Empathy in Cinema

Scott Hardie | July 19, 2016
Movies are a literal medium, right? Unlike the interpretive nature of books, where a hundred people can read the same story and picture a hundred different versions of it in their minds' eyes, what you see on film is what you get.

Media is a means to increase empathy, right? If we could have some kind of device that let us experience someone else's life with our own senses, like in Strange Days, we would have to feel more sympathy for other people's experiences, because we would know firsthand what it's like to live in another gender or race or culture or class. Drama and literature have pursued this goal since early civilization, but movies are the closest that technology has yet come to letting you really see and hear someone else's experience. (Video games are poised to go even further as they evolve, but that's another discussion.)

All movies are shaped by their directors' choices, right? They don't show you real life unfiltered; they invent a story with the intention of provoking specific emotions. Even documentaries show you a version of reality manipulated by editing and camera position and music and so on. Thus, human biases come into play: Races and genders and cultures and classes can be portrayed as caricatures or stereotypes or with other inaccuracies that give you a false impression of reality and thus make you feel less empathy.

If you'll forgive the sophomoric philosophizing that got us here, all of the above has me pondering a question: Have movies as a whole, as humanity has experienced them for over a century now, done more overall to increase empathy in the world by showing us lives that we would have never been able to experience without cinema, or to decrease empathy in the world by literalizing false narratives that pit us against each other?

Samir Mehta | July 19, 2016
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Scott Hardie | August 7, 2016
Again with the Transformers bashing, Samir. When you are going to acknowledge those movies as universally-treasured cinematic masterworks, as history will surely remember them?

Great points though. Context is everything, as always. In time, the good and timeless works will outlast the high-grossing flash-in-the-pan summer blockbusters.

For whatever it's worth, I always found the cultural tug-of-war over 300 to be misguided. The real point of that movie to me was the rich visual imagery, which was a major achievement regardless of the political or ethical merit of the rest of the film. It has been argued that the purpose of cinema is to introduce new images into our shared culture, and the images created on screen in 300 were unprecedented and magnificent. In both its accomplishments and its transgressions, it is minor compared to Birth of a Nation, but it deserves to be remembered in a similar fashion. (Just curious: Would you put Braveheart on that same list you wrote?)