How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (3 page)

2. We're Not Meant to Identify with Barney at All

Here's an alternative interpretation which may help us to escape the Barney Paradox. Maybe Barney was not conceived of as a protagonist of the series whom the audience was supposed to (or would be encouraged to) identify with. Married male viewers should identify with Marshall, single male viewers with Ted. Barney is there to laugh at.

While this may have been the way Barney's character started at the very beginning, this angle misses out on some of the most important aspects of Barney's appeal and of his character in general. At the very beginning of the series (in the first couple of episodes only), Barney was portrayed as a loser—as the butt of every joke, quite similar to the Stiffler character in the
American Pie
franchise, which
How I Met Your Mother
has very rich ties to. Even his haircut was a bit similar to Stiffler's. And he really was just someone to laugh at.

So at least at the beginning, while Barney was depicted as an awful person, he was also depicted as a loser—not someone the audience should identify with. But this all changed very early on—maybe because the creator of the series realized the potential of the character. Barney would not have become as popular as he did if he had stayed this ‘dork', as Lily addressed him in the second episode.

3. Schadenfreude

A somewhat different way to go would be to say that while we're encouraged to have some kind of emotional engagement with Barney, this is by no means a positive emotional engagement. The emotion we're supposed to feel towards Barney is that of Schadenfreude—the feeling of happiness at other people's misfortune. We are not supposed to laugh with Barney—we're supposed to laugh at him.

This would be compatible with Barney's popularity, as Schadenfreude is not an unpleasant emotion to have. There's a long history of fictional characters whom we love to hate: from Tartuffe through Osmin and Monostatos to Dr. Evil. The idea then would be that Barney fits this illustrious list: the reason we like watching him is to see how he will eventually get what he deserves.

Again, there are many bits from the show that point in this direction. There are many, many scenes where Barney's misfortunes are supposed to provide the laughs. A quick list:

       
•
  
He's thrown out on the street naked
(“Naked Man”).

       
•
  
He's forced to wear the ducky tie for a full year
(“Ducky Tie”).

       
•
  
His attempt to take revenge on Marshall with the exploding meatball sub fails miserably
(“The Exploding Meatball Sub”).

       
•
  
He's tied to the mechanical bull for two full hours (providing a memorable scene with perfect comedic timing when getting off)
(“Woo Girls”).

       
•
  
He gets repeatedly thrown out of the prom
(“Best Prom Ever”).

       
•
  
He gets stung by a swarm of bees
(“Burning Beekeeper”).

       
•
  
He gets beaten up by proud Canadians at a Tim Horton's
(“Duel Citizenship”).

       
•
  
His legs stop working after running the marathon without any training
(“Lucky Penny”).

       
•
  
He gets a nickname he hates
(“Swarley”).

       
•
  
His long-awaited two hundredth conquest is an odious muscular body builder and not a super-model as planned
(“Right Place, Right Time”).

       
•
  
As nobody is willing to give him a high five, he's forced to hold up his right arm for hours
(“I Heart NJ”).

       
•
  
He's left in the doctor's office for the weekend with his ‘Sensory Deprivator 5000' on
(“Bad News”).

But the best example of our Schadenfreude towards Barney comes from the various slap bet episodes. Here we have full episodes organized around our desire to see Barney punished. So it's undeniable that some of our emotional engagement with Barney is of the Schadenfreude nature. The episodes about the mystery woman who tells all Barney's potential conquests about his shenanigans resulting in the woman slapping him fits this pattern. We just like seeing Barney getting slapped.

But this isn't the whole story. What this pattern of Barney doing something bad and then getting punished for it makes even more conspicuous is the recurrence of those situations where Barney does something
really
bad, but goes completely unpunished.

A striking example is the ending of the “Playbook” episode, where he tricked all his friends (and especially Lily), used Robin, with whom he just split, maliciously, and got the reward of going out with the girl he wanted to. If he ever deserves to be slapped, this would be the time, but there is no slap, just Barney victoriously winking at us. Schadenfreude is not the only and not even the dominant way in which we engage emotionally with Barney.

4. Imagining from the Inside

The main way that philosophers have tried to understand why we identify with or become emotionally engaged with fictional characters (in movies, plays, or novels) is with the idea of “imagining from the inside.” The general idea is that when we identify with a fictional character, we imagine her from
the inside. We put ourselves, in imagination, in that person's shoes. So the possibility we need to consider is that we do identify with Barney in the sense that we put ourselves in his shoes.
¹

But why would we want to do that? Why would we want to imagine “the emotional equivalent of a scavenging sewer rat,” to quote Lily, from the inside. Surely there must be more attractive things to imagine . . .

What does it mean to imagine someone from the inside? What does it mean to put ourselves in someone else's shoes? Is it imagining being someone else? Is it imagining having someone else's experiences? The most plausible way of cashing out this metaphor is to say that we imagine ourselves in someone else's situation—an idea that goes back at least to Adam Smith's 1759
Theory of Moral Sentiments
.

If identification with a fictional character is a matter of imagining this person from the inside and if imagining from the inside amounts to imagining being in this person's situation, then the proposal is that we imagine being in Barney's situation when we engage with him emotionally. And here we may have a way out of the Barney Paradox.

Here is Alfred Hitchcock, who knew a thing or two about triggering the right emotional reaction from the audience:

Even in this case [where we know that there is a bomb concealed in a briefcase in the plot to assassinate Hitler] I don't think the public would say, “Oh, good, they're all going to be blown to bits,” but rather, they'll be thinking, “Watch out. There's a bomb!” What it means is that the apprehension of the bomb is more powerful than the feelings of sympathy or dislike for the characters involved. . . . Let's take another example. A curious person goes into somebody else's room and begins to search through the drawers. Now, you show the person who lives in
that room coming up the stairs. Then you go back to the person who is searching, and the public feels like warning him, “Be careful, watch out. Someone's coming up the stairs.” Therefore, even if the snooper is not a likeable character, the audience will still feel anxiety for him. Of course, when the character is attractive, as for instance Grace Kelly in
Rear Window
, the public's emotion is greatly intensified.
²

If Hitchcock's right, then we can identify with characters we deeply dislike or even find repugnant. We can't help identifying or engaging even with Hitler when he's about to be blown up, in spite of the fact that we find him morally despicable. If identification is imagining oneself in the fictional character's situation, then we can certainly imagine ourselves in an evil character's situation. After all, there's nothing evil about the evil character's
situation
.

And, presumably, the same goes for Barney: the reason why we don't find it difficult to identify with Barney is because this amounts to imagining being in Barney's situation and it is Barney himself and not Barney's situation that is evil. So this way of thinking about our attitude towards Barney would not rule out our identification and engagement with him. We have made some progress.

Or, have we? It is possible to put oneself in someone's shoes, even if this person is evil, provided that there is nothing evil about the shoes, that is, about the situation one imagines being in. But this does not explain the
appeal
of identifying with Barney. On the imagining from the inside account it may not work against identifying with Barney that he is awful, but it doesn't explain why we are drawn to do so either. And what is striking about the reaction Barney triggers in the audience is not only that we can, if we really want to, engage with him emotionally, but that we are drawn to do so. The imagining from the inside view fails to explain why this would be so.

5. Emotional Contagion

An alternative to the “imagining from the inside” view is the emotional contagion account: when I see a sad fictional character
on scene, I do not need to actively put myself in her position or imagine myself being in her situation. All that happens is that I get infected by her sadness.
³

This is a case of emotional contagion, a phenomenon we know from ‘real life', that is from our emotional engagement with real people around us. From a very early age, our own emotional state is influenced by the emotional state of the people around us. And this influence is mainly unconscious: if, for example, faces of different emotional expressions are presented to us in a way that makes it impossible for us to become conscious of this stimulus (because they are flashed very briefly or because the stimulus is masked), it still influences our emotional state.
⁴
So the suggestion is that something like this happens when we are engaging with Barney.

As emotional contagion is mainly unconscious, automatic and unreflective, we react this way emotionally to other people regardless of what we think of their moral character. Even if we know that Barney is the emotional equivalent of a scavenging sewer rat, we just can't help feeling sad when he's feeling sad (setting it aside that Barney, of course, never feels sad; he feels awesome instead . . .).
⁵
This is an automatic emotional reaction that undercuts any assessment of Barney's moral character.

While this is clearly part of the story when it comes to understanding how we engage emotionally with real people and with fictional characters, again, it's not the whole story. If this were the whole story, then Barney's evilness would have no influence on our identification or emotional engagement with him. But, and this is the crucial point, Barney's evilness does have an influence on our identification or emotional engagement with him and a positive one. We identify with Barney more strongly and more readily than we would if he were a
law-abiding nice guy. And the emotional contagion account of identification does not tell us why we do so.

6. Being Bad, Vicariously

The emotional contagion account's emphasis on automatic processes may indirectly help us to explain our weird attraction towards Barney. Just as it's hard not to get sad if we see Barney being sad, it's also difficult not to feel smug when Barney is winking at us smugly after pulling off the ‘Scuba Diver' in “The Playbook.” Is this a nice and commendable emotion to have, feeling smug after having screwed all of one's friends, and especially one's ex-girlfriend? No. But we can't help it—it's our automatic emotional contagion reaction to the situation.

And we can go even further. Maybe some part of us does not mind experiencing, but only in an indirect and vicarious manner, what it would be like to completely fool our four best friends for the sole purpose of getting a girl. Presumably, this is not a part of us that is normally making our moral decisions. And this does not imply that we are immoral or terrible people. We would not do anything like this in real life. But fiction and real life are very different. And when engaging with fiction we may be more liberal with what we are willing to experience—given that this experience will only be a vicarious one.
⁶

Most of us don't have rails under our bed in case we need to dump a no longer needed one night stand to an unknown location (“The Fortress,” Season Eight). And most of us would never even contemplate using such a device. But watching Barney do the same is different. Doing it is wrong; watching Barney do it is not wrong. Having the experience of pulling the secret lever that rails the bed away is not an experience we would like to have for sure—not unless we are sociopaths. But having the same experience vicariously is something very different and it has a certain appeal—partly precisely because we would never choose to have this experience for real, that is, in a non-vicarious way.