The character identification process

How is it that we identify with fictional characters? In some films, the main characters are deliberately insipid, while the secondary characters, especially the villains, are more polished, far more interesting, complex and profound. This seems counter-intuitive, since it’s the main character’s story we’re following, and it’s with him or her that we’re going to identify. We may therefore be surprised to identify with an insipid character rather than an interesting, rich and rewarding one, and yet this is the key to the identification process. Let’s explore its mysteries.

The Keys to Identification

However, the process of identification has absolutely nothing to do with a process of validation. We do not watch a film to validate ourselves, but to project our emotions and live experiences vicariously. Since the brain does not distinguish between reality and imagination, these experiences lived through films are very intense. It is therefore ourselves who live these experiences when we watch a film, and not the characters.

In academic narrative cinema, there is almost always a main character whom we follow and with whom we identify. This places us within a story, that is, a sequence of events, much like in life. Sometimes, we get bored in certain films because the main character seems uninteresting, even if the stakes of the story are enormous. For example, if the main character must save the world, we should, in theory, feel extremely involved in their adventures. Conversely, in other films where not much seems to happen, such as love stories without major stakes, we can feel very strong emotions and become passionate about the characters and the story.

Identification with a character is one of the key elements of our interest in films and the stories they tell, even if it is not the only one. For us to identify with a character, they must be a kind of blank surface onto which we can project our emotions and thoughts. This is why they must not be too defined or too rich from the start. The character in a film, as the name suggests, is merely a narrative object, a vehicle for our emotional and philosophical projection.

For identification to work, there must also be a gap in information between the character and us, a mechanism well-documented by Alfred Hitchcock in his explanation of suspense. For example, if the character is in a room and we know that an armed intruder is entering the house, we experience intense tension because we want to intervene in their fate. This gap pushes us to identify with them, not because we are living the same thing as them, but because we are living a different experience—that of wanting to help them.

Initiation stories, where an incompetent and illegitimate character gradually acquires skills and legitimacy, work particularly well to foster identification. These characters are often empty at the start, which allows the audience to project their own incompetence and hope, through the character, to acquire qualities and skills. If the character already had all their skills from the beginning, we could not identify with them.

The Main Character is Us

In conclusion, what makes us identify with a character is that the true character of the story is us. The character on screen is merely a vehicle for our imaginary self during the film. They must therefore be as empty as possible at the start, so that we can, along with them, acquire experiences, skills, and emotions. If they were already full and interesting from the beginning, it would be impossible for us to identify with them.

Thus, the main character should be seen as an empty vessel that gradually fills up. Even if this character discovers, for example, that they are the son of a king, this revelation will function as a newly acquired quality, as they themselves were unaware of it before. We, too, are unaware of many things about ourselves, which makes this type of discovery equally functional for identification.

Finally, for the identification process to touch several of our emotional zones, the character’s qualities must be acquired through different means: both through their efforts and through “gifts from heaven,” such as an inheritance or a revelation. This opens up the story and strengthens our emotional involvement.

Identification therefore occurs through a projection onto the character, in the psychoanalytic sense, which makes us feel like actors in the story. When we are placed in the position of the character’s eyes, paradoxically, identification is quite weak, as we no longer have a surface for projection; we are in the place of a character whom we know does not actually exist. For the character only exists within us through our projection onto them. This is why a film entirely shot in subjective camera, like Lady in the Lake by Robert Montgomery (1947), foreshadows video games more than an imaginary immersive cinema. In video games, the rules of identification are completely different—that’s another topic.