Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo (Rutgers University & NYU), "Virtual Terrors"
Noûs, 2023
The first short film I made as a film student was zero budget, so I had no choice but to cast a friend I happened to be have a crush on, her boyfriend, and myself. It was a love story. They were the lovers and I was a waiter (for three seconds) in one of the scenes. The film ended with the revelation that the relationship had been a fantasy, that the woman the guy had offered to share his umbrella with during a storm at the beginning of the film had in fact declined. This made the last scene a re-enactment of the first, now showing the rejected guy standing there with his umbrella, watching this woman he’d been struck by – and would never get to know – walk away.
To me, the tragedy was obvious. Anybody with a crush on anybody was basically that guy. But my friend’s boyfriend didn’t seem to get it. He was not an actor, of course, and no amount of retakes from different angles – not even the universal melancholy inducer, the sound of rain – would produce the mournful look on his face I wanted. At some point I walked over to him, the camera still rolling. My friend – his girlfriend – saw this and stopped mid-way. I said to him: imagine she is really leaving. Imagine Mariela – the actual Mariela – is turning the corner and you – not the character but you, Pío – will never see her again. It will happen one day. Just imagine this is it. I turned to my friend and instructed: keep walking, Mariela! Then back to him: it’s three seconds until she reaches the corner now. Catch the last glimpse of her well – she is turning the corner, that loved silhouette – this is it! And so I got it.
The last short I made had a slightly bigger budget. This one involved a man witnessing a family being killed. There were many reasons, not least of which was money, not to show the event itself; my job was to convey the horror of it through the witness’s reaction. Thankfully, this time we had a professional actor. But this one too kept sobbing at the wrong times, or sobbing the wrong way. At some point I had to cut. I walked over to him. Imagine these are your neighbours, I said. Do you have neighbours? He did. Do you know them well? They’d waved hello. Do they have children? They had children. Can you imagine, say, that the parents are involved in a drug cartel, or that they’re journalists (let’s go for the journalists), and that one morning, as both you and they are stepping out of your homes, a black van drives by and shoots them? This is Mexico – it happens. You see it all the time on the news. Just imagine this is it. I saw him trying: his eyes narrowed, picturing the scene in his head. His neighbours waving. The van passing. Firearms appearing through the smoked-glass windows. But then he glazed over – he just couldn’t. And I suddenly realised that, actually, it was impossible for me, too.
There had been no question, the first time, of me not understanding the delusional umbrella-holder. I myself yearned for Mariela. My ‘actor’ of course didn’t (the bastard), but it wasn’t difficult to get him there: all I had to do was place him in the perspective of his future, heartbroken self. The difficulty now was that the experience of witnessing a murder was one of such extreme violence, so unlike anything the actor or I had ever been through, that there was nothing in the range of emotions and sensations stored in our memories that could help us place ourselves in the witness’s shoes.
There is a strand of filmmakers – scholars call it ‘extreme’ or ‘unwatchable’ cinema – who take this idea to the extreme: their thought is that violence is the kind of thing you can’t really understand unless you first-personally go through it, hence their efforts to not only to show you violence but to make you suffer yourself. Take their spokesman, the Austrian Michael Haneke. In Funny Games (1997/2007), we see at length and in excruciating detail the violence that two young men physically inflict on a family; in Amour (2012), we see it being inflicted upon an old couple’s minds. In both the physical and psychological varieties, the display only ends when suffering has reached its peak and there isn’t more left to squeeze. Being shown extreme violence of this kind does not leave the viewer untouched. The fact that Haneke’s victims are middle class, as his typical audience are, and that they have placeholder names – Georges and Anne – for the audience to substitute their own completes the familiar view that Haneke’s goal is not only to display extreme suffering but to torture the viewers themselves.
But when you see Funny Games, do you really feel like it is you being beaten to death? When you see Amour, do you feel like it is you losing your mind? In other words, can film really give us epistemic access to the suffering of others? Consider three ways in which one might have such access. One first way for subject A to learn the fact that subject B is in extreme pain is discursive testimony. A second alternative is to learn it by visual perception, in which case A might infer that B is in pain. In such a case, A might also enter a state of pain herself, but her pain will differ from B's pain not only in degree (if A is sitting in a comfy cinema seat, for starters) but also in kind: it will not be ‘pain by being beaten to death’ but ‘pain by cinempathy’. And then a third theoretical alternative is that A learn the fact that B is in extreme pain in the same way B herself learns it: by occupying B's conscious experience. In that case, A will learn the fact expressed by the proposition ‘B is in extreme pain’ in a way that can be expressed by the proposition ‘I am in extreme pain’. Assuming that an individual's being in pain constitutes the existence of that instance of pain, this means there will be now two tokens of the same type of suffering: B's and A's, which means there will be now two distinct facts: A's being in extreme pain and B's. The additional fact, however, does not preclude but rather allows A to learn the target fact – B's being in extreme pain – in the de se mode of presentation, whereby she will ascribe the pain not just to some individual distinct from her, as in the two previous epistemic methods, but also to herself.
The failure of the first and second methods and the success of the third in giving one access to the suffering of another can be mapped onto Kendall Walton’s view that to genuinely (as opposed to ‘sort of’) empathise is neither to judge that the subject one is empathising with is feeling thus – or judging that ‘the empathizee feels like that’ – nor to judge that one is feeling thus and so is the subject – ‘I am panicked and so is he’ – but rather to judge that the other's mental state is of the same type as one's current state – ‘he is as I am, like this’. Only this third kind of judgement is genuinely empathetic, and it features three indexicals: they refer to (i) the target subject, ‘he’, to (ii) one's own self, ‘I’, and to (iii) the type of state one is in, ‘like this’.
Walton is liberal as to the conditions under which an empathizer can deploy the triply-indexed thought. If I am grieving for a friend of mine and you are grieving for yours, I can truthfully hold the empathetic thought – ‘I am as you are, like this’ – without the need to imagine grieving for your friend rather than mine. But this liberalism assumes the availability of mnemonic and imaginative resources to the subject. When the target type of experience is extreme suffering, in contrast, the empathizer – the filmgoer – will have no mnemonic resources to draw on to make the imaginative jump. Extreme suffering is, by assumption, unlike anything the viewer has experienced; her ignorance of extreme violence is precisely what motivates extreme filmmakers to make their films in the first place.
Cinema hinges on visual perception, the second epistemic method mentioned above, which yields, in turn, Walton's second insufficient thought – ‘the target feels like that’ – rather than his ‘truly empathetic’ thought – ‘he is as I am, like this’. If only there were a way to put the viewer in the extreme sufferer’s shoes…
Might Virtual Reality be the medium that finally delivers de se knowledge of another’s suffering? This is my paper’s question. I show how extreme filmmakers – or filmmakers with Hanekean sympathies – have indeed thought so, and put VR to work towards that end. I ask in virtue of which of its properties VR has succeeded here, to the extent that it has; then examine the epistemic and moral dimensions of the extreme filmmaker’s ambitions in light of VR’s powers. I end, however, with some reasons to be wary of the new technology that filmmakers have on their hands. No virtual environment will make a white person experience the world in the way that has been shaped by the personal experiences of a black person, just to give one obvious example. I personally had to get my heart broken by Mariela a couple of years after we shot that first film to understand the experience of the character I’d myself written. I thought I understood him, but I was mistaken.
Which brings me to a final point. You might read my paper and think you’ve got a grasp on the problem of what you can’t understand with words or images – or virtual environments – and have formed opinions. But you might be mistaken. I can’t tell you what it’s like to step into the virtual shoes of another, and whether it works to foster empathy or not, because to understand that – and this shouldn’t come as a surprise now – reading my paper will not be enough. Which means that the issues I raise remain open questions you’ll have to go and experience Virtual Reality to answer yourself.