Hello everybody, I am
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You know what, never mind. Hello everyone.
I’ve always enjoyed thinking about how empathy works. Jokes aside, the picture above is from BBC’s Sherlock, a show that also brings empathy and the human mind into discussion. It’s interesting seeing a highly functioning sociopath like Sherlock interact with people close to him.
But of course, this isn’t about Sherlock, whose gore and insults might as well be considered PG 13 compared to the nightmare that is Possessor. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure.
Before we get into it, I have to say that I was not the biggest fan of the movie. It’s definitely a slow-burn, and the assassin part of the movie takes its time building up. However, it does a good job expressing empathy and the lack thereof.
Tasya Vos (cool name btw) is an assassin that possesses (title drop—kinda) people to kill people. After she possesses someone and finishes the job, she always has to go through a set of questions that concern her past. It acts as a way to see if there’s any brain damage done to her. And let me just tell you, the damage has been done. Nay, it had been done before the main plot began.
Some folks have mentioned the butterfly scenes, so I want to focus on something different. In order to properly fool other people, Vos has to know a lot about the person she is to possess. She has to know how they talk, the way their bodies move when they talk, their overall mannerisms when approaching someone else, etc.
There’s a scene where she is spying on Colin Tate. Unfortunately, I cannot take screenshots because the website blacks them out, so imagine Tasya Vos is peering through a camera, imitating what Tate is saying. She directly perceives Tate’s body and places herself in his skin (figuratively, for now). However, we can see that empathy does not equate to total understanding. When Vos is in Tate’s body (literally), his girlfriend notices that he is acting off. Though Vos can try her best to act like Tate, emulate his feelings, actually being him is not possible because Tate naturally interacts with the environment and other people differently due to his past. Something is off about him, and Ava notices.
This fits the Embodied Theory about empathy. Ava doesn’t need to analyze every bit of Tate that is off. Just from being with him long enough, she can tell, he is acting slightly differently.
I am firm in believing that empathizing and understanding are two different things. I can feel bad for a person losing someone, but can I understand the exact feeling unless I go through it myself? Not really.
The Futurama episode shows this well. Bender is a largely psychopathic character that cannot empathize with other people. That doesn’t mean he can’t feel emotions. The reason he flushes Nibbler in the toilet is because he is annoyed at how much attention the pet is getting compared to him. In other words, he’s a bit jealous. It didn’t help that Nibbler ate the cake Bender was making and going to present.
Eventually, he gets an empathy chip that makes him feel exactly how Leela is feeling. What’s interesting is that he can still complain about the emotions he’s experiencing as they are happening, which implies that simply feeling someone else’s emotions does not equate to understanding them. Bender, by the end of the episode, is back to his old self. In fact, the empathy chip was working “at triple capacity”. Bender wasn’t “feeling” Leela’s emotions. He was “emulating/simulating” them.
Possessor has a more complex view on empathy, but don’t sleep on Futurama. Both of them reinforce my opinion that while we are capable of somewhat feeling other people’s emotions by drawing on our own experiences, it is the lack of that same experience that doesn’t allow us to have a perfect recreation of how the they feel.
Thanks for reading my TED Tal—
Wait, that’s not right.
Warmly,
Guga Khidasheli
There we go.
4 thoughts on “Analysis #2 – I Can Empathize, But I Can Never Understand”
Hi Guga,
Your observation that, while he doesn’t experience empathy, Bender can still feel emotions, is super important and leads to some interesting questions about how he feels them. His body is mechanical, so what does it feel like for him to experience annoyance or jealousy? Something to keep in mind in two modules when we talk about emotions. You also make a good point that he is annoyed by his experience of Leela’s emotions. This is because he recognizes that the emotions he is feeling are not originating from him primordially—from his “I”—but are nonprimordial—he is still feeling them, but recognizing that they are not his. What’s called metaemotion can also help to explain what is happening her. Metaemotions are how we feel about our emotions. As someone who is a crier, I have definitely been annoyed at myself experience at sorrow when watching a movie that I know is shlocky—though that doesn’t stop me from weeping.
Great analysis of the role of embodied cognition in Possessor. I love your observations about how Vos is “embodying” the people she will possess long before that possession occurs. Also, your observation about Ava sensing that something isn’t right about Colin is also great. She probably couldn’t verbally articulate exactly what is off about him, but her embodied experience of his body gives her the feeling that something is off.
Sorry to hear that you did not enjoy Possessor. You are not the first person to note that its slow-burn feels like it drags a bit. However, I think that part of the reason for this is that it’s necessary to shift our empathy as we experience the film. We start by empathizing with Vos (she’s our protagonist and the film is written in such a way to encourage us to empathize with her), and when she first enters Colin’s body, we are probably rooting for her to succeed with her mission. But the time that we spend with Colin’s body, as we see the effect of being possessed has on him, we shift our empathy. We come to see that Vos is not just killing him, but destroying who he is and how he will be remembered. Anyway, that’s my pitch for the film’s pacing.
Jessica Hautsch
Hi Guga!
I completely agree with you on Bender and the way he is forced to live through Leila’s emotions. As I discussed in my post, Bender not feeling sympathy for others or consideration for how his actions might hurt others is not going to change just because he is lived through Leila’s emotions for a little while. His brain is still hard-wired wrong, and living through someone’s emotions is not going to fix neurological brain damage.
And you bring up another excellent point about Tas emulating Colins. Even if she said all the right things at just the right time, and flipped her hair one way or another just like he did, she is never going to fully embody Collins because that is just not who she is, and she never will be. And Ava recognizing right away that he was acting differently is a perfect example of how surface-level Tas’s empathy was all along. Great analysis and I love the humor, from one comedic writer to another, keep up the great work!
snaraujo
I think that is an interesting point and I think people in everyday life analyze each other. When a sociopath is taking on grooming a victim they study them and start to become them in a sense. To become them is to over come them. When you brought up the point about Ava noticing he is acting different, because she has spent the most time with him and knows him best. You can study someone and pick up their actions but like you said feeling what they are going through is something another cannot do. Yes I feel like you can have emotion such as anger, jealousy, hatred. I think in order to care for something strongly you would only feel those emotions if that person meant something to you. I think you can kind of put yourself in someones shoes or try to. You may not know exactly what they are going through, but you can feel that you want to try and understand.
ellryan
Hi Elizabeth,
This comment brings up an interesting point. Vos is studying Colin to observe and imitate his mannerisms. In contrast, Ava knows that something is not right, not because she has studied him, but simply through her embodied experience of their everyday interactions. This relates to some of what you learned about with direct perception. She doesn’t need to study or interpret his movements or facial expressions because she perceives them directly.
Jessica Hautsch