Suffering and Aesthetic Identification in Cosmopolitan Cinema

Looking at specific film examples of cosmopolitan cinema, this paper is concerned with both theorizing and probing how different modalities of aesthetic  identification with the suffering hero – sympathetic, cathartic and ironic – are consequential for the ways in which the viewer is capable (or not) of detaching herself from the immediacy of the emotions underlying her identification (e.g. compassion, sympathetic tears, tragic emotion, estrangement) and rise to moral judgment and reflection about what is represented.  It is through the fictional exercise of the imagination that audiences are invited to identify and empathize with the fate of individual characters and to consider the moral implications of their suffering in their life worlds. If fictional characters can become ‘real’, personalized and tangible as subjects experiencing pain, it is also because the suffering ‘other’ is perceived not as a distant object of pity but as a fully-fledged subject just like ‘us’. We will see that some modalities of aesthetic identification with suffering characters have the potential to trigger cognitive linguistic deliberation– and, therefore, new cultural meanings of suffering  - in a discursive ethical space where a range of interlocutors - audiences, filmmakers, creative personnel and critics – enter into conversation with each other about what constitutes human dignity and its violation. It is argued that cosmopolitan cinema challenges the idea that suffering is ‘unrepresentable’ by personalizing suffering and bringing its visual presence before us in ways that verbal representation cannot.