I’m late to the discussion on this one, but this module included media that deals with empathy in extreme sci-fi scenarios. While Futurama is always a fun watch, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Possessor, as ’empathy’ wasn’t as intriguing of a topic compared to the previous week. Though it wasn’t an easy watch, I was pleasantly surprised with the sci-fi concepts and story.
I watched The Possessor first, and oh boy, was it hard to stomach at parts. The camera work was amazing (which only made the gory parts even gorier) and the concepts it tackled were really interesting. We follow Tasya Vos, an assassin who takes over other people’s bodies to kill her target. As she moves in and out of bodies, she becomes more and more disoriented with her identity and life itself. Even before the assassination on John Parse goes wrong, Tas has become prone to violence, killing her victims brutally with knives and blunt force. She also appears constantly confused, practicing her mannerisms before seeing her family and misremembering facts about her life.
I interpreted this descent into madness as the effect of an overload of emotions and experiences; when Tas goes into other’s bodies, she seems to gain a better understanding of her target while simultaneously losing a piece of herself in the process. In the final scene where Tas/Collin kill Michael, the process is described as parasitic – almost as if the process of switching bodies intrinsically causes insanity. This idea is supported by Girder’s apparent lack of emotion and statement that she feels overtaken by the act of entering another body. After the years of experience she had being an assassin, the process took it’s toll on her – just as it did to Tas in the end.
A scene that I connected to the lecture was when Tas is watching Collin as he talks to his girlfriend at home, mimicking everything he says. She’s likely directed by her employer to learn about her target this way because the mimicking activates her mirror neurons, which fire both when an organism witnesses an action and performs that action themselves. This would help her learn Colin’s mannerisms quicker.
I then watched the episode “I Second That Emotion” from Futurama, which was a welcomed change of pace from the nail biter that was The Possessor. Bender gets jealous of Nibbler – Leela’s pet – and flushes him down the toilet in retaliation. Leela is heartbroken because of this, but Bender doesn’t seem to understand or care about her feelings. She says that she would feel better if Bender understood how she was feeling, leading to the doctor implanting an empathy chip into Bender against his will. He’s then stuck feeling the same emotions as Leela. This is an example of simulation theory – the idea that understanding others involves simulating their mental states based on your own experiences. In this case, Bender is literally experiencing emotions as Leela does.
During his time with empathy, Bender is shown to experience emotions in a robotic way. When Leela feels an emotion, a light on the chip blinks red and Bender completely switches what he was previously thinking. He sometimes comments on these emotions with his true thoughts, though, stating that he hates Nibbler just after the empathy chip made Bender miss him. While he is experiencing Leela’s emotions, they are not accurate to how Bender wants to feel. Because of this, Bender doesn’t learn his lesson in the end and is just as big of a jerk as he was when flushing Nibbler down the toilet.
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