SCREENING CHARACTERS

Characters are central to our experiences of screened fictions and invite a

host of questions. The contributors to Screening Characters draw on archival
material, interviews, philosophical inquiry, and conceptual analysis in
order to give new, thought-provoking answers to these queries. Providing
multifaceted accounts of the nature of screen characters, contributions are
organized around a series of important subjects, including issues of class,
race, ethics, and generic types as they are encountered in moving image
media. These topics, in turn, are personified by such memorable figures
as Cary Grant, Jon Hamm, Audrey Hepburn, and Seul-gi Kim, in addition
to avatars, online personalities, animated characters, and the ensembles of
shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.

Johannes Riis is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University

of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on issues of film acting,
including a monograph (Spillets kunst: Følelser i film); articles in numerous
journals and anthologies, including Cinema Journal, Projections, and The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. A member of the Board of Directors
at The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image since 2005, he is
currently writing a book on film acting styles between 1920 and 1980.

Aaron Taylor is Associate Professor of New Media and a Board of

Governors Research Chair (2019–2023) at the University of Lethbridge. He
is the editor of Theorizing Film Acting, and his essays on performance have been
published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Cinema Journal,
Velvet Light Trap, [in]Transition, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Journal of Film
and Video, Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Vol. 2, Make Ours Marvel, Millennial
Masculinity, Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture, and Stages of Reality.
Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series
Edited by Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe
Documentary Testimonies
Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker
Slapstick Comedy
Rob King and Tom Paulus
The Epic Film in World Culture
Robert Burgoyne
Arnheim for Film and Media Studies
Scott Higgins
Color and the Moving Image
Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins
Ecocinema Theory and Practice
Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt
Media Authorship
Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner
Pervasive Animation
Suzanne Buchan
The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture
Tom Brown and Belén Vidal
Cognitive Media Theory
Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham
Hollywood Puzzle Films
Warren Buckland
Endangering Science Fiction Film
Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell
New Silent Cinema
Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo
Teaching Transnational Cinema
Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett
Fantasy/Animation
Edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant
Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm
Mark Garrett Cooper, Sara Beth Levavy, Ross Melnick, and Mark Williams
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
SCREENING CHARACTERS
Theories of Character in Film,
Television, and Interactive Media

EDITED BY

JOHANNES RIIS AND

AARON TAYLOR
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 American Film Institute

The right of Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor to be identified as the

authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-39182-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-42250-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Spectrum MT
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 contents

list of figures viii

acknowledgments x
foreword: consorting with characters xi
murray smith

introduction: screening characters 1

johannes riis and aaron taylor

part one
the importance of actors 17
1. seeing and hearing screen characters: stars, twofoldness,
and the imagination 19
ted nannicelli

2. character and the star vehicle: the impact of casting

cary grant 37
kathrina glitre

3. character collaborations: the writer–actor relationship

in mad men 55
r. colin tait

part two
social types, social contexts 75
4. being typical and being individual 77
henry bacon

5. the mark of the social: stereotypes, folk psychology, and

metonymy in mainstream film 93
tico romao
 6. racialized disgust and character in film 110
dan flory

part three
medium-specific features and constraints 127
7. impossible characterizations 129
paisley livingston
contents

8. performative metamorphosis: animated characters and

spectator proximity 143
pete sillett

9. social media as interface, or how characters enter our

everyday reality 160
philippe gauthier

10. owning our actions: identification with avatars

in video games 174
andreas gregersen

part four
emotional and moral engagement 189
11. ethical criticism and fictional characters as moral agents 191
carl plantinga

12. absorbed character engagement: from social cognition

responses to the experience of fictional constructions 209
katalin bálint and ed tan

13. “familiarity breeds contempt”: why fascination, rather

than repeat exposure, better explains the appeal of
antiheroes on television 231
malcolm turvey

part five
the character within genre 249
vi
14. girls who can leap through time: shojo and time travel in
east asian media 251
jinhee choi

15. action and affordances: the action hero’s skilled and

surprising use of the environment 266
birger langkjær and charlotte sun jensen
16. introducing characters in television crime series: stylistic
and narrative strategies 284
lennard højbjerg

about the contributors 304

about the american film institute 309
index 311

contents

vii
 foreword: consorting with characters
murray smith
“If people are, like, knowing my movies thirty or fifty years from now,
it’s going to be because of the characters that I created.” So said Quen-
tin Tarantino upon accepting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for
Django Unchained in 2013. The following year, BBC Radio ran a “character
invasion” event comprising new performances and rebroadcasts of radio
shows featuring memorable fictional figures, interviews with writers and
other public figures discussing their own character fascinations, as well as
mockumentary-style encounters between well-known (fictional) charac-
ters and (actual) broadcast journalists—Lynda Snell (Carole Boyd) from
The Archers (1950–) calling into Anita Anand’s talk show, advocating for
parish councilors to be empowered to issue on-the-spot fines for antisocial
behavior (“We’re such a force for social good, you see”). Jumping ahead to
2016, discussing her admiration for John Le Carré in relation to helming
The Night Manager, director Susanne Bier commented: “His books are clear,
straight, fantastic thrillers with plots and turns and all the things that clas-
sical thrillers have . . . yet their characters are also deeply psychologically
morally ambiguous and not predictable. I thought, ‘I should be doing that.’
I do like plots, but I love those kinds of characters.”1 This is just a sampling
from a three-year window: our traffic with characters is constantly throw-
ing up events of a similar nature. In their indefinitely varied forms, charac-
ters are ubiquitous in our encounters with fiction—quite simply because
characters embody our deep fascination with human agency.
Our ongoing love affair with imaginary figures as diverse as Lynda Snell
and Jonathan Pine, Django Freeman and King Schultz, Alan Partridge and
Tony Soprano, Alicia Florrick and Walter White, makes salient a notable
disparity between the popular embrace of engagement with character as
a central feature and reward of fiction, and the pronounced academic sus-
picion of character, as a supposedly naïve object of fascination. Suspended
in the detached glare of structuralism, reduced by Roland Barthes to the
formula that a character is merely a bundle of semes, and then radiated by
deconstructive ideas—the idea of character was pretty much killed off in
literary, film, and cultural theory.2
In theory, but not in practice, and not in ordinary discourse. Fascina-
tion with character never disappeared from ordinary interaction with
 fictions—it was always hiding in plain sight—and in recent years it has
made a comeback in academic debate, with a number of theorists attempt-
ing to make sense of the phenomenon rather than sending it to the back of
the class. The volume now in your hands is evidence of the resurgence and
richness of contemporary debates around character, in relation to motion
picture and other media. The Beeb’s character invasion is just one of many
indications that our love of fictional character endures whatever skepti-
cism is thrown at it. The invasion metaphor is instructive: characters are
foreword: murray smith

mere figments of the imagination, but they enter into our thinking about
and dealings with the actual world in a remarkably fluid way. We can talk
for long stretches about characters using exactly the same language as we
do in relation to persons. We analyze our own selves and the personalities
of others through the filter of character, noting points of similarity and
difference between our real neighbors and their fictional counterparts, and
we wonder how we might react in the circumstances in which these char-
acters are placed. A product of the imagination, character is nevertheless
integral to ordinary life; this is one way in which we can see that aesthetic
experience is anything but quarantined from regular existence.
Of course, as with just about any routine activity, the fascination with
character can turn pathological, as when individuals confuse actors with
characters and bestow upon fictional characters the power to intervene
concretely in our world. “The curious thing is how many people there
are in the world who are perfectly convinced that [Sherlock Holmes] is
a living human being,” Arthur Conan Doyle once remarked. “I get let-
ters addressed to him, I get letters asking for his autograph, I get letters
addressed to his rather stupid friend, Watson—I’ve even had ladies writing
to say that they’d be very happy to act as his housekeeper.”3 One might
wonder if Conan Doyle was right to take such behavior at face value,
however. Everyday engagement with characters may be tinged with this
darker hue now and then, but in general we have no difficulty tracking
fictional entities even as they dart in and around real entities, and many
of the pleasures of character depend upon this robust recognition. If we
didn’t instantly recognize Lynda Snell for the character she is—or at least
that she is a character—as she harangues Anita Anand, chances are we’d
be irritated rather than amused. The peerless Down the Line (2006–2013)—
hosted by another star of the character invasion, Gary Bellamy (Rhys
xii Thomas)—caused a bit of a stir by presenting itself initially as an actual
call-in show. The fact that this ruffled the feathers of some listeners under-
lines the norm that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction needs
to be treated with care, even when we play with, on, and around it. Of
course, any careful listener would have quickly detected the telltale signs
of parody, and now that the nature of the show is known, the initial (and
delightful in its own way) frisson of doubt is supplanted by an appreciation
of the show’s masterly mockery of call-in types and clichés.
 In his comments on the importance of characters to his works at the
2013 Oscars, Tarantino also underlined the significance of the contribution
of the performers taking on and embodying the scripted roles:

You know I’ve been saying things like, “I want to thank

the actress for what they’ve done”—when it comes to my
script. It’s not just an easy thing to say—it really is why I’m
standing here. . . . I have to cast the right people to make

foreword: murray smith

those people [i.e., the written characters] come alive and
hopefully live for a long time. And boy this time, did I do it!

Tarantino rightly praises his performers for their skill in elaborating his
characters through performance, but his remarks also underline the “two-
foldness” of character in the performing arts—the fact, a central concern
for many authors in the current volume, that we attend at once to the
character and to the actor or actress embodying the character; a quality
most obvious when that performer is a star bearing a freight of associ-
ations and a history of roles in other works and of actions in the public
mediasphere.4
Not that stardom is the only context in which the twofoldness of char-
acter matters, however. Consider these two very different cases. The nar-
rative premise of the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who
(1963–1989, 2005–) is that its eponymous character physically regenerates
every so often. The flip side of this fictional conceit is the opportunity to
cast a fresh performer in the role of the Doctor with each transformation
(the current—thirteenth—Doctor being the Time Lord’s first female
incarnation). The performers chosen for the role have varied from estab-
lished stars (including Paul McGann, David Tennant, and the incumbent,
Jodie Whittaker) to relative unknowns (like Matt Smith). So, while the
nature of the character is bound to keep the distinctive presence of the
performer playing the Doctor at any given moment salient in the mind of
the viewer, that presence is not always a starry one. Chloé Zhao’s The Rider
(2017), meanwhile, features a cast mostly composed of untrained actors
embodying characters closely resembling their real selves. The hunch
we have as we watch the film that many cast members might be play-
ing fictional versions of themselves is consolidated by the closing credits,
announcing as they do that the central trio of Brady, Tim, and Lilly Black- xiii
burn are played by Brady, Wayne, and Lilly Jandreau, with the majority of
other characters bearing the same names as the actors embodying them.
Far from collapsing character into actor, two folds into one, however, this
strategy invites us to consider the extent to which, and the ways in which,
the characters are not quite identical to the people portraying them.
Keeping our attention on the contemporary American scene, the case
of Roseanne (1988–1997, 2018) presents a different but equally complex—and
 considerably more notorious—instance of the interplay between fiction
and reality, character and star. Roseanne Barr’s fictional creation Roseanne
Connor is (or at least, is perceived to be) about as closely modelled on the
comic actress herself as is possible. The return of the show in 2018, after a
21-year hiatus, played this resemblance up and capitalized on it by framing
the blue-collar Connor as a Trump supporter, mirroring Barr’s public sup-
port for Trump as both candidate and president (and thereby representing
the support of many actual working-class voters for Trump). The tight
foreword: murray smith

alignment between star performer and fictional character forged by Barr

and her collaborators has generally worked in the time-honored mode of
the star system, Barr’s embodiment of Roseanne Conner in the sitcom and
her presence in the wider media reciprocally buoying one another. The
very tightness of the bond between star and character in this case also led to
the demise of the revived show—Barr’s racist tweets eventually prompting
ABC to cancel it and terminate plans for an 11th season.
Behind twofoldness lies a spectrum of possibilities ranging from an
emphasis on character-as-artifact to a contrasting stress on character-
as-imagined-person. The first extreme is most frequently occupied by
comic metafictions, from Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), to Stranger than Fic-
tion (2006), to Too Many Cooks (2014)—a comic parody of television credit
sequences in which credit lines are attached to the bodies of performers. Such
reflexivity is not the exclusive province of comedy, however: consider the
ominous, angst-ridden mood of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), or the playful-
yet-dramatic tone of television works like the series Sherlock (2010–), a con-
temporary reimagining of Holmes and Watson, and the Black Mirror episode
Bandersnatch (2018).
The contemporary vogue for the antihero—recall Bier’s enthusiasms
for morally ambiguous characters like Jonathan Pine and Richard Roper,
protagonist and antagonist of The Night Manager—points us to the other end
of the character spectrum, where the accent is on characters as analogues
of actual human agents. Take the case of Don Draper (Jon Hamm). When
the first trailers for Mad Men (2007–2015) began to air, I remember being
deeply skeptical. Can you imagine a less appealing and more arid terrain for
compelling fiction than the world of advertising? Hadn’t we had enough
of that from schmaltzy 1980s drama Thirtysomething (1987–1991)? Well, such
are the limits of my imagination. Aside from the milieu and period in which
xiv the drama takes place, Mad Men sets itself a further challenge: although
Draper has some redeeming traits, he’s a remarkably unsympathetic char-
acter. In this respect he is representative of a major trend in recent televi-
sual fiction—serial narratives organized around fundamentally immoral,
unsympathetic, and antiheroic characters.
Of course, the antihero is hardly unprecedented, not just in literature,
but in film and television as well. Nor does the fashion for shows featur-
ing antiheroes represent the whole televisual or cultural picture. In some
brute quantitative sense, the mass of fiction in all media doubtless remains
conventionally heroic—tracking the fortunes of more-or-less morally
admirable protagonists as they struggle against and overcome obstacles of
various sorts. Consider The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–) as one high-profile exam-
ple: here our sympathies are solicited for and squarely align with the pow-
erless, oppressed victims of Gilead; the agents of the new order come only
in various shades of black. But there’s no denying the large number of con-
temporary variants on the antiheroic model: from the serial killer thriller

foreword: murray smith

(Dexter [2006–2013], Hannibal [2013–2015]), the domestic gangster drama
(The Sopranos [1999–2007], Breaking Bad [2008–2013], Ray Donovan [2013–], Fargo
[2014–]), the prison drama (Oz [1997–2003], Prison Break [2005–2009, 2017–],
Orange is the New Black [2013–]), the period drama (Mad Men [2007–2015], The
Americans [2013–2018], Masters of Sex [2013–2016]), the political drama (The
West Wing [1999–2006], House of Cards [2013–], The Wire [2002–2008], Homeland
[2011–], Boss [2011–2012]), through to the crime thriller (The Killing [2007–
2012], The Bridge (2012–2018], Line of Duty [2012–], True Detective [2014–], Mammon
[2014–])—almost as many variations as there are individual series. None-
theless, a common thread runs through these shows. There can be little
doubt that there is a large audience for the morally distressed narrative,
and that the sustained exploration of weak, dubious, compromised, and
corrupt protagonists is a major reason for the critical and popular success
of these shows.
Hume would have been perplexed, for he disputed the value of such
“rough heroes,” claiming that “[w]e are displeased to find the limits of vice
and virtue so much confounded,” and cannot bring ourselves to “bear an
affection” to characters “we plainly discover to be blameable.”5 Aristotle
might not have approved either, as these characters hardly conform to the
model of the flawed hero—an essentially good person brought down by
a single weakness leading to catastrophe. Here the emphasis is reversed:
these are essentially negative figures whose immoral actions are mitigated
to an extent by circumstance, personal history, and one or two redeeming
traits. So what accounts for our fascination with such creations, and the
high value our culture puts on them?
A common explanation is that we are drawn into a strong bond of
identification with these characters, the shows offering the thrill of trans-
gression in the playground of the imagination, a process often greeted by
either tabloid condemnation or romanticized, countercultural celebra- xv
tion. Neither response is adequate. Imagined, vicarious transgression may
be one part of the equation, but these shows defeat any simple response of
either sympathy or antipathy, pleasure or revulsion, toward their protag-
onists, cultivating instead a complex and profound ambivalence toward
them. This ambivalence is in part a response to the focus on what Meadow
Soprano (Jamie-Lynn Sigler)—Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) teenage
daughter—decries as her parents’ “bullshit accommodational pretense,”
 the spurious self-justificatory stories they tell themselves, and their com-
plicity in hiding from their children the true nature of Soprano’s lifestyle.
Dishonesty and especially self-deception lie at the heart of these dramas. In
the second episode of the final season of Mad Men, Draper asks his daughter
what he should say in a letter explaining her absence from school one day.
“Just tell the truth,” she sighs. As the master ad man, Draper’s instinct is
always to varnish, pitch, and prettify—never just to tell the truth. Adver-
tising is at once the American Dream and the Big Lie.
foreword: murray smith

Walter White’s journey in Breaking Bad, from beaten down high-school

chemistry teacher to brutalized drug lord, is the most extreme case of anti-
heroic transformation in the contemporary wave; creator Vince Gilligan
has spoken of his conscious intention to test the limits of audience sympa-
thy with an increasingly immoral protagonist. White’s self-understanding
is heavily fortified by self-justification: his mantra—everything I do, I do for
my family—only gives way decisively in the final season. Rejected by his wife
Skyler (Anna Gunn), his son Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), and his criminal partner
Jesse (Aaron Paul), and responsible for the murder of his brother-in-law
Hank (Dean Norris), he eventually recognizes what he has become, swal-
lowing that recognition like a bitter poison.
The theme is also explicit in The Americans, in which the outright duplic-
ity of spying shades into the quicksand of self-deception. “You’re a very
good liar,” says Soviet diplomat Oleg Igorevich Burov (Costa Ronin), lover
of Soviet double-agent Nina Sergeevna Krilova (Annet Mahendru), as she
declares her devotion to him. But perhaps she lies best of all to herself.
Asked during a polygraph test if she has ever betrayed her country, the cam-
era lingers on her while she pauses; although at this point in the story she is
overtly working for the KGB, we really can’t be sure where she stands, and
we get the impression that she isn’t sure either. This drama of self-decep-
tion is also played out by the show’s central couple, whose efforts to per-
suade themselves of the rightness of their cause and the value of the bizarre
double-life that they lead—as Soviet spies and regular American citizens—
corrodes their sense of self. They cannot easily reveal their true identities
to their American children any more than Soprano can be honest about
the nature of his work, Walter White reveal to his son what he has become,
or Draper admit the lie of his identity, stolen from the corpse of a fellow
soldier in the Korean War. And in each case, the impediments to honesty
xvi with others feed back into self-deception and self-loathing. Bad faith eats
the souls of them all.
Not so for the eponymous hero of Dexter. On the face of it, the show
fashions a blackly comic variation on the figure of the heroic vigilante:
like many a modern superhero, Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is a social misfit
whose actions are rendered sympathetic by the limits of the law and the
greater evil of the criminals he hunts down. But underneath the famil-
iar genre trappings and the vividly realized Miami setting, the show is
structured around an authentically disturbing conceit. “People fake a lot
of human interactions,” Dexter declares in the series pilot; “but I feel like
I fake them all, and I fake them very well.” So well that most of the time
we can hardly respond to him as a faker, a cheater, and a psychopathic
killer; the constant display of social warmth is just too compelling. Dexter
warns us that his charm is but skin deep, but at some preconscious level,
we can’t resist all those smiles, nods, and solicitous questions. Dexter’s art
is not self-deception but just deception; he has no soul to be eaten. His rit-

foreword: murray smith

ualistic murders of unconvicted killers, conducted with a combination of
clinical precision and slaughterhouse brutality, nonetheless stop us short:
these brief but sadistic interludes sharply remind us that Dexter’s hunger
for justice is first and foremost a means of channeling a very different kind
of appetite. Dexter is undoubtedly the most warped of vigilante heroes,
and his presentation complex enough to jam any simple embrace of his
transgressive cachet.
Stanley Cavell talks about the tradition of “moral perfectionism” he
finds in philosophy, literature and film—visions of the self as a seeker of
moral virtue—from Plato to Emerson, from Henry James to His Girl Fri-
day (1940).6 The antiheroic trend in contemporary fiction and television
puts this vision under severe strain, tipping over in the blackest cases to an
image of moral imperfectionism. These are fictions for a morally disabused
age, conscious of the reality and demands of ethics, but weary and wary of
tabloid moralism, and skeptical of conventional heroism (of which classi-
cal tragedy is one form). Director Paul Greengrass describes Jason Bourne
(protagonist of the initial Bourne trilogy, played by Matt Damon) as a char-
acter who realizes he has done very bad things but is now “trying for the
light.”7 These televisual antiheroes, by contrast, have either given up striv-
ing for the light or lack the will or the intelligence to see it.
And yet an antihero is still a hero. We retain a thin thread of sympathy
with White to the very end, for he ensures that Skyler is protected from
exposure as his accomplice, that Jesse escapes captivity by their fellow drug
runners, and that he takes down with him an array of still more vicious
characters. The possibility of redemption, no matter how slight or remote,
is thus an essential ingredient in these shows: even Dexter experiences a
kind of unease with himself. And self-deception is a key to the possibil-
ity of redemption: White, Draper, and company strive to dupe themselves
because at some level they understand, but can’t stand, what they are or xvii
have become.
There are more than seven billion people in the world. But that num-
ber is dwarfed by the unimaginably large crowd of characters who popu-
late our imagined worlds, and the still larger, indeed infinite, set of possible
characters. Characters are the anti-matter to the matter of real human
agency: intangible, yet omnipresent and vital. As the contributors to the
current volume ably demonstrate, these characters are distributed across
 fictional worlds situated within different genres, each with their different
conventions, and created in different media, each with their distinctive
affordances. Such characters, and the fictional environments they inhabit,
address varied social questions and constituencies, engaging us morally
and emotionally in diverse ways. Within this vast space of design, there is
room enough for the comic and the dramatic, the realist and the reflexive,
the good, the bad, the ugly, the wild, the beautiful, and the damned—and
all points in between.
foreword: murray smith

notes
1 Anne Thompson, “The Night Manager Is Thrilling and Boasts One Director:
Susanne Bier,” Indiewire, April 18, 2016, www.indiewire.com/2016/04/the-
night-manager-is-thrilling-and-boasts-one-director-susanne-bier-289742/.
Thanks to Eva Novrup Redvall for the reference.
2 “When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and
appear to settle upon it, a character is created,” writes Barthes. Roland Bar-
thes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), trans. Richard Miller, 67. Allud-
ing to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Peter Wollen refers to protagonists as “bundles
of differential elements” in Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1972), 94.
3 Conan Doyle made these remarks in 1930, in what is said to be the
only filmed interview with the author, www.youtube.com/watch?v=
XWjgt9PzYEM&t=270s.
4 Murray Smith, “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History 42,
no.2 (Spring 2011): 277–94.
5 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), in The Philosophical Works of
David Hume, Vol. 3, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1874–75), 283.
6 Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004).
7 The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004), Extended Edition DVD (Univer-
sal, 2007), director’s commentary, 00.03.23.

xviii