creating empathy through media

The Other:

Rain Man (autistic)

Forrest Gump (mentally retarded)

A Beautiful Mind (paranoid schizophrenia)

The Last of Mohicans (native-american)

Avatar (aliens)

Schindler's List (jews)

Uncle Tom's Cabin (african-americans)

We need one for Mexicans and Muslims now.

Imagination is Reality Plus

Imagination is Reality Lite--a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

If you enjoy winning the Word Series of Poker, flying around Metropolis, or making love to a certain someone, then you can get some limited taste of these pleasures by closing your eyes and imagining these experiences.

But in some sense, unreal events can be more moving than real ones, similar to how artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar. There are three reasons for this:

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but these people tend to be professors, students, neighbors, and so on. This is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

Such psychic intimacy isn't limited to the written word. There are conventions in other artistic mediums that have been created for the same purpose. A character in a play might turn to the audience and begin a dramatic monologue that expresses what he or she is thinking. In a musical, the thoughts might be sung; on television and in the movies, a voice-over may be used. This is commonplace now, but it must have been a revelation when the technique was first invented, and I wonder what young children think when they come across this for the first time, when they hear someone else's thoughts expressed aloud. It must be thrilling.

As another case of intimacy, consider the close-up. Certainly voyeurism has long been a theme of movies, from Rear Window to Disturbia, but the technique of film itself offers a unique way to satisfy our curiosity about the minds of others. Where else can you look full into someone's face without having the person look back at you? "Some viewers thrill to the prospect of views into the bedroom and bathroom," the philosopher Cohn McGinn writes, "but the film viewer can get even closer to the private world of his subject (or victim) —to his soul."

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds, by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

Honor

The world of the Odyssey and today's world are two very different worlds.

Values:

Ancient:  Honor, Courage, Bravery, Heroism, Nobility, Aristocracy.

Modern:  Aspiration, Enterprise, Efficiency, Tolerance, Democracy.

High-status occupations:

Ancient:  Soldier, Warrior, Priest, King.

Modern:  Investment Banker, Lawyer, Politician, Pro Athlete.

And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming,

after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas,

and only a few escape the gray water landward

by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt coated upon them,

and gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil;

so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him,

and she could not let him go from the embrace of her white arms.

Now Dawn of the rosy fingers would have dawned on their

weeping,

had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene planned it otherwise.

She held the long night back at the outward edge, she detained Dawn of the golden throne by the Ocean, and would not let her harness her fast-footed horses who bring the daylight to people:

Lampos and Phaethon, the Dawn's horses, who carry her.

Then resourceful Odysseus spoke to his wife, saying: "Dear wife, we have not yet come to the limit of all our trials. . . .   

- Odysseus XXIII, 233-49

Odysseus, one of the meanings of whose name is "trouble," cannot rest. He will soon go off to complete his adventures.

You can go back to the amniotic sea, or you can make your surface shining and impenetrable, so no one knows you. You think you can find unalloyed happiness. Some of you are hermetically sealed; some of you are going to be terrified if you are found out. Look, I don't know why you can't just have joy. But if you're going to be truly recognized and experience joy, it has to involve trouble and pain. You can be Calypsoed or Odysseused, buried or troubled.

Some advice! Some advice to give the future leaders of the Western world, the hegemonic lawgivers, the triumphalist accountants of the white imperium!

The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal, celebration.

...when great Odysseus had bathed in the river and washed from his body

the salt brine, which clung to his back and his broad shoulders, he scraped from his head the scurf of brine from the barren salt sea.

But when he had bathed all, and anointed himself with olive oil, and put on the clothing this unwedded girl had given him, then Athene, daughter of Zeus, made him seem taller

for the eye to behold, and thicker, and on his head she arranged the curling locks that hung down like hyacinthine petals.

So Athene gilded with grace his head and his shoulders, and he went a little aside and sat by himself on the seashore, radiant in grace and good looks; and the girl admired him.

- Odyssey VI, 235-37

MGM in its heyday could have done no more for Gable. The elderly Homer writes about sensations and domestic comforts, about physical happiness and relations between people. His heroes have gone from fighting the war to telling stories about it, from asserting identity on the battlefield to asserting it at the feast table and in bed. The body, abused, torn, sated only by killing and savage meat-and-wine feasts in the Iliad, now requires its normal daily tending and comfort. Odysseus needs a bath and needs to get back into his own bed; his elderly father, Laertes, who has left the palace in Ithaca in disgust, and now lives in the country on the floor of a hovel, needs a winding sheet to be buried in. We are all in need of a home, an enclosure, tightly wound around us, and friends.

And now comes the surprise, the source of the Odyssey's amazing power. It turns out the poem is a huge black comedy. Just when the exhausted heroes most want rest and comfort and pleasure, they find terror and entrapment. The Odyssey is the most famous of the Nostoi, or homecoming poems—epics about the return of the heroes of the Trojan War. A disastrous return in many cases, as the men, punished by the gods for some crime or dereliction of worship, suffer catastrophic weather and shipwreck, or, landing home at last, die at the hands of treacherous wives.

In the Odyssey, you either eat, or you are eaten, and if you eat, you had better eat the right thing and in the right place. Sensual pleasures—eating the lotus blossoms that bring peace or the cattle of the sun god, which brings punishment, or yielding to the island nymphs and sirens—can destroy you or sap your will to go home.

Yes, a cruel joke! The gigantic poem is built around an excruciating paradox: The temptation to rest, to fill your stomach is almost overwhelming, yet the instant you rest, you are in danger of losing consciousness or life itself. In the end, short of death or oblivion, there is no rest, a state of being that might be called the Western glory and the Western disease. That Homer cannot attain peace—that there's something demonic, unappeasable, and unreachably alien in the spirit of the Odyssey as well as in the Iliad—has not much figured in the epic's popular reputation as a hearty adventure sage. It was a finer, more exhilarating and challenging work than most people thought.

- David Denby

Asylum

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here, mad. You’re mad.

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

- Lewis Carroll

the lover