This week we watched Possessor (2022) and a Futurama episode titled “I Second that Emotion,” which expressed the meaning of Theory of the Mind.
Possessor (2020)
Tasya Vos is an assassin that is able to commit murders by taking control over other people’s bodies using brain-implant technology. In order to get back to her own body, she forces the host to commit suicide. The film starts off with Vos having finished one of her jobs, but fails to force her host to commit suicide. Her inability to go through it suggests there are some issues she has to work through, and it is hinted in the beginning as to what those issues are. After returning to her body, she has to go through a debriefing session to remember and connect with her real self. She feels guilt over a pinned butterfly she killed as a child. This guilt does not bode well for her future since her handler, Girder, wants to pass her title down to her. Vos is also seen practicing her “role” as an ex-wife and mother to Michael and Ira. She practices the phrasing and tone in which she’ll talk, similar to how she practices the way the hosts she invades act as well. This demonstrates that the person she is seen as through her ex-husband and son are not truly her. Even in the end she confesses to Colin that: “I loved him too, but I’m not sure if it was me.”
Similar to Theory of the Mind, she is able to understand that other people’s thoughts and perspectives are different from her own, but she still tries to connect with them in order to get the job done. She does this when killing the lawyer when she decides to stab him repeatedly instead of shooting him, something that her host would’ve done. This could either be because it would make it easier for her to commit the act, or easier to overpower her host. When killing John Parse as Colin, she again does not shoot him, but hits him with a weapon and disfigures his face. She is connecting with her host.
The ending where she kills her son was interesting because there is so much rage when shooting him. As if it was that moment when she felt she was free, free of acting like she had any emotions to show to Michael and Ira. In being free of them, she was free of that guilt she felt for pinning the butterfly as a child.
Futurama
In the episode of “Futurama: I Second that Emotion,” it was less challenging to follow along. Bender flushes Nibbler (Leela’s pet) down the toilet, and feels absolutely no emotions over it afterwards, not even when witnessing Leela breakdown over Nibbler. In order to teach Bender a lesson, the Professor implants an empathy chip that will allow Bender to feel every emotion Leela is going through. Bender is unwilling to even try to understand what Leela went through, which makes it easier for him to not care. He could try to show certain acts that would be perceived as acts of kindness, but he would still not feel them. Similar to Vos practicing phrases and tones of voice in order to act as if she felt those emotions. After taking the empathy chip off, Bender is back to his old self, having no emotions.
2 thoughts on “EMPATHY IMPLANTS AND CHIPS”
Hi Alessa,
You do a really nice job of how we see the division between Vos and her victims deconstructing throughout the episode. As you learned in the voicethread, empathy requires the ability to differentiate the self from the other. But, as you lay out in your post, Vos seems to struggle to do that at times. This lead to a certain amount of ambiguity in the film—was that really the way that her victims would want to murder the target, or was that actually Vos? Your point about the final scene and the butterfly is important. After being in her host, she has to reconstruct her sense of self. By the end of the film, we see her constructing a self without guilt—and empathy.
Jessica Hautsch
I really liked how you pointed out how Vos can’t connect to others in a normal way but still tries to with her family. She knows that she can’t but still tried to make her son and husband feel like she was normal. After realizing that it was impossible for her to make that connection again because of the body transferring, she turned those attempts into rage and using that to brutally murder all of her victims. Watching this movie again made me see it from a completely different view and it raised so many questions and view points.
jjwaterman