The Empathizers

I’ve worked in mental health for years now, and I’ve found that psychologists begin working at a very young age with people with “emotional disturbances” on the differences between “sympathy” and “empathy.” Sympathy could be defined as “feelings of favor, support, or loyalty,” whereas empathy would be defined as “intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” In other words – sympathy is involves you “feeling badly” for someone else, and with empathy, you feel it yourself too.

This is likely a rudimentary distinction for most of us, but I find it interesting in the movies and television. TV drama, for example, trends on sympathy – a show like Grey’s Anatomy hopes to get you sympathetic towards its characters’ romantic tangles, but not so much that you’re unable to walk away and do the dishes afterwards. True “empathetic” portraits are rarer. One I discussed years ago on a blog was The Sopranos’ “Luxury Lounge” episode in which poor chef Artie Bucco’s feelings of inadequacy about his life become a source making the audience as uncomfortable as he is.

And maybe that’s the key difference – one makes you sad, the other makes you uncomfortable.

I was thinking about this watching the modern master of discomfort in television, BBC’s The Office. Its Christmas Special followed up its influential 2-season, 12-episode run tracking down its characters (allegedly) 2-3 years in the future. For people who were a fan of the wrenchingly miserably uncomfortable antics of Ricky Gervais’s David Brent, they’ll absolutely love the scenes in The Office’s Christmas Special, which include disastrous blind dates, mocking the overweight, a hopelessly sincere music video, and even a game show appearance that made me yell “Stop, just stop! Please stop!” Ending that Christmas Special – even though that special is a rare BBC Office production with a happy ending – I still felt myself experiencing humiliation for David. I winced through every interview he provides, hoping he won’t say the wrong thing to fuck up the great situation he somehow manages himself into by episode’s end. Perhaps I identify too closely with waiting for myself in my own life to also say the wrong thing. Perhaps Gervais knows I feel that way.

Empathy is tricky, I think, because it’s so much more than “feeling the feelings of another.” Or, that’s exactly what it is, but the interpretation differs. During a sad scene in Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s third season, in which Buffy’s vampire true love Angel breaks up with her, I identified that Buffy was deeply upset, and I said to myself “poor Buffy,” hoping for her to feel better. During a sad scene in Buffy’s sixth season, in which Buffy, driven to intense confusion over her sexual affair with vampire Spike, pounds the crap out of Spike up on the steps of the police office, I felt myself a sense of humiliation, a feeling of having done the exact wrong thing, a sense that I, like Buffy, was just a slave to the emotions I can’t help but feel.

There are a number of movies that have done this to me – so many movies, following the example of more realistic movies of the 70’s and then in through the revolution of independent films of the 80’s and 90’s, simply follow their characters’ actions, giving occasional, if any, explanation. That makes the movies’ subjects a source of our scrutiny, and eventually our own feeling. I’m thinking of poor Charlie in Mean Streets, who’s a walking caldron of guilt everywhere he goes, or of Roy Gideon in All That Jazz, whose daily routine of pill-popping gives way to his own internal psychic pummeling. By the end of those movies, I felt about as at wit’s end as either of those men, and all I’d done for the previous two hours was sit on a couch.

This is what people always say about movies: they “transport” us to different times and places, they ask us to leave our world. They make us feel something we did not expect to feel. This is true, I suppose, but some movies do that with different emphasis on the make and the feel. A number of movies have done this to me in recent years. I remember not totally loving Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, that movie about a modern 13-year-old and her frantic mother, played by Evan Rachael Wood and Holly Hunter, but I do remember how I felt afterwards – not “cleansed” or “happy” or “sad,” but that I had to continue on in the vain of Evan Rachael Wood’s Tracy, knowing everyone had known what she’d gone through, the drugs she did and the sex she had. Wood’s performance was “great,” I suppose, but it was great because I eventually felt what she felt. For around 100 minutes, her life was my own.

Roger Ebert recently wrote an in interesting piece in his online journal about what it means to him when he cries at a movie. He stated that he doesn’t cry in movies that are “sad,” not even Terms of Endearment, but in moments of great warmth and kindness between people. He also said for him “crying” means not the waterworks some of us associate with movie-watching, but a feeling of thickness in his throat, a quick jerk of the eyes, something that is rather close to crying. I can agree with that entirely. When I think of the moments that really got me going in movies, it’s moments like that – when Shrek tells Fiona in Shrek “you are beautiful.” When the father in Bend It Like Beckham tells his daughter that everything he’s done in life was for her to have opportunities. When in The Straight Story, a man decides to help a total stranger drive across Iowa to see his estranged brother.

This is true about movies in which I “feel for” a character – it’s said a great deal about characters, but the experience is different than we’ve described. When I say that, I want to be clear what it means – it means that I can no longer question a character’s bad decision, their humiliation, sadness, or despair, because it’s become mine. Like Bruno in L’Enfant, who got me to identify with him even though he sold off his own baby to make some money. Like Chuck in Chuck & Buck who may have embarrassed himself and his best friend for about an hour straight during his movie, but only engaged my own feelings of romantic obsession.

In all of those movies, it’s the discomfort that awakens my own sense of empathy, and perhaps this is more of a statement of myself than of moviemakers. But then again, why make a movie that asks its audience to be uncomfortable if a filmmaker doesn’t feel that that feeling is something we understand and want to explore? Great movies, especially great modern “independent” movies, ask us to share our experience of the worst parts of ourselves, and, in effect, drain them of their weight. We wouldn’t laugh at the David Brents if we didn’t have a little of them in us too.

I'm an animal, you're an animal too

I’ve been trying to listen to U2’s new release No Line On The Horizon, really I have. Rolling Stone gave it a 5-star review (although, they did that for All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000 also, and I listen to that album about as much now as I used to – which is to say, never), and it’s been stated in the mainstream press that this album will “revitalize” U2 in the same way Achtung Baby did in 1992. Well, much has been said about U2 in the mainstream press this week, and for a band that is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has sold (according to Wikipedia) 140 million albums worldwide, and has even a Noble Peace Prize nomination under its lead singer’s belt, perhaps that is to be expected.

I can’t help but think, however, that there’s just not that much to say about No Line On The Horizon, while a separate release this week, on March 3rd, I find so much to say about, so much that I haven’t really been able to listen to No Line. That release is by an artist familiar to my thoughts, Neko Case, who this week released Middle Cyclone. It started a bit last week with the promotional video attached to Middle Cyclone’s Amazon page – Case discussing her decision to record part the album in a barn on her Vermont property, with a “piano orchestra” comprised of 8 pianos Case and her cohorts found for free on Craigslist. What a strange decision, and what an interesting piece of the Case mythology – a woman whose catalogue has featured oblique consternations the likes of fast trains, deer eyes, Ukranian murder tales, eagles, lady pilots flying into mountains, women in canneries, ghosts wandering across South Tacoma Way, and the vapor of dead pilots, abandoned pianos in a barn in Vermont seems, in its way, a natural progression.

Middle Cyclone is a triumph, and what it really is, to me, is a work by an artist with a true voice. I think of Neko Case like my favorite women in rock music – PJ Harvey, Lucinda Williams, Fiona Apple, and Joni Mitchell – modern women who make great songs and great records, but really what they’ve done is reconstitute the very meaning of “great songs and great records” because their voice is so specific, unique, and definite. Now, let’s not get sidetracked by the word “voice.” Case has a singing voice that soars, most comparable to Patsy Cline. It is passionate and vivid and her music would be less of what it is were she not so gifted a singer, but I’m not talking about a singing voice, I mean a point of view, a “voice” like a fresh, specific perspective. When I hear, for example, a PJ Harvey song, I hear music that no one else in the world can make, and maybe they don’t even want to try. Case is like that.

This can be a detriment to many listeners. I was surprised to find out that Middle Cyclone’s third track, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” is already well known to Rock Band 2 players – I saw an interesting, reductive review somewhere on google; it rates the singing part as four stars since the vocals are so challenging but also featuring “kind of funny lyrics” (“I’m a man man man man man man maneater/ still you’re surprised when I eat ya”), but its conventional bass part earns it only one star. In a way I felt a little angry that Case gave her song to Rock Band 2 – stoners across the country don’t deserve the opportunity to laugh at Case, her obsession with killer whales and tornadoes. But hey, all press is good press, I suppose.

A listener, and a music fan in particular, can get obsessed with the personality of a certain artist, can learn to love the quirks they make fun of later. I recall a coworker wanting to tell everyone about her Jill Scott cd – because she couldn’t stop listening to it, but it presented a problem listening to it on her headphones at her desk because she would start so low, and end up so loud on any given track. For the artists I love, their quirks lend themselves to so much vulnerability, I want to be strong and beat up naysayers for them. Of course, presenting that vulnerability is what makes them strong in the first place. In 2001, I saw PJ Harvey opening up for U2 at Denver’s 25,000-person-capacity stadium the Pepsi Center. She strode on stage with an electric guitar by herself and sang “Rid of Me,” whose lyrics can make a casual listener deeply uncomfortable. I know I could never stand in front of a stadium and sing “Lick my legs I’m on fire/ lick my legs of desire.”

In the same way, putting a song on Rock Band 2 is a bold move, and anyway, Cyclone’s got a lotta nerve. What an act of bravery to start an album with a track like “This Tornado Loves You,” a song you could reasonably describe as “a song about the destructive side of love.” But like the great tracks of her last two studio releases, 2002’s Blacklisted and 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, it’s hard to even describe her songs as falling under what you might typically consider a “song.” One blog online complained that Case’s not-often-over-3-minute style here signified her “lack of interest” in her material, or her sketchy approach. This reader clearly was unaware of previous four records, when even with conventional ABAB songs rarely topped the 3 minute mark.

But “This Tornado Loves You” is lyrically out there even by Case’s standards. “My love, I am the speed of sound/ I leave them motherless, fatherless/ their souls dangling inside-out from their mouths/ But it’s never enough/ I want you.” Youch. On my first listen, I began to resent the whole Case thing – couldn’t she just ditch the furious journal-writing session and get back to writing something pretty and instantly loveable, like “Guided By Wire” or “Furnace Room Lullaby”?

No, no she couldn’t, and I’m so lucky to get to fall in love with albums like Cyclone that push me away from what my understanding of a “great record” is; we all should question this sort of thing on occasion. I got pretty instantly obsessed with Blacklisted and Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. Look back over my writing in 2006, and one or both of these albums will come up over and over again. I think a great deal about Case, for whom, I think, her career truly started with Blacklisted. That album came roaring out in its banjo-heavy opening track “Things That Scare Me” with a blazing cry of “I am the dying breed that still believes/ hunted by American dreams.” It was a record of outcasts and drive, of being free to live closer to your own lunatic thoughts, and it was sealed in theme by the unconventional structure of its songs. Fox Confessor took that a step further, with difficulty telling its tales of people – star witnesses, widows of St. Angel, John the Baptist – facing their destiny of speaking the truth, whatever the consequences may be. The album was a surprise “Indie hit,” which means it sold close to 200,000 copies. At least that outside-the-margins thinking could reign in 200,000 people.

I think of defining your identity, of speaking truth outside the realm of conventional social definitions is something I wrestle with constantly, of “believing” despite being hunted by American dreams. Middle Cyclone blazes a step further, and focuses on love, particularly the need for love that remains. The defining line is midway through the record on the title track, a simple guitar melody accented by a toy music box, and it’s without a doubt one of the most gorgeous songs of Case’s career. “I can’t give up acting tough/ it’s all that I’m made of/ Can’t scrape together quite enough/ To ride the bus to the outskirts of the face that I need love.”

In writing about that song, and that line in particular, the instinct arises to replace some of the lyrics with ellipses, to sand out the actual words in a purpose to make the meaning clearer. Let me please avoid doing that, because the line, with its jagged edges, is perfect. Case, in her Amazon promotional video, said she found herself writing often during the writing of this record about tornadoes. Here, the “cyclone” can’t give up acting tough, and neither can Case – she has been successful in blazing her trail outside of regular standards, but can’t do it quite enough to escape her own needs from others. There’s actually a Harvey line it reminds me of (Harvey has a lot to say on this theme, but in a very different way), in a 2007 track called “Silence”: “I freed myself freed myself and remained alone” and just before that “Somehow expect you’ll find me there/ that by some miracle you’d be aware.” Both women have made their vulnerability into strength, they’ve succeeded. Both can’t scrape together quite enough to rid themselves of that need for love.

Where Cyclone’s first half is obsessed with love-as-tornado type destruction, the songs take on that same scattered logic of “This Tornado Loves You.” “Polar Nettles” and “Vengeance is Sleeping” keep the roar low and soft, obsessing over the way that love can be a brute force, and perhaps that surprises us most of all, the depths of feeling of which we’re all capable. In the middle is a rather cheeky cover of the Sparks song “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth.” In this context, that’s a threat as much as a hippie moment. On the album’s second half, Case strolls away in a couple of nightmares – “Fever” and “Prison Girls” take Case’s writing into the realm of dreams, wandering into and out of imagistic meaning.

Yet it also, actually, contains a couple of Case’s most singable, single-ready songs, to great surprise. “I’m an Animal” seems a song that Case must have written years ago and rejected as too obvious. She sings of her own nature: “Yes, there are things I’m still so afraid of/ But my courage is roaring like the sound of the sun,” and it’s great chorus “I’m an animal, you’re an animal, too.” Her need for love and her doubt makes her the beast that she is. Perhaps earlier in the record it may have seemed obvious, but here, track 10 of 14 (15 if you count the 35 minutes at the end of the record devoted to the sound of Vermont fireflies), it’s a solid beat of strength. Earlier songs on the record spoke of love’s destructive, cyclone-like path. This is a great embrace of the destruction within.

The other song that is unignorable, and beautifully singable on the second half is “Don’t Forget Me,” a cover of a Harry Nilsson song that Case gives her full piano orchestra treatment too. It’s not typical to hear eight (or even two) pianos on the same song, and the effect is jarring, deeply symphonic. Pianos typically cover the same ground, so more than one seems ultimately unnecessary – and here, it’s not as though each piano covers a different note (although, plenty do), but that they make each not deeper, more cavernous. There are trills of piano that continue north when a high note is reached, and plunge downward slightly enough to accent the song. I listened to the Harry Nilsson version after hearing Case’s – his version is also quite dramatic, but also emphasizes the humorous lyrics (“I’ll miss you when I’m lonely/ I’ll miss the alimony, too”), making it sounds like a song by a nebbish-y forty-something divorcee.

Case’s version is too baritone and too orchestral, and plays right over any of the humor in the song. It also is perfect, a moment of tenderness whose instrumentation literally expands each note, like a piano player playing with 80 fingers instead of ten. Case has done this before – Blacklisted’s covers of Sarah Vaughan’s “Look For Me (I’ll Be Around)” and Aretha Franklin’s “Runnin’ Out Of Fools” are direct fits in the progression of those albums, and sung with such ferocity by Case, there’s no doubt she makes those songs her own. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish, but for a couple of years I had no idea that “John Saw That Number” from Fox Confessor was not a Case original, just a retooling of a traditional church song, it’s such a snug evocation of that record’s themes. Her two covers here are classic Case. Like Me’shell Ndegeocello covering Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” on Bitter and Harvey doing “Highway ’61 Revisited” on Rid Of Me, it’s impossible to accuse the artist of co-opting someone else’s material, they’re such specific punctuations to albums already plenty specific.

So far in writing what I’ve written here, I’ve written 2,154 words. I write a lot of words anyway. Next to the long, 1000-word treatments U2 is getting in every publication is a much shorter, usually 1 paragraph bit of praise or dismissal for Middle Cyclone. I hope none of these things keep people from investigating what Cyclone says about Case, or her career, or us, or love in the ears and thoughts of the listener. Middle Cyclone deserves all the words in the world.