The Aesthetic Achievement and Cognitive Value of Empathy for Rough Heroes
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The Aesthetic Achievement and Cognitive Value of Empathy for Rough Heroes William Kidder1 Accepted: 12 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
It is often said by television critics and audiences that we are currently enjoying, and have been enjoying since at least the early 21st century, a golden age of television. Programs that ushered in this golden age, in that they achieved high levels of critical acclaim, a large audience, and a certain level of influence on popular culture, include The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. These two programs, and many others that followed in their wake, share an interesting commonality: they center on what David Hume1 termed the “rough hero.”2 Though the protagonists of such programs are often referred to as “antiheroes,” we can contrast an antihero, who lacks traditional heroic qualities yet is generally depicted as being pro-social, with a rough hero, a protagonist who is explicitly depicted as immoral.3 The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, two programs that are generally seen as archetypal of this rough-hero genre, focus on, respectively, a mob boss and a drug dealer. These characters are a far cry from the morally incorruptible heroes of television history, but there is undoubtedly something about the rough hero that audiences and critics alike find uniquely compelling. In this paper, I will examine what is compelling about rough heroes on television. My goal is to present an explanation for why it is that we engage with and value programs that center on these immoral characters. I argue that the key to this explanation involves imaginative resistance and empathy. My empathy-based account of our imaginative engagement with rough heroes is meant to offer an alternative to A.W. 1
See Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Moral Political, Literary, E.F. Miller (ed.), (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987) pp. 226–250, originally published in 1757. 2 Another commonality shared by these programs is that their protagonists are male. Discussion of the role that the gender of the rough hero/heroine plays in imaginative resistance and engagement is beyond the scope of this paper. For a discussion of the asymmetry between engagement with rough heroes and rough heroines, see Andrea Clavel-Vazquez, “Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice: What Rough Heroines Tell Us About Imaginative Resistance,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 76, Issue 2, (2018), pp. 201–212 3 I take this distinction from Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), p. 182. * William Kidder [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Humanities 257, State University of New York at Albany, 1400 Washington Ave, Albany, NY 12222, USA
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Eaton’s robust immoralism, a view that also foregrounds empathy and imaginative resistance.4 According to Eaton, robust immoralism is the view that “the capacity to make an audience feel and desire things inimical to their considered views and deeply held principles is for this very reason
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