Contemporary Film and the Empathy Controversy: Part 2

Abstract

Part 2 of this article presents a reading of three films—first, The Blind Side (2009) about the interracial adoption of a Black teenager by a White upper-middle class family, second, The Kids Are All Right (2009) about a middle-class lesbian marriage, and third, The Normal Heart (2012) about gay activism during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The first two films are mainstream and as such dramatize and cultivate empathy in ways that reinforce hegemonic (White, middle-class, and heteronormative) expectations. The Normal Heart contrasts with these films, and does so despite its homonormative focus on White gay men, in that The Normal Heart allows viewers to consider ways of resisting expected emotional responses. However, all three films illustrate the failure of Paul Bloom’s argument in Against Empathy to consider the enculturation of affect, which is quite typical of social psychology. We are, as Althusser puts it, “interpellated” by normative ideology and hegemonic representations; and film clearly demonstrates this point. Only psychoanalysis—in this article, the school of Lacan and Lacanian film theory—allows us to read unconscious dynamics in relation to coercive enculturation and identify resistant cultural representations.