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.