How do films evoke an identification with one character as opposed to another? Two recent films, The Bourne Ultimatum and No Country for Old Men give us a character who appears to be indomitable, almost supernaturally in control. Both of these characters are professional killers who leave a trail of bodies behind them. Yet we react to them very differently. Jason Bourne is a hero whom we admire and wish to identify with whereas the relentless murderer, Anton Chigurh, in No Country is a bogeyman, a nightmarish figure whom we fear but do not identify with. He may unconsciously act out our most extreme aggressive fantasies, but we tend to place him in our representational world as an external object.
Filmmakers usually allow us to identify with a hero or dis-identify with a villain by manipulating their circumstances and motives. Jason Bourne kills those who attack him. He defends women. Although he is relatively unexpressive, we are led to feel that he can be kind and empathic. He is fighting a cruel system that has made him into a killer by using and corrupting his idealism. The killer in No Country is motivated by greed and self need only, killing people because they get in his way, although observing an odd idiosyncratic moral code.
However, a third character, from another recent film provides us with a model that stands on the prism point between these two archetypes, an object with whom we both wish to identify and fear as an external threat to our moral integrity. I am referring to Ben Wade, the charismatic outlaw, played by Russell Crowe, in 3:10 to Yuma.
by Gershon Reiter From Fathers and Sons in Cinema © 2008 Gershon Reiter by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www. Excerpt from “Fathers and Sons in Cinema,” by Gershon Reiter, coming out this June. The book addresses the father-son relationship in American cinema by re-examining ancient dragon-slaying myths, showing how they apply to movies, or to what the book calls filmmyths, that deal with fathers and sons. 
The opening credits of Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game, are accompanied by the song, “When a Man Loves a Woman”. The song tells us that a man’s love for a woman will cause him to lose all judgment, to give up his money, his friends, even his life. If she is bad, he will not see it. The film’s first scene confirms the song’s philosophy. 
“The filmmakers use the dynamics of the primal scene, presumably without conscious awareness of those dynamics, to exact upon the agents of the East German government (GDR) exactly the forms of revenge that Arlow’s patients exact in fantasy upon their parents.” 
