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Is Cinema a Vessel for Empathy?: An Assessment of Audiences’
Active Inaction

Aislinn Boyle
MOPA 409
Word Count: 2563

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MOPA 409
Aislinn Boyle
Instructors: Michael Thoma, Jack Silberman
Date: December 14th, 2020

Is Cinema a Vessel for Empathy?: An Assessment of Audiences’
Active Inaction
Since the dawn of film screenings, questions of film’s legitimacy as an art and audiences’
levels of participation with it have been on the forefront of numerous theories regarding film
reception. Regardless of whether or not viewers are active or inactive, what remains is a twopart, deceptively convoluted question: Is it possible to garner new empathy by watching films,
and can audiences be active and compassionate enough to enact their new wisdom onto the real
world? Through comparing and contrasting the socio-political effects of film as well as the
psychoanalytical theories of film itself, it is revealed that audiences not only identify with the
screen because of its mirror-like qualities, but they also, through this association, have the
potential to either absorb or neglect new ideological thought through film. This will be analyzed
by synthesizing parts of Walter Benjamin’s and Stuart Hall’s theories on audience reception and
apperception through a socio-political lens. Then, Christian Metz “The Imaginary Signifier” will
pave the way for a psychoanalytical understanding of film reception and will, ideally, determine
whether or not the act of viewing cinema reinforces spectators’ own egos as if the screen is a
mirror. Real-world benefits of identification with a film will then be discussed in comparison to
the viewer with “agency” that reframes the narrative to their own ideology. The point, though,
where cinema can possibly entertain both window and mirror-like qualities for all audiences may
prove to be the point of true cinematic empathy. In a scientific context — specifically robotics —
empathy in soft machines is theorized to be found first through instilling vulnerability into the
machine. This connotes that the soul of the machine (empathy) is formed through vulnerability.
If the cinema applies the same by taking its gaze and making it vulnerable by flipping it on its
head (morally/existentially speaking), then plausibly those stuck in their echo-chambers will, in a
Benjamin sense, escape and be mobilized.

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Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Stuart
Hall in “Encoding/Decoding,” when synthesized, provide decent frameworks in which film and
television are not only coded with meaning but also dictate certain responses to that meaning.
Walter Benjamin states, in essence, that art which has been mechanically reproduced then
redistributed to wider audiences loses its “aura” (which belongs to the physical art) and instead
gains a political element. Benjamin surfaces an opposing point from Duhamel who states that
film is “a pastime for helots, a diversion for the uneducated, wretched” (qtd. in Durham 32).
Benjamin concludes Duhamel’s assumption with the statement that “clearly this…[says] that the
masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” (32). Benjamin
argues that this distraction may be more favourable for art via mechanical reproduction because
if someone concentrates on a work of art, they are “absorbed” by it, whereas if the masses are
distracted, it is a state of reception that allows for the absorption of the art into themselves (32).
Distraction through art thus becomes apperception and can, according to Benjamin, mobilize the
masses.
This, though, is operating under the assumption that the film’s encoded messages are
received, decoded, then followed through into reality. Enter Stuart Hall, who establishes how
media is encoded and decoded and the ways in which the audience responds to said media. Hall
seeks to prove a cyclical nature with which ideological meaning is communicated. He first states
that in order for something to become a communicative event, it “must become a “story’” (qtd. in
Durham 164). Within these stories are encoded messages which must carry “meaningful
discourse” in order to be “meaningfully decoded” (165). He then later dives into the televisual
sign, with visual and aural discourse, that represents what it captures but cannot “be the referent
or concept it symbolizes” (166). This is important because in order for something to be
communicated through something only half-real, it must be encoded, hence the significance of
stories and signifiers. Hall lists three ways in which these codes are then decoded by audiences:
1) The dominant hegemonic position wherein the viewer is operating under the determined
societal codes and interpreting meaning through them (169). Furthermore, producers in order to
get this result assess what has been already encoded under the dominant hegemonic position and
perpetuate that meaning; 2) the negotiated position. This position acknowledges dominant

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hegemonic encoding in media but interprets and negotiates it under a more “corporate” position.
Negotiated codes and the logic behind them are sustained by hegemonic encoding because of its
particular and partial opposition (172); lastly is 3) the oppositional approach. This necessitates
that the viewer decodes a message by denying and dismantling its framework, then re-framing it
with entirely new foundations under their own ideologies (173). With these three positions in
mind, and Benjamin’s point on viewers’ apperception of art, it is clear that through societal,
hegemonic codes, viewers decode art in a way that corroborates with their own beliefs on a base
level. While Hall’s concepts can and do manifest in several ways, both positively and negatively,
what may be most intriguing of our times are the following questions: How do audiences decode
meaning, assimilating it into themselves, and act upon this new framework in the real world, if
they act at all? Essentially, how do people watch films, and how do they see reality?
Before establishing the real-world context, it is imperative to explore film
psychoanalytical theory via Christian Metz. Taking from Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud,
Metz in “The Imaginary Signifier” combines their approaches with the spectator’s identification
with the screen. Metz explains that the Lacanian formation of the ego through identification with
the self in the mirror allows for the absence of ourselves physically in a film, yet still for our
identification with it. In essence, “what makes possible the spectator’s absence…is the fact that
the spectator has already known the experience of the mirror [from childhood]…and is thus able
to constitute a world of objects” without the spectator being present in the film (46). Metz then
explores what a spectator specifically identifies with, and, more specifically, where the already
existent ego of the spectator lies within a film. While an individual could identify with the
experiences of a protagonist, or even their actor, this is not an umbrella means of identification
for all. The ego, therefore, must be present somewhere else. Metz goes further, stating that the
subject is all perceiving because there is no direct reflection of themselves with the objects on the
screen. Therefore, “this mirror [the screen] returns us everything but ourselves, because we are
wholly outside of it” while looking upon it (49). It is this looking, and the association with the
camera lens, that creates the viewer as the signified in the cinematic experience. This voyeurism
is also the placement of the ego, found in a series of mirrors from projector to screen to human
eye. The position of being the “perceiver” rather than the “perceived” connotes a pleasure in
seeing without being seen — in falling into the world of the imaginary without leaving the real

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(54). This ‘seeing' is further fleshed out into discussions of filmic idealism, voyeurism, and
scopophilia, among other themes. With the aforementioned context of Hall’s decoding positions
and Benjamin’s point on the apperception of mechanically reproduced art, it becomes clear that
while cinema may not be a direct mirror in terms of subject and object, it is a reflection of what
audiences desire to see unfold on screen. This desire is to either reinforce their own egos or fuel
idealism through viewing film.
In modern times, there have been several studies conducted on the effects of film wherein
the process of identification and/or voyeurism was shown to have either established empathy or
reinforced narcissism, respectively. In “Film Involvement and Narrative Persuasion: The Role of
Identification with the Characters” Juan-José Igartua, conducts several studies wherein he assess
the significance of audiences’ identification with characters. This is broken down into several
processes:
“a) Emotional empathy, the ability to feel what the characters feel and become affectively
involved…; b) cognitive empathy, adopting the point of view of or putting oneself in the
place of the characters; c) becoming absorbed in the story… a temporal loss of selfawareness and imagining the story as if one were one of the characters; and, d) personal
attraction to the characters…” (1).
These four points were found to ring true in tests, and, most notably, these tests found
that films with socially-determined “others” succeeded in creating empathy in the viewer. This is
a result of audiences “[empathizing] with the characters” through the film’s storytelling,
encoding and decoding, and persuasiveness (13). Empathy communicated through film,
discussing stories otherwise untold, is where cinema becomes a window looking out onto new
worlds. This is putting a compassion-fuelled twist to Metz’s position of the ego between
spectator and screen, taking the audiences gaze and directing them to otherwise overshadowed
stories and persuading them to walk in their shoes. This is the power of the cinema that Benjamin
spoke of — the ability to mobilize; however, this is not true of all cinema, nor of all viewers.
John Keefe in “The Film Spectator as “Bricoleur”’ explores both phenomenological and
psychological approaches to film spectatorship as well as cinematic devices within a film (the
camera, colour, mise en scène etc.) which are encoded with meaning, then decoded. In a later

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section, Keefe unveils the “obverse of empathy and altruism” wherein “the fact of agency gives
us power to behave inhumanely” (qtd. in Miller 102). This is where the power of the cinema is
lost at the “departure from moral behaviour under religious, political or other ideological
imperatives, under proclamations of righteousness” (102). While this is mentioned within the
context of cinema violence and our aestheticization of it, this “[displacement] of imagination or
denial within awareness” can also be applied to altruistic stories or scenes (102). Taking the dark
side of one of Stuart Hall’s decoding positions, this individual agency can be applied to the
oppositional approach which necessitates the viewer decode meaning then reform it according to
their own ideology. In a world that has grown increasingly more hostile towards others, as well
as more narcissistic, it would be ill-informed to not address the decrease in empathy on the
whole — the denial within awareness— and the plausibility for its manifestation in the film
spectator through the oppositional approach, but this has yet to be empirically assessed. Another
dark side can also occur, with less hesitation, in the hegemonic and negotiated positions. For
example, the article “A Dialogic Approach to Alien Movies” mentions the film Avatar (James
Cameron, 2009) and “criticisms of its depiction of the Na’vi (the alien race) as Native
American…[and] the “white messiah complex”’ (162). Yet, Benjamin Schrager, with a dialogical
approach, emphasizes the benefits of this as an educational standpoint for students to understand
the “political geography of imperialism” through aliens (163). When you cast the viewpoint on a
story from a historically oppressive gaze, it is only educational if one were seeking
reinforcement of the hegemonic position. Even though Schrager is aware of this issue, and takes
time to point it out explicitly, using sources that paint the hegemonic position as beneficial are
prime examples of active viewers that assimilate meaning into their preconceived ideologies,
creating a “mirror,” if you will. This also weaponizes empathy because it is James Cameron’s
choice to have the “white messiah” as the main character, with whom we are persuaded to
empathize with and to not challenge beyond a negotiated approach.
Film has shown to succeed in garnering empathy in several instances, but how can
empathy through cinematic exposure to new concepts, people, and ideas, win? Laura Mulvey
states that it is man’s “castration anxiety” that begets the fetishization of women in film by the
male, hegemonic gaze (qtd. in Durham 348). There are, of course, other hegemonic codes/ways

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of seeing in the cinema (as seen with Avatar), but what lacks in all is a subversion of the
established way of gazing. In rare instances there are films that go against the norm, but they are
easily avoidable if one were to choose. How can empathy be instilled with such resistance? In a
deceptively sharp turn, the article “Homeostasis and Soft Robotics in the Design of Feeling
Machines” inquires about the “conditions that would potentially allow machines to care about
what they do or think” (Man et al. 446). The idea is to “begin the design of these robots by,
paradoxically, introducing vulnerability” (446). Building off of living beings’ state of
homeostasis, imbuing a robot with vulnerability makes them not only aware of their own
mortality and their need for survival, but also aware of others’ need to survive, too. This creates
the seeds of empathy. If, say, film were to take the male gaze (among other gazes), cradle it, then
castrate it, the hegemonic position would be in a state of vulnerability. In this vulnerability, those
who benefited from this gaze may begin to understand and empathize with the other side. It
could lead, for a brief moment, to eliminating the ego in looking as well as decoding outside the
hegemonic position, and to politically mobilizing those who otherwise would have stared and
watched. In essence, it is proven time and time again that films can be a tool to understand
others, or to see a reflection of ourselves and our desires; but, for some spectators that mirror
must be broken to reveal the window looking out onto the “new” world behind.
Cinema bears a unique ability to change peoples’ perceptions of the world in both an
aural, visual, and (arguably) textual sense. By beginning with Walter Benjamin’s assertion for the
cinema to mobilize the masses and Stuart Hall’s theories of the processes of encoding/decoding
media, this established not only the power of a film to incite change as opposed to other art, but
also the ways in which audiences respond to film and find meaning. This meaning can be
assimilated into hegemonic codes or our own ideologies. Then, Christian Metz and
psychoanalytical film theory cemented the importance of the gaze, the ego, and the screen
working in conjunction to reveal a mirror of our own desires. Real-world studies were conducted
regarding the degrees to which audiences empathized with characters in film, most notably films
that portrayed minority groups, and these studies were successful and affective. This can reveal
to audiences a “new” window on the world. That being said, empathy is never universal, and
hostility or passivity breeds ignorance even when approaching new ideas in film and/or film

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critique. Through taking Laura Mulvey’s application of castration anxiety (adopted from Freud),
and synthesizing the formation of vulnerable soft machines, empathy can be created by utilizing
the hegemonic gaze in a film, favouring it, then exposing it. This would, ideally, make viewers
who are normally comfortable vulnerable and create empathy for the other. It should be
recognized that this solution will likely fail in a broad setting (in many cases it already has), but
as the world is exposed to more and more stories from different viewpoints everyday, and an
increasing number under the spotlight, the future of empathy in film is not as bleak as it may
seem.

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Works Cited:
1) Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935, quoted
in Durham, Meenakshi Gigi., and Douglas Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks.
West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
2) Cameron, James. Avatar. 20th Century Fox, 2009.
3) Igartua, Juan-José. “Film Involvement and Narrative Persuasion: The Role of Identification
With the Characters.” Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, 2009
Annual Meeting 2009, 1–19. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.capilanou.ca/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=ufh&AN=45286641&site=eds-live&scope=site.

4) Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding,” 1973, quoted in Durham, Meenakshi Gigi., and Douglas
Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
5) Keefe, John. “The Film Spectator as “Bricoleur,”’ 2012, quoted in Miller, Jacqui. Film and
Ethics : What Would You Have Done? Liverpool Hope University Studies in Ethics Series.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. https://search-ebscohostcom.ezproxy.capilanou.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=839512&site=edslive&scope=site.
6) Man, Kingson, and Antonio Damasio. “Homeostasis and Soft Robotics in the Design of
Feeling Machines.” Nature. Nat Mach Intell, October 9, 2019. https://www.nature.com/
articles/s42256-019-0103-7.epdf.
7) Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.” Translated by
Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdflibrary/Metz_Imaginary.pdf
8) Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975, quoted in Durham,
Meenakshi Gigi., and Douglas Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. West Sussex:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

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9) Schrager, Benjamin. 2017. “A Dialogic Approach to Alien Movies.” Yearbook of the
Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 79 (January): 153–67. doi:10.1353/pcg.2017.0008.