I fucking love you! Emotional address in Fleabag, or how viewers’ empathy becomes voyeurism
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Julie Neveux
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of emotional language and telecinematic direct address in the BBC television series Fleabag (2016–2019) on viewers’ empathetic engagement, showing how multimodal narratives can invite empathy. In this series, direct address, often used to create intimacy with the audience, is the vehicle through which the eponymous protagonist shares or does not share her emotional states with those within or outside the diegesis. This way of communicating her feelings, I argue, shapes and intensifies viewers’ potential empathetic engagement in different ways throughout the series. In particular, I explain that the way in which Fleabag recurrently uses expressive language, most prominently swear words, while addressing the audience, initially invites viewer’s empathy in Season 1, before a stylistic shift in Season 2 eventually redefines this kind of emotional address: at the end of the series, viewers’ empathy is disinvited, positioning them as unwanted voyeurs.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank both anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. I am also deeply grateful to the editors of this Special Issue, in particular Fransina Stradling, whose multiple, enthusiastic and expert re-readings have considerably improved this paper. Any errors that might remain are mine.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: stylistic approaches to narrative empathy
- The role of pathetic fallacy in shaping narrative empathy
- From witness to accomplice: the manipulation of readers’ empathy through consciousness representation in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley
- Exploring the potential of sentiment analysis for the study of negative empathy
- “The unlikeliest twins”: the role of intertextual foregrounding and defamiliarisation in creating empathy in Meursault, contre-enquête
- I fucking love you! Emotional address in Fleabag, or how viewers’ empathy becomes voyeurism
- Connecting with the world: poetic synaesthesia, sensory metaphors and empathy
- Afterword
- Refreshed hypotheses
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: stylistic approaches to narrative empathy
- The role of pathetic fallacy in shaping narrative empathy
- From witness to accomplice: the manipulation of readers’ empathy through consciousness representation in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley
- Exploring the potential of sentiment analysis for the study of negative empathy
- “The unlikeliest twins”: the role of intertextual foregrounding and defamiliarisation in creating empathy in Meursault, contre-enquête
- I fucking love you! Emotional address in Fleabag, or how viewers’ empathy becomes voyeurism
- Connecting with the world: poetic synaesthesia, sensory metaphors and empathy
- Afterword
- Refreshed hypotheses
