthetics of the embodied performer, relegating acting to the subsidiary function of dramatic enaction rather than a necessary component of narration. A more complete account of film or television narration must consider the poetics of performance – the means by which actors’ expressive choices enable viewer comprehension and moral engagement. Indeed, concentrating primarily on character appearance, action, behavior, and dialogue gives us an incomplete picture of a work’s moral significance. Attending to such manifest content of character representation overlooks both its enacted form and certain aspects of its latent content. Therefore it is necessary to codify some of the means by which screen acting’s material elements can lead to moral appraisal. Drawing on certain key tenets of embodied cognition, we can schematize a conceptual vocabulary that enables us to attend to an actor’s expressive body and apprehend how this physicality draws us toward (or away from) the characters they represent. Of particular interest are the moral facets of actors’ appearances, expressions, gestures and postures, movements, and voices. These dimensions fundamentally inform how we might describe an ethically laden experience, evaluate characters as moral agents, and develop an embodied responsiveness to a work’s moral solicitations.