simulated compassion

Movies such are Hotel Rwanda are designed to make us feel compassion. It humanizes the people involved in the genocide, shows harrowing scenes of their emotional turmoil and as a result, brings their suffering to a closer and more personal distance. Instead of just 30 second news clip, the genocide in Rwanda becomes an immersive 2 hour experience.

Yet sometimes I wonder if the increase of such movies have made us less compassionate. (I am speaking of movies that are designed to make us cry and weep over tragedy as opposed to those that tend towards glamourizing death and violence. i.e. think Hotel Rwanda, Schindler's List, vs. Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill)

Movies take months to years to come out, whereas everyday we are bombarded with real news and tragedies concerning real people that we do not feel compassion towards. As Hotel Rwanda pointed out, we say "how awful" and go on eating dinner.

On one hand, this can definitely be attributed to our own need for comfort-- it's easier to detach ourselves from horrible things happening around the world because we can ignore the nagging inside to do something about it. (Such action is often costly and too often inconvenient). By detaching ourselves, and not viewing the people who are suffering as actually human, we can continue living our comfortable lives.

But in addition to this, I think we have the unspoken expectation that anything truly tragic must appear the way it does in movies to produce an emotional response. Absent in real life situations where compassion would be appropriate responses, are the signifiers that mark movie scenes where we are to cry-- closeups of tears, sorrowful music, meaningful and well scripted lines.

In contrast, when we hear basic news broadcasted or hear about a friend's suffering, it does not appear as tragic as it does in movies. But we consumers of movies and simulations are not used to doing the mental legwork ourselves-- we are not used to imagining ourselves in another person's shoes, because we have relied so much on simulated signifiers in movies to make us cry or to make us feel.

Even one of the most beautiful emotions that we are capable of experiencing, compassion, has become simulated and rendered unreal. Our heart wrenches at the movies, tears gush out and then we walk away, perhaps silent for a few minutes, but then in almost all cases, doing nothing different except perhaps talk about how good the movie was. They make us feel compassion but afterwards, it's over. Holocaust. Genocide. It's over. And yet we've become accustomed to all the signifiers that mark sadness and times where we are supposed to feel compassion. And, we perhaps end up even more desensitized to the real people out there and nearby for whom we should have compassion, because we've become accustomed to only have compassion on Hollywood glamourized tragedy.