I find it interesting how easily most people ignore terrible acts performed by characters if those acts take place ‘off screen.’ This applies both to prose fiction in novels and short stories as well as cinematic works.

There is a huge difference between seeing an event occur and hearing about it that same sequence from a third hand, or even more remove, source. In a post about hypothetical people and there non-value when it comes to morality I discussed the incident in Blade Runnerwhere the replicants jump a shuttle and murder a number of people in their escape. By not seeing that bloody act of cruel violence we are left with the ability to sympathize with the Roy and the others as they struggle to survive.

In the Lord of the Rings, the novel not the film, Gandalf recounting the story of the ring and Gollum’s possession of it tells about Gollum leaving his caves deep in the Misty Mountains searching for Bilbo and his lost precisions.  Along the way Gollum left in his wake a number of empty cribs, the implication quite clear that bereft of slimy wiggling fishes he added to his diet screaming murdered babies. I have had fans of the novel deny such passages until I read them out verbatim. If you are going to view Gollum as a villain worthy of sympathy then it is necessary to forget about his habit of eating babies.

This technique, placing a character’s most heinous actions off screen, is an important one if you want to have a character that has been bad but still capable of generating sympathy for the readers or audience. It should work for most people, though some quirk of my imaginative process keeps my own sympathies at a distance. I think about those babies, their families waking to discover them missing, perhaps finding their bones, and when those thoughts pass through my mind it becomes impossible to have anything other than contempt for Gollum. No doubt because others may share this revulsion this is in part the reason why this element of his backstory is omitted from Gandalf’s tale.