Empathy and the Movies

 I struggle with empathy.

 

First, with understanding it. Is it cognitive or emotional? Is it understanding or feeling? Or is it just knowing how to respond to people in the best way?

 

Second, with appreciating it. Is it always needed? Is it the best way to go? Can it every be a bad idea? Counter productive? Totally inappropriate?

 

Third, with applying it. What if you don’t feel it? Is it ethical to act as if you do when you don’t? Is that authentic? What are the best ways to show it, the most effective, and is asking about effectiveness even empathetic?

 

Further, is it an either-or matter? Does it exist on a range, a continuum, where a little bit might be enough sometimes but much more is needed—or out of place—in others?

 

I’ve read Brene Brown. I know what not to say.   

 

Is it possible we have put too much emphasis on empathy when what’s needed is common humanity and common sense? Can empathy be so strong it keeps us from acting when needed? I truly believe that from experience; one's emotive response to another's trauma or pain can restrict one's ability to act in a rational and even helpful manner. I don't want the EMT to have empathy if I have a heart attack; I want them to competently do CPR or those paddle things!.

 

We heard this week about the train riders taking pictures of a rape in Philadelphia rather than calling the police or trying to intervene. I’ve read different viewpoints, even those who try to spin it as “not to bad” or “misreported” or somehow excusable. In writing about lack of empathy, that writer had none. Calling 911 was the minimum, and no one did. What kind of beast photographs a sexual assault? The city of brotherly love? Their city fathers/mothers are going to have to do some massive public relations to counteract that one.

 

I’m thinking about empathy because of the argument that fiction—and I guess by extensions, movies—creates or builds empathy. What is hard for me is when a person who is screwing up his/her life and others is somehow supposed to be empathized with. Example: addicts. Anyone who has lived with addicts knows that at some level they put the object of addiction before everyone else. It’s hard for me to empathize with that. I’ve seen the victims and the long-term pain.

 

Example 2: The “Nora” complex. Nora is the main character in A Doll’s House; she is a bourgeois Norwegian woman in the late 1800s who, after a series of events, decides she is not self-actualized and leaves her three children and husband. Now, that’s my spin. What she says is that she is not capable of raising the children because she’s been a doll in a doll’s house her whole life, one who made bad or grossly misinformed decision because she thought like a woman and didn’t understand the “real” world. Therefore, she must leave her clueless, borderline abusive (see below) and accusing husband, walking out into the cold and who knows what.

 

*in the actual text of the play, Torvald does not strike Nora, although he calls her stupid and such quite a bit. In versions I’ve seen, he does, but that is the director’s choice, and a bad one, I think. Torvald would not hit her, despite everything. He would demean her in other ways; his sense of self would not let him be physical.

 

The most recent example of the Nora Complex is the current HBO Scenes from a Marriage, which is supposed to be based on the Ingmar Bergman version from the 1960s. There are a lot of good things about it, but gosh, it’s depressing and long. I can’t bring myself to watch any more of it. SNL made a parody of it. Mira has an affair and leaves her husband and child (she may have custody, sort of, but she’s a crappy mother who is totally wrapped up in her sense of her pain and unhappiness, and it’s hard to empathize with that level of privilege).  Later she splits with the lover and gets fired and wants to come back and not finish the divorce. The husband is not having it after two years of being jerked around.

 

Yet, a part of me empathized with Mira. She’s confused and tired. She’s the main breadwinner (although, seriously, they could have lived on the husband’s salary quite well.)  She feels that pressure and the pressure of being all a mother is supposed to be. Her husband loves her but she doesn’t feel he sees her fully, which is an interesting tie to Genesis 16 and Hagar and her name for God—“the one who sees me.”  (Another topic for another post)

 

Still, she’s an adulterer who tears apart her family and gives the child trauma because she has to have a lover in the moment. She puts everything else behind her desire.

 

Art can make us feel empathy with people whose actions don’t really deserve it. And that is perhaps the answer: empathy is toward the soul and the struggles of the other person, not toward their behavior, and those should not be conflated. They must be accountable; empathy should not let anyone relinquish their accountability.