Goines On: Real people

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Goines used to think of time spent watching movies or TV series as “escapist” – time away from “real life.” For that reason, he was caught off guard and surprised, a few episodes into watching the Israeli TV series Shtisel, to realize that the characters of most of the dramatizations he watched were as real to him as the actual people he interacted with. Goines truly cared about some (or most) of the characters he encountered in various dramas, perhaps especially in the case of Shtisel.
    Actors wear make-up, costumes, etc. to portray the characters they are assigned; they come across as real, as likable, as lovable, or as deplorable as actual people. The plight of a character Goines liked or even identified with inspired concern for the character, apprehension that things might go wrong for him or her, relief or pleasure when things worked out well.
    And beyond the feelings that Goines had for fictional characters and actual people, he didn’t know much more about actual people of his acquaintance than he knew about the fictional characters in dramas. Goines couldn’t see inside the head of an actual person, even of Mrs. Goines – who still in some ways remained a mystery to him. And a dramatization sometimes revealed more about what is going on in a character’s head than many actual people are willing to reveal about themselves.
    Characters in films could even be tactilely real when Goines considered that, theoretically, he could have been on the set during filming. He might even have talked with the actors, having previously asked them to please remain in character. He could shake their hand, maybe feel the fabric of whatever costume they were wearing, even exchange hugs with them, if he and they hit it off.

Hanna Rieber (1927-2014)
as Malka Shtisel

    Goines felt validated to discover that the 10th episode of the 1st season of Shtisel illustrates the reality of fictional characters. Malka Shtisel, the grandmother, is unconscious in a hospital following a fall down stairs. Her son Shulem (Akiva’s father) discovers a list that Malka has made naming individuals she wants to remember to pray for each day. Shulem recognizes that a couple of the names on Malka’s list belong to characters in a TV soap opera she loved to watch!
    The episode even explicitly posits the equality of fictional and actual scene by having the camera pull away from Shulem talking about his mother’s list to reveal that the scene is projected on a TV monitor, which Malka is watching from the vantage of some heavenly half-way house where she is pondering whether to die or return home from the hospital.
    Goines widened the field to include other representational arts besides dramatic story. What about short stories, novels, paintings, sculptures? Goines looked at the two bird figurines atop the Goines’ TV cabinet and was astonished at how quickly, automatically his heart opened and went out to the two birds. Even sculptures and statues apparently manifest some reality of the individuals or creatures they represent, in terms of evoking feeling responses. Was all representational art, ideally, capable of such emotional reality? Would the “cathartic” cleansing or purification that Aristotle philosophized about in his Poetics even be possible if the characters in a stage performance were not real to the audience?

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