Guest post: Empathy and violence.

By Farid Ben Amor

Empathy is a funny thing.  Love, doubtless, is its cause.  This bond that unites our species both enables and burdens us with experiencing the emotions of a loved one, or even a stranger.  And consoling a crying person or rejoicing at a friend’s achievement are common positive outcomes of this profound emotion.  But despite empathy’s sacred provenance, society forgets its dark side.

Vigilante justice, as seen in Law Abiding Citizen, breeds devastating hatred.  In this movie, Gerard Butler’s character loses his family to two criminals that rape and murder them.  The justice system and Jamie Foxx’s character’s ego get in the way of a fair ruling, so Butler’s character takes justice into his own hands and kills the perpetrators, and then some.

Indeed, our victim-hero goes on to methodically kill many more who are guiltless in his original abortion of justice.  And you love it every step of the way.  When he finally gets his comeuppance and dies, there was an audible shocked disappointment in the crowd of my screening.  One audience member exclaimed, “But he was the good guy!” which was quickly followed by collective nervous laughter.

That we are aware of and relish our empathy-caused double standard is nothing short of incredible.  But that’s what movies are for, right?  A comfortable escape to indulge our fantastical paradoxes?  Perhaps this is why Žižek prefers using the medium for his psychoanalytics.  He sees Western love as “a violent passion to introduce a difference … to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others.”  Is this not precisely what we do when we share Butler’s character’s glee in his murders?

This concept of empathic violence finds an inverse analog in The Passion of the Christ, which Žižek declared “the ultimate sado-maso gay spectacle.”  Setting aside its homosexual undertones, that movie enables even the most secular-liberal types to experience – by way of empathy – an intensely masochistic episode (except for someone like Bill Maher and others surely stimulated in a sadistic way).  In either case, its wide acceptance and popularity, like that of vigilante movies, presents us with an undeniable link:

That violence is a veritable Aristotelian sine qua non to empathy and love.

Funny.

NW in Foreign Policy.

Could Dry Summer, a Turkish film from 1964, have anything to teach us about present-day Middle East politics? I ponder the question over at Foreign Policy magazine online.

What’s striking about the film — besides its frank erotic undertones and its stark depiction of rural Turkish village life — is how relevant its subject matter remains. In the simple story of a ruthless farmer’s claim to a source of water on his land, it dramatizes competing notions of property rights that still trouble us today. And it successfully straddles that line between modernity and tradition so often referred to when talking about present-day Turkey. Even as the characters channel ancient rivalries of Cain and Abel, the female lead’s blend of head scarf and billowy salwar pants wouldn’t look at all out of place in a Middle Eastern music video.

Whole thing here.

Watching propaganda in Bucharest.

I recently had the unique opportunity to watch a contemporary North Korean movie in an audience of mostly Romanians. Aside from the novelty of watching anything made for public consumption by the North Korean state — let alone subtitled in French and Romanian — the experience was a bit like following someone back into Plato’s cave, shocked to discover people still there mesmerized by the dancing shadows on the wall.

The Dear Leader’s affinity for cinema goes beyond your average dictator’s appreciation for the propaganda value of the dark arts. He once reportedly kidnapped a South Korean film director and his girlfriend, held them in captivity and forced them to make a movie for him … which he then released with his own name on the credits. In 2006, A Schoolgirl’s Diary became that rare North Korean flick successful enough on the festival circuit to score a foreign distribution deal (through a French company). Something like a third of the population saw the movie domestically.

Last month it was screened at Bucharest’s Asian film festival with some justified fanfare. This would be the first North Korean movie to be shown in the country since the fall of Ceausescu, the Communist leader whose vision of Bucharest — bulldozing most of the historic center, forcibly resettling tens of thousands of people, and constructing an overbearing palace — was supposedly inspired by a visit to Pyongyang. And here was an audience full of old-timers with memories of those days!

The film’s story itself is classic socialist realism. It follows a high school girl named Su-ryeon who lives in the countryside, torn between her dream of becoming a scientist like her father and staying at home to care for her family. The tension becomes acute when her mother falls ill and the sacrifices of working as a researcher become clear. Should she set off for the big city like her father, leaving her family behind except for the occasional visit for a good home-cooked meal?

As it turns out, the dilemma is resolved with a neat trick of ideological consistency when our protagonist is reminded that the true family is the nation, and the one true father — why, that’s our Dear Leader. Off she goes to university and a bright future ahead as a great successful scientist in the service of the benevolent state.

One of the running threads in the movie is Su-ryeon’s embarrassment over living in a rural house, as opposed to more acceptable urban living quarters. For the Romanians in the audience, whose uproarious response to just about everything the characters said revealed their continuing disbelief that there are people in the world who still believe this stuff, the final scene was a fitting punchline: Su-ryeon’s family surprises her by moving into an apartment (closer to the city, presumably). Joyful tears streaming down her face, she thanks them for the privilege of living in exactly the sort of concrete monstrosity that blots most of the Bucharest cityscape today.

The movie itself is well-made and it functions sufficiently enough as an entertaining coming-of-age tale. More than anything, it will eventually survive as a curious artifact of a hermit state whose regime may well persist far into the future. It may be amusing to a Western viewer, for example, to hear the periodic references to the Dear Leader (which I think was roughly translated to Romanian as “Beloved General”) or the occasional song-and-dance number featuring schoolchildren saluting the righteous nation. Like the amused (and bemused) Romanians in the audience, maybe there will be a day when Koreans from both north and south can laugh together at the idea that not so long ago, this kind of movie could find an earnest reception.

Michael Jackson: No stranger in Moscow.

And now, a musical/cultural interlude:

In a country still pocked with scars from its half-decade experience under a particularly brutal form of Communism, the Palace of the People remains the most fantastical and the most visible. Over the 20 years since political and economic transitions began to rock Eastern Europe, the structure has transformed into something of a pop icon in Romania: a reminder that kitsch is universal, a beckoning, forbidden Neverland in the heart of the capital.

Today, each new batch of tourists shuffling gape-mouthed through the cavernous pastiche of rooms hears the same story. Did you know? On his first visit to Romania, the King of Pop stood on the balcony of the hulking edifice, facing a throng of adoring fans, and greeted them with the shout of … “Hello, Budapest!”

Like many stories about Michael Jackson, this one is as believable as it is unverifiable. Some tour guides insist on its veracity, while others dismiss it as a myth. (Romanians like to point out that they got their revenge when Lenny Kravitz offended Hungarians with the opposite mistake.) True or not, this much-repeated tale reveals as much about a national inferiority complex as it does the Western cultural forces that were unleashed after the fall of the Iron Curtain: Young people here adored him, even if, like many Americans, he probably couldn’t place Romania on a map.

Contrary to what many eulogists have claimed in the past week, it wasn’t all downhill from Thriller. Michael Jackson reached the very height of international fame with his 1991 album Dangerous, released less than a month before the fall of the Soviet Union and more popular in many countries – and for a longer time – than it was in the United States.

This was particularly true in Eastern Europe, where for decades access to popular media was tightly controlled. Much has been written about how Michael Jackson’s crossover appeal chipped away at the racial wall dividing American musical tastes. Likewise, the Berlin Wall symbolized a barrier that kept Western music, movies, and ideas out of public view in the Communist space – even as jeans-clad listeners furtively tuned in to Radio Free Europe to hear songs and the latest news. Thanks to this balkanization of culture, for example, almost no one in the United States has heard of Willis Conover, the beloved radio host whose nightly jazz broadcasts on Voice of America fed the musical appetites and imaginations of millions behind the Iron Curtain.

The first cracks became visible when Jackson appeared on Soviet television in 1988 – in that famous Pepsi commercial, of all things. And when the dam finally broke, American artists found a voracious audience waiting for them among the former captive nations. Jackson was the first to venture east. In 1992, as Romania still foundered under a Gorbachev-approved government of former Party apparatchiks, his visit stirred a European response the likes of which Americans hadn’t witnessed since Ronald Reagan visited Berlin five years earlier. At a sold-out concert before over 70,000 people, he sang about healing the world as teenage Romanian girls in the audience screamed hysterically and tore at their hair.

When HBO broadcast the Bucharest performance, it became the channel’s most-watched special. Now that the curtain has fallen on Michael Jackson for the last time, television reruns are familiarizing a new generation of Romanians with the spectacle, a throwback to a disruptive post-1989 period that many of them barely remember.

The impromptu shrines to Jackson at American embassies across the region and the nonstop public eulogies are a testament to a popularity that never really faded the way it did back home. They also hark back to a time when Europeans could unabashedly wave American flags in support of a shared cultural alliance, like they did at Jackson’s Bucharest visit, Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech – and more recently, Barack Obama’s tours through the continent. (Russia excepted, where Michael is probably still more popular.)

Yes, to many Americans, there’s something infectious about seeing throngs of foreigners swooning to the sweet words (or sounds) of a Yankee superstar. Call it a post-World War II phenomenon, a messiah complex, a delusion – but on some level, and at some point in time, it fed a mutual desire. Just ask Michael: After all, in his late period it was the King of Pop erecting literal monuments to himself, just as much a symbol of his need to be adored as of his lasting cultural imprint abroad.

In Eastern Europe people have developed, quite understandably, an automatic suspicion of wildly popular figures in general and wily leaders in particular, especially the kind who insist on memorializing themselves. The spectacle of this Western pop figure with millions of adoring fans, though, always managed to steer clear of those defense mechanisms. Maybe it was his consummate shyness out of the spotlight, his almost childlike naivete and vulnerability, that sent the right signal to his fans: He was the exact opposite of a brutal strongman, an ambassador of nothing more than peace and goodwill.

His legacy, of cultural ties that permeate even the sturdiest of walls, was one that no repressive regime could tear down.

Iranian cinema and the election protests.

I’m no expert on Iranian cinema, but fortunately a couple people who are have already written about whether today’s unrest is a culmination of societal trends reflected in the nation’s films. Already, two Iranian filmmakers, Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, have emerged as Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s spokespeople abroad, and maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise to us, considering how intertwined the reformist movement has been with demands for more artistic freedom.

Here’s film historian Abel Kerevel’s description of The Snowman, which sounds like it touched on some pretty potent culture-war issues in Iran:

This movie was a smash hit in Iran when it was released. It was actually made in 1994, but remained banned until [Mohammad] Khatami came to power in 1997. The prominent themes of cross-dressing and the desire to travel to America were both forbidden enough to incite quite a brouhaha. Groups of young, ultraconservative militants attacked some of the theaters showing the film, but oddly, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weighed in to say he wasn’t opposed to it. Even though The Snowman had circulated heavily on the black market before its 1997 release, it eventually became Iran’s highest-grossing film at the time.

Or this one, providing a connection to Khatami’s eventual rise to the presidency:

One of the earlier Iran-Iraq War films, The Imperiled follows a small group of “antirevolutionaries” accidentally freed by the opening of the shah’s prisons in 1980. During their escape to the Iraqi border, this group — a former SAVAK agent, a capitalist, and a murderer — get caught up in the war, valiantly defending an Iranian border town. Iranian film connoisseurs might consider The Imperiled an odd, if not obscure, top-10 pick. But though The Imperiled was never banned, authorities disliked the movie so much that it essentially ended the careers of its stars — Malik Motii, Ali Fardin, and Said Rad (all icons from the ’60s and ’70s). The controversy surrounding the film eventually led to the resignation of the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, who was succeeded by Mohammad Khatami, who later became president. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a godfather of sorts in contemporary Iranian cinema, hated The Imperiled so much he claims it was the reason he started making movies.

A.O. Scott also weighs in:

The flowering of Iranian cinema in the 1990s was itself evidence of a cultural and political thaw, a tentative premonition of the current demand for change. As minister of culture and Islamic guidance from 1989 to 1992, [Khatami] encouraged the expansion of film production, and his election to the presidency in 1997 (in an unexpected landslide) came less than a week after Mr. Kiarostami shared the Palme d’Or in Cannes for “Taste of Cherry.”

As nearly contemporaneous news events — and in retrospect today — those two victories symbolized the possibility of a relatively liberal and cosmopolitan Iran, or at least the partial ascendance of more outward-looking and conciliatory forces within Iranian society. The reality turned out to be much more ambiguous, as Mr. Khatami’s tenure in office was marked more by the frustration of reformist aspirations than by their fulfillment.

…

A typical Iranian film can feel like one long series of family quarrels — a clatter of competing opinions and interests that is at once contentious and courteous, violent and fraternal, but that never seems to end. Democracy can feel that way, too, and in that respect the Iranian cinema of recent years offers a foreshadowing of what is happening now, beyond the screen.

And now, a post about abortion.

Cristian Mungiu’s brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days captures on film the personal consequences of possibly the most brutal, uncompromising anti-abortion regime the world has ever seen. Now that abortion is back in the news again — so much for the idea of “moving past” the culture wars! — it’s worth remembering what kind of society results from taking anti-abortion policy prescriptions to their logical extreme. Tony Judt explains the policy’s legacy in a 2001 New York Review of Books essay ($):

To increase the population—a traditional Romanianist obsession—in 1966 [Ceauşescu] prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.

The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. In twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceausescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children—a figure that has remained steady to the present.

In Romania, a heavily Orthodox nation, the abortion policy — which also included a ban on contraception — didn’t have its roots in religious conviction but in a singular obsession to expand the pool of pure Romanian stock. Regardless of rationale, it led to outright misery and death while failing to reduce the actual number of abortions.

The film itself is studiously apolitical. With deceptively simple formal rigor, it depicts a factual account of what could and did happen in Romania on a regular basis prior to 1990. It could be wielded in any number of ways by either side of the abortion debate — yet, upon its very limited release in America, it’s worth noting that the film barely warranted a peep from the culture warriors. Perhaps that’s because in the end, no group is willing to publicly suggest banning contraception.

The abortionist in the film is a sinister, manipulative character who’s so chilling precisely because he’s so believable. Yet in that society, people were forced to rely on such men — men who might be condemned as murderers in a free country like the United States, but who were at the time some women’s last hope.

So we’re left with a story told in a moral vacuum, one that nevertheless reminds us that, far from an attempt to nurture life, Romania’s anti-abortion regime was wielded as one of many weapons against its own people.

N.B. It’s worth adding that at the extreme, abortion literally becomes a privacy issue: Women in Romanian dorms had to submit to monthly exams to ensure definitively that one thing led, nine months later, to the other.

Jack Bauer converts to Islam.

Almost, anyway. Maybe too clever by half, but you have to admit it was an irresistible twist to see our favorite Muslim-torturing hero beg an imam for forgiveness on his death(?)bed. If nothing else, it was an announcement that 24’s lefter-leaning producers successfully hijacked the once conservative-dominated writers’ room. Or was it?

From the beginning, the politics of 24 have been messier than partisans want to admit (confirmed when I discovered how much of a guilty pleasure it was among bigwigs at NPR). The show was developed before 9/11 and didn’t deal with Islamic terrorists until its second season. There wasn’t really any torture until then, either — at least by the good guys.

What people tend to overlook is the basic structural necessity of the very features that peeve both the left (incessant torture) and the right (stuffy white guys usually end up pulling the strings, with evil Muslims downgraded to their hapless tools). For a real-time show, torture became a vital device to quickly move the plot forward and transmit information. When you’re counting in seconds, there’s no time to develop a rapport with your enemy and adhere to U.N. resolutions. The audience would get bored — and the hour would soon be over.

Similarly, it’s proven difficult for the writers to sustain a single villain over an entire season. It’s just practically impossible to map out an entire 24 hours in advance. The solutions have given us mixed results: Season 2 was a well-planned hybrid of one plot (nuclear bomb somewhere in Los Angeles!) that led smoothly into another (stop impending war before it’s too late!). Season 4 was a string of standalone plots, lined up one after another. Season 6’s main plot was solved about 7 episodes too early, leaving producers scrambling for another threat that seemed tacked-on and unnecessary.

In each case, the focus necessarily shifted from one bad guy to another — from the previous villain to the mastermind higher up who was “actually” behind it all along. Thus the plot continues and the stakes are raised, but practically speaking we’re eventually going to be dealing with a conspiracy in the government, a corporation, or some other group that tends to be in the left’s crosshairs because it is powerful. This happened when Joel Surnow, the show’s co-creator and self-described “right-wing nut job,” was the head writer as well as after he left. Necessities dictated by the story trump political motivations.

And while the show has been more explicit in the past year about the ethical considerations raised by torture and terror, they’ve always been there, lurking behind the surface. Jack’s been tortured himself, multiple times. He’s tortured someone and gotten false information. He helped stop a war that would have been waged on false premises. And every time he’s skirted the edge of the law, he’s turned himself in to face the consequences.

Now that we’ve just finished a season where these issues were front and center, some fans are sure to stop watching. One on Twitter wrote of her disappointment in the finale: “I needed less crying and way less of Jack being incapacitated.” She might well have added, “and more torture!” There’s been a spirited debate online about the political direction of the show: whether it’s increasingly reflecting the age of Obama, whether Jack Bauer will become a secret Muslim, whether the show has become too politically correct.

On that last point: Of course it’s politically correct! What primetime series on network television isn’t? 24 is politically correct now, just as it was after 9/11, when it was politically correct not to question our leaders as they did what they felt was necessary, Bauer-like, to protect America.

Is empathy illogical?

“I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes.”

I’m not sure Spock would agree. In the future utopia of Star Trek, where food can materialize out of thin air and money has been replaced by limitless “credits,” the legal system is surely infallible — administered by computers voiced by James Earl Jones, even. Sure, at some point in human history empathy was the “logical,” evolutionary solution to group survival. But that was during the dark reign of the State of Nature. Today, we have things like laws and courts that are supposed to restrain our instincts and hold us to a higher, democratically sanctioned standard. They’re not infallible, though — not yet anyway.

If there’s one thing the show’s ’60s incarnation taught us, it’s that while emotions can fuel war and untold suffering — the reason Vulcans decided to do away with them in the first place — they’re also what make humanity worth striving for. That, aside from the occasional justification for armed intervention, was basically the message of every episode.

Then again, Spock was always the constitutional check to Kirk’s will of the mob, defender of the system Kirk often sought to escape. Which officer would you rather have on today’s Supreme Court?

Happy Memorial Day.

In honor of those serving and those who have fallen, take a few minutes to absorb the devastating final scene of one of the greatest war films ever made: Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.

The joys of local government.

Parks and Recreation isn’t perfect. At least not now, after a six-episode run. But neither was the American Office in its first season, before it had enough time to unshackle itself from the long British shadow. The potential is there, though, for P&R to find a voice of its own without falling back too much on rehashes of old Office antics. And that’s why I’m glad it was renewed for another season.

Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope is basically Michael Scott meets Tracy Flick: an ambitious blond go-getter with the political sensibilities of, say, Chauncey Gardiner. We get to see what would happen if, instead, Mr. Smith had gone to Pawnee, Indiana, and filibustered on the topic of construction pits. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Poehler is playing the character straight or for laughs, a balance Steve Carell nails on a weekly basis. And some of the characters are hard to figure out. Like, isn’t “Tom Haverford” just a slightly more wiseass version of Jim from The Office?

Yet the show has so much to teach us about civics and local government! The apathy most people in a community feel about their elected leaders? Check. The difficulty of pushing through a simple project with citizen backing? Ditto. And best of all, it’s a handy microcosm for the swirl of idealism and cynicism, ideology and pragmatism that defines our national politics. The best character on the show is Ron Swanson, the head of the parks department. Here’s how he introduces himself on the show:

SWANSON

I've been quite open about this around the
office: I don't want this parks department
to build any parks because I don't believe
in government. I think that all government
is a waste of taxpayer money. My dream is
to have the park system privatized and run
entirely for profit by corporations, like
Chuck E. Cheese. They have an impeccable
business model. I would rather work for
Chuck E. Cheese.

This could literally, with few modifications, describe the actual working beliefs of more than a few elected leaders in America today, from the states to Congress. (Replace “parks” with “emergency management” and “Chuck E. Cheese” with “Wal-Mart.” Seriously, try it.) It only sounds slightly more absurd when transplanted to a small-time local agency that’s actually tasked with providing certain services.

Swanson’s desk sports a sawed-off shotgun aimed at the visitor’s chair, supposedly a metaphor for his view of the government’s attitude toward the people (or should that be vice versa?). Here’s his political ideology in a nutshell:

My idea of a perfect government is one guy
who sits in a small room at a desk, and the
only thing he's allowed to decide is who to
nuke.

Here’s hoping the show delves more into the practical consequences of this mindset on the actual workings of the agency. (Judging by personal grudges, the ongoing office Scrabble tournament, and general incompetence shown so far … well, let’s not take this metaphor too far.)

Michael Ayers at The Wrap puts it nicely, writing that the show’s “promise lies in the way government interacts with its citizens; monotony’s portrayed in a whole new light.”

This became brilliantly evident during “Rock Show” — where broken-legged, dispassionate civilian-couch potato Andy Dwyer unveiled his band’s newest song, “The Pit.” Its bland yet dedicated mantra sums up the show’s central premise around local government: “I fell in the pit/you fell in the pit.”

Now that’s good satire.