Empathy (part 1)

I wouldn't want to risk the wrath of John Rodgers of King Fu Monkey by suggesting that there is such a thing as "liberal Hollywood."

If by "Hollywood" we mean the film industry, then we're talking about a profit-chasing, profit-maximizing machine which has only one agenda — and that agenda has nothing to do with politics or social causes. In that regard, talking about "liberal Hollywood" makes about as much sense as talking about "liberal Wal-mart."

But within and despite that profit-making machine, "Hollywood" also has something to do with telling stories. More often than not, Hollywood seems more interested in selling stories than in telling them, and the business of it is always threatening to swallow up the art of it. But despite all of that Hollywood is, among other things, a community of storytellers. And telling stories requires, among other things, empathy. And empathy, nowadays, is regarded as a "liberal" characteristic.

This is, I think, what so many of those conservative pundits were complaining about when they lamented the supposedly "liberal" and "political" stance of this year's nominees for the Academy Award for best picture. These pictures dared to imagine and express empathy.

This was what made these movies worthy of consideration for best-picture honors. And what made them so frightening to their critics.

If you listened to the conservative commentators commentating on Brokeback Mountain you'd have thought the movie was a political tract conceived and executed by radicalgaypolitical activists promoting their radicalgaypolitical agenda. But that wasn't where this movie came from. It came from Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, Ang Lee, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal — each of them a storyteller of one kind or another, and each relying, as all storytellers must, on empathy.

The conservative commentators seemed relieved when Crash beat out Brokeback to win the Academy Award.* That film also — explicitly (maybe even a little too explicitly) — was an exercise in and meditation on empathy, but it extended that empathy in so many different directions that perhaps it seemed less threatening than the more focused phobia-line-crossing Brokeback.

But even Brokeback Mountain didn't stir up the kind of anger and controversy that two other nominated films did for trespassively extending empathy not just to outsiders, but to enemies. Both Munich and Paradise Now dared to imagine that terrorists are human and that we not only can, but perhaps ought to, try to understand what they are thinking. And for some viewers, that was asking too much.

Empathy is all well and good, within limits.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* The Academy — a guild of people who are all, again, also storytellers — is always impressed by, and a bit self-congratulatory about, skillful displays of empathy. Thus Matt Dillon's impressive portrayal of a racist police officer in Crash garnered an Oscar nomination, while Terrence Howard's equally impressive portrayal of a black victim of racist cops in Crash did not. Thus also three nominations this year for straight male actors playing gay men. Both Dillon and Gyllenhaal lost out to George Clooney, who won for playing a character who was neither liberal nor good-looking.