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The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson on empathy and the movies.
What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? Both words refer to a shared feeling, suffering, or experiencing. The subtle but significant difference between empathy and sympathy is clear when we consider their different prefixes. Sym- simply means “along with”; we are sympathetic when we happen to feel what another person feels. Em- however, implies something more active, when we deliberately enter into the feelings of another, through an act of will, intelligence, and imagination.
Obviously many, perhaps most, movies involve some degree of sympathy. We call the protagonist a “sympathetic character” when he or she is someone to whom we can, as they say, relate. Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, even Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music are sympathetic characters, and we experience their movies from their point of view.
Cinematic empathy is another thing entirely— and can be surprisingly powerful. Cinematic empathy is accomplished by the director, writer, and actor— the movie’s creative team—when an unsympathetic character is somehow made sympathetic. The will, intelligence, and imagination involved in every act of empathy are deliberately and consciously translated by the filmmakers into the art of cinema, making the viewer feel for someone which would normally seem quite unlikely.
A masterful early example is M, the story of a mad serial killer, a child murderer, in early 1930s Berlin (based in fact on a real-life murderer in 1920s Dusseldorf, Peter Kurten, as all initial viewers of the film knew). A less likely character for anyone’s sympathy could scarcely be imagined. But director Fritz Lang and actor Peter Lorre through cinematic empathy enable us to feel for him — while still portraying the killer, Hans Beckert, as eminently creepy. Lang borrows the horror movie dictum that what is not shown is more horrifying than what is, giving us ominous touches such as a ball rolling to a stop or a balloon getting caught in telegraph wires at the very moment we know Beckert is murdering — and perhaps violating — some innocent little girl. Beckert cues us himself by whistling the Hall of the Mountain King theme from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, an eerie tune in a ghostly story.
We should be repulsed by Beckert. But we are not. Through Lang’s inventive direction — showing Beckert at odd human moments, for example, making faces in a mirror, innocently buying a newspaper — and Lorre’s brilliant acting — he uses his huge, popping eyes, for example, in such a way that he seems more scared rabbit than terrifying monster — we actually come to care for him, to feel sorry for him.
And we start to see the two groups hunting him down — the police on the one hand, and the criminal gangs on the other (who are said to despise child molesters for giving criminality a bad name) as obsessed, unfeeling bullies. When the criminals finally succeed in trapping him, we understand it when he screams “But can I...can I help it?” and then we are stunned when he asks, “Who knows what it feels like to be me?” For, to a certain extent, we do. Lang and Lorre have accomplished that, and the effect is to make us question our usual reaction to such monsters as Beckert and as it were distribute the guilt and the blame. It sounds like the most facile cliché to say “the real criminal is society itself.” But to show it — to express this idea through cinematic empathy — made for one of the most powerful films ever made.
The ultimate experience of empathy however is not just feeling for, but identifying with, a character. And while we feel for the murderer in M, we of course cannot identify with him—he is too far removed from us. To feel empathy to the point of identification requires someone with whom we can identify in the first place, but whose character reveals problems, contradictions, guilt.
James Stewart made a career of playing sympathetic characters throughout his early and middle careers. But in the early 1950s, Stewart teamed with the quirky and talented director Anthony Mann to produce a series of Westerns — The Naked Spur, The Man from Laramie, Bend in the River, The Far Country — wherein he played morally ambiguous, flawed, neurotic, and sometimes even sinister characters—thus balancing his eminently likeable image and establishing himself as a far more subtle and gifted actor than he would otherwise have seemed.
The apotheosis of this stage in Stewart’s career was not in one of the Mann Westerns, however. It was in a film by the great manipulator of audiences, Alfred Hitchcock, and the film was Vertigo. In it, actor and director push cinematic empathy to its limits by making us not merely feel for, but actually identify with, a deeply wounded and psychologically unstable man.
Stewart’s character, detective Scotty Ferguson, has suffered deep psychological trauma: trying to save a fugitive he chases over San Francisco rooftops, he ends up clinging for life to a gutter and witnessing the fugitive’s death. The combination of terror and guilt wound him deeply. Long after his physical injuries mend, he is a troubled, haunted person. In a rich Hitchcockian convoluted plot, Scotty becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman, Madeline, who seems to have been murdered. She is replaced by Judy, a plain look-a-like Scotty tries to remake in the image of Madeline. He is cruel, insensitive, and fetishistic. But we not only feel for him, we identify with him.
Because Hitchcock knows better than any director how to handle a viewer, and because Scotty looks exactly like that man we know and like, James Stewart. This is in fact the core of the film: our identifying with a man with a rotten psyche. The plot itself, clever as it is, is what Hitchcock called the “McGuffin”— the red herring that is beside the point.
Most viewers experience Vertigo as a profoundly disturbing movie, hard to watch and painful to recall, for precisely this reason. They have felt not just sympathy but active, powerful empathy with someone they really do not like.
Most recently, an acting tour-de-force has brought us another major example of this empathetic principle: Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Dan Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Plainview is an ordinary human being who gradually becomes evil by willful acceptance of a vice — greed. He’s not exactly sympathetic at the start — he is a rough, taciturn, and too-practical 19th-century American shamelessly out to exploit the resources of the earth and the people. But Day-Lewis, and the camera, bring us so close that we can’t help but feel for him. As greed slowly works its way within Plainview, we feel his pain.
This pain brings us too close for comfort as his greed deepens. He starts to lie, steal, abuse his own body, and murder. And when he does these things, we neither condemn him in outrage nor feel sorry for him as a victim, rather we are astonished that this man we know so well is doing these things we know to be so bad.
We are in the position of the innocent family member when someone in the inner circle becomes deeply sinful. That is where the horror is located, and it is extremely close, and deeply human. We feel it. It is terrifying to watch a human soul be destroyed.
Christianity teaches that we are all flawed, lost, alienated from God. But our psychological self-preservation enables us to deny that most of the time. We prefer a Dualist view of the universe, with Good and Bad, and we think we belong with the good.
Cinematic empathy challenges that — and therefore involves a very serious Christian anthropology. It causes us to sympathize with an eldritch monster, to identify with neurotic, psychologically selfish characters. At first it makes us uncomfortable. But then we experience a kind of relief: our flaws may be more hidden, but they are there. As St. Athanasius put it, unmasked demons are never dangerous. Cinematic empathy unmasks a few of ours and it ultimately reminds us that every one of us shares humanity with the outsider, the flawed person, the despised human being. And that the first person Christ admitted into Paradise was not his mother nor a disciple, but a repentant thief.
The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson has taught spirituality, history, and theology at
colleges and universities for 30 years.
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