Why save the best bits? J. J. Abrams’s film Super 8 reaches its climax when the young hero, Joe Lamb, and heroine, Alice Dainard, are being chased through the subterranean nest of an escaped alien being—a being something like a giant spider. We have had the grand moment set up for well over an hour with various characters indicating that the “monster” is empathic and it communicates by touch. We have also been prepared to assume that Joe really understands monsters. He spends his free time building models of them, and when it is time for Alice to play a zombie in the kids’ own Super 8 film, she asks Joe how to do it. His description, while still kid-like, is on the money and Alice turns out to be a natural.
We also have the information that our monster (1) is hungry, (2) is terrified, and (3) wants to go home. I felt that way when I saw the first Alien movie. That isn’t a good combination for anyone, least of all an intelligent being that has been imprisoned for over twenty years and held among aliens it regards as hideous insects (i.e., we humans). And our Super 8 monster has every reason to see us this way. After all, we never touch the creature except with probes and prods, and for it, touching is the basis of communication, and hence the primary evidence of the existence of a moral conscience. As far as the monster can discern, humans have no such capabilities. To analogize, at best we seem like reptiles to this being, and at worst, yes, cockroaches. In twenty years of imprisonment, the alien has never had the opportunity to discover that we have any moral feeling at all.
Thus, in the key moment, the alien catches Joe, scoops him up, and starts to eat him, but feels (and thereby notices) that Joe, while perhaps afraid, is trying to see the monster, to study the monster’s face. Studying faces is another thing Joe does, as is made abundantly evident in his work as a makeup artist. In that crucial instant, the monster pauses, ponders, feels Joe seeing him, offers his own eyes for Joe to look into, and then suddenly grasps that human beings do with their eyes what the alien beings do by touching. The alien realizes that Joe is “touching” with his eyes, and while it is a strange thing, and hard to understand, the alien is, after all, far more intelligent than a human being, so the matter is puzzled out. The alien is able to grasp, in that moment, why all the humans have responded as they have. To them, the visual appearance of such a spiderly alien is terrifying, while to the alien, the withholding of touch is barbaric, a kind of unimaginable torture. But now the alien knows that humans did not understand, could not understand, its own moral frame of reference.
In that climactic realization, the alien becomes aware that it is wrong to feed on these beings and that its first and only imperative is to get off this planet and go home. And what is more, the alien being now knows how to do it—how to build a ship that will take it home. It may not be obvious to those who haven’t reflected on the matter, but the motive force that creates the alien’s spacecraft is a kind of love, in the form of desire to touch, to hold, to be near, to possess. The parts are drawn together by empathy. That is why the sad little piece of the alien spaceship that Joe takes home from the site of the train wreck “wants” to be with the other pieces. The ship is made of and powered by something like longing.
When the alien becomes aware that humans actually do have love, or more precisely, longing within themselves, it also realizes that it can use anything that anyone loves (in the relevant sense) to rebuild its craft. That is why, in the denouement, only some things are drawn upward into the water tower and fused into the ship. The things being drawn up are things that someone loves. That gun the soldier won’t relinquish, that cool car, and yes, the necklace that Joe’s mother wore and that he has invested with every ounce of his personal longing. Giving the locket to the alien is, as we know, a “Spielberg moment,” but I think the philosophy transcends Steven Spielberg’s typical (and unhappily simplistic) moral messages. In Abrams’s hand, it isn’t actually unselfishness or agapic love that is relevant, nor is it eros of any kind. He has thought this through more carefully. The operative kind of desire is, as I said, longing. But what is that? Abrams tells us, by way of Alice Dainard, who, unlike Joe (who depends on his eyes for understanding), is an empath. It does not occur to Alice that not everyone who is touched by the monster comes to understand the monster. Only some people do, like Alice and Dr. Woodward. Alice gets it and reports it to Joe, just before he is scooped up. It is crucial for the story that Joe believes Alice completely, even if he can’t feel it himself. He has seen what she can do. She says longing is a mix of (1) hunger, (2) terror, and (3) wanting to go home.
The thematic suggestion made by the movie is, therefore, that when it comes to making the monster into a mensch (that favored trope of the movies endowed to us by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), the trick is to grasp that longing is the connection we have with the monster. And beyond Abrams’s insight about longing there looms a really tough philosophical question. Is this “longing” what empathy really means? Can we, as humans (or even including other species), share, at any equally profound level, any other form of desire? Or is the bottom line that we can all be afraid, hungry, and far from home together, and that’s about the long and short of who we are? Can agapic love or friendship or erotic attraction go deep enough to contribute anything to empathy? Or is empathy really just a power to develop that moment of longing within ourselves by sharing it with others? In my view, that is what Super 8 is about, and it’s a little more far-reaching than the usual Spielberg questions.
Now that you know what this essay is about, let me take a few steps back to examine how Abrams accomplishes his aims. There are many monsters in Abrams’s head, and not all follow the patterns established in Super 8. I will privilege this movie and this monster in what follows, as a clue for understanding Abrams, and I will not argue for that assumption apart from saying that I feel this movie and this monster are special for him. I think they show something about the man that he hasn’t put into his other projects, at least not so fully as this one.
Quotationalism is a word culture critics created to describe the (apparently infinite) capacity of mass culture to digest and regurgitate itself in allusions of allusions, parodies of parodies, and tributes of tributes.1 Perhaps television is most gluttonous among the various media, but long before the advent of television or even commercial movies, books were already about other books. What has changed in the last hundred years is that a new feast of morsels for quotation has been cooked up in appetizing visual images and delicious lines that make memorable sound bites (rather than highbrow fare, where people show off their stale Shakespeare or their crusty Byron). And for dessert, there is recorded music in general, which, please recall, didn’t exist until a little over a century ago (so yes, it’s a processed food, but who can resist Twinkies and Ding-Dongs?).
Yet the appetite isn’t limited to the content of mass culture. Everyone knows, I think, that movie making has the advantage of consuming every other artistic form and commercial medium, using them to their fullest as dependent art forms. In the same way that sculpture was absorbed into architecture during the Middle Ages but then broke free again in the Renaissance, many art forms are simply absorbed by other art forms for a time, and no art form ever existed that is more voracious than the movies. Obviously, a symphony, created independently and aimed only at its own musical target, can accomplish artistic ends that a film cannot. And that is also why we often comment that a movie “wasn’t as good as the book,” and so on. What we mean is that a book can tell a story in a way the movies cannot equal. No major medium of artistic expression is at its very best when it becomes a mere ingredient in another, but it has to be admitted that feature-length movies can preserve more of what makes another artistic medium valuable in its own right than any other art form. What a canvas of space, time, image, word, and sound! Makes me sort of hungry.
And in a way, we go to the movies because we are hungry for something—not just images and stories, but the sequence of feelings these evoke when we eat them with our eyes and ears. We want to devour all the forms at once. A feature film can bring to the table an orchestral piece or song, for example, as the music it really is—there is enough time for that in a full-length feature. I savor, emotionally speaking, the scores of John Williams—especially the only two scores that ever actually made me cry, which were Goodbye Mr. Chips and Amistad—and I wonder, would these amazing works of orchestral music exist without the films? No, I don’t think so; although it is true that the music is subordinated to the film, it is also the case that sometimes the music swells and overtakes the film and seems to drive the whole flavor.
Of course, the genre of the musical adds in so much music that it becomes the main course. When one considers a smorgasbord like the long scene in An American in Paris, in which Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly dance their way through a dozen styles of French painting to the strains of Gershwin, well, I don’t need to say more about this phenomenon. My point is that emotional and aesthetic desire fall within the limits of hunger, humanly understood. There is, as Kant insisted, a subjective universality that connects at this level any being worthy of the name “human” to all the others.2
And the fact is that because the film industry has been able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on art during its great commercial century, artists who wanted to make a living have been drawn to and have been willing to develop their gifts and expend their creativity in service of the meta–art form of movie making. People who would have gone into different arts or who wouldn’t have had artistic careers at all were drawn into the movies. The simple fact that people were willing to pay handsomely to dine on the results of all that cooking did most of the work.
When we consider the auteur director in this light, a sort of magnificent chef of images and emotions, it is tempting to wonder what any one of our famous directors might have done for a living in the centuries before the invention of film. I think Spielberg, for instance, belongs to the Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm line of writers and story collectors. It is clear to me that for all his imagistic prowess, Spielberg is no painter. He really is a storyteller first, but he might also have found work as an illustrator. The kinds of stories he tells are fairy tales, in the best sense of the word. I think it is pretty clear that Hitchcock would have directed plays and run a theater. I think Tarantino would have been a playwright. And Abrams? What of him? I will answer that question at the end of this essay. If I say it now, it invites controversy. Yes, all this is just my opinion, but, as with the three opinions I expressed about those other directors, there is a case for the opinion.
But where it concerns quotationalism, every art form consumes every other in the feeding frenzy of global mass culture. Abrams seems to understand this and has indeed begun the process of perfecting it, but his use of the film within a film device as the B-story in this movie shows that he wants to be lighthearted about this part of the structure of the film and its narrative. Like Tarantino, Abrams understands that what you quote becomes part and parcel of the Warholian identity you beget in the public mind. Abrams is crafting his own image in his choices. It’s a kind of artistic styling made from lots of little squeals that say, “I like this!” I think of the moment in Super 8 when a Starsky and Hutch 1974 Gran Torino crosses a distant intersection just as the camera fades away from a scene. That is playful. The movie is literally made of such quotations.
So it is an artistic styling made in little squeals, sideways whispers, and elbows nudging at your ribs. In the same way that Kid Rock can assert his redneck credentials, his love of redneck Michigan, and his redneck conservatism by combining, of all things, a groove from Warren Zevon, a guitar lick from Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a piano tinkle from Bob Seeger into a musical manifesto . . . well, let’s just say that if a dim bulb like Kid Rock can pull that off, even if it makes me want to barf, someone with Abrams’s cultural background has plenty to choose from. But when you’re hungry for a series of feelings, there’s nothing quite like going to the movies—or making one.
As we know, Abrams wrote, directed, and produced Super 8, but he took his baby boomer adoptive Uncle Steven along for the ride. Abrams’s penchant for quoting Spielberg in images, in cinematic style, in script style, and in theme has been commented on by everyone. Some people can’t stomach this level of hero worship. To be honest, if I personally believed that was the real story, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. I like Spielberg’s films just fine, and I never miss one, but he annoys me enough to discourage any writing from my end (I’m sure he’s devastated . . . ). Spielberg’s simplistic moralizing, his inability to recognize when he’s said enough, the out-and-out obviousness of his symbol choices, the total absence of subtlety, and most of all the self-serious self-indulgence . . . well, I have said enough, but he insults the intelligence of his audience and leaves nothing to their imaginations. Yet I prefer him to most of his generational cohort, since it doesn’t look like he sold out.
On the other hand, I like Abrams’s version of Spielberg better than Spielberg. There is a deconstruction of Spielberg in Abrams (I am far from the first to say this, of course). Part of the reason I like Abrams is that, in a way, the Goonies are better the second time around. The setting of Super 8 is exactly calibrated with Abrams’s own childhood (more on that shortly)—it was a weird, in-between time to grow up. Abrams is too young to be a baby boomer, but as the oldest of the Gen Xers, he really isn’t quite a child of the eighties either. The year 1979, when this movie is set, was a cultural void. Disco and southern rock had gone rancid, Zeppelin was moribund, Springsteen was on hiatus, and we were still listening to Hotel California. Stirrings of the eighties were under way, for sure, but Abrams chose not to bring in the music of 1979. That was a conscious decision, I’m sure. He must have judged that it would detract from the mood he wanted to create. This was not primarily about nostalgia for that year. It was more about what was scary that year.
The Iranian Revolution was under way (but no one understood what it meant). Carter was still president, but the country wasn’t going to be recovering from Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil crisis. The president had given a speech, now dubbed the “malaise” speech, in which he told us that we were living beyond our means and that if we didn’t make sacrifices now, consume less, and pay down our debts, our economic future was very uncertain. That displaced feeling of being betwixt and between, a sort of aimlessness as the nation’s industrial base disintegrates, pervades Super 8. One hardly knows what to think today, as the film opens with a scene of a still-functioning steel mill, something that would be extinct before too many more years elapsed. Abrams said in an interview that the whole film grew from the idea of having someone change the safety sign at a steel mill. If that writing decision doesn’t give us a clue that this movie is about truly scary stuff, then we are pretty slow.
But fear isn’t the same as terror. They are related, but it isn’t easy to understand how vague fears grow into total terror, especially for kids who haven’t got enough life experience to have their fear generalized into existential angst. As every storyteller knows, things have to come apart gradually and build into an apocalyptic moment. You can’t escalate fear into terror by having things jump out from behind trees. Terror takes time.
Abrams wanted to capture that transitional time in our history, a time almost no one takes the trouble to remember—post-seventies, pre-eighties—and to make it vaguely scary. Not much was going on, but there was one thing good about 1979: the box office. It is important to remember that Abrams grew up in L.A., in a movie-making family. It was a big year out in L.A. There was Apocalypse Now and the (very) first Star Trek movie (ironically), and Kramer vs. Kramer, and most importantly, this was the year Alien came out. Our monster in Super 8 is modeled on the monster from Alien, and the camera technique of Ridley Scott and Derek Vanlint, showing parts of the alien without allowing the audience to get a sense of the monster as a whole, is repeated in Super 8. Obviously they weren’t the first to come up with the idea, but the technique had become a cliché by 1979. Scott and Vanlint resurrected it with powerful effect.
Many writers and critics have remarked that Alien signaled a real change in Hollywood. It had been foreshadowed with Jaws (1975) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), but with the release of Alien, no longer would moviegoers be bothered with the complexity of needing to empathize with the monster. In 1979 the requirement of conscience that marked the sixties and seventies, in which Mary Shelley’s softer sensibilities about monsters would dominate, suddenly retrogressed to the fifties (taking Sigourney Weaver’s pants along with it—so not everything would be like the fifties . . . ). Back in the duck-and-cover fifties, you were allowed, nay, expected simply to be horrified at the alien invaders, at their shear otherness. You weren’t expecting the Frankenstein scenario, the misunderstood-monster-is-the-mensch moment. Weaver’s nemesis in Alien wasn’t misunderstood, it was evil, violent, and planning to eat us all.
The residents of 1979 live on the cusp of Reagan’s cruel world, and they don’t know it. The slow creepiness of the eighties hasn’t yet poked its way out of their bellies and into their consciousness. These characters still think it’s the seventies, and in a way it is. But the struggle for the souls of moviegoers was well under way (after all, one last monster-mensch needed to phone home, in 1982, before the good guys lost), and the main change was that the public was given permission to refuse the moral chore of seeking the monster’s point of view. Abrams remembers all this. In retrospect he has also been able to see something of its meaning, so the writing, set decoration, art direction, and even the acting in Super 8 capture that time and its insensibility of the future. It’s a world with no war-mongering neoconservatives, a world in which airlines and utilities and the telephone company are regulated by the government in the public interest, and a time when steel mills still made steel. No Wal-Mart, no Internet, no stadium seating at the movies, no MTV, and, by the way, no Rubik’s cubes (Abrams missed that detail—but the geek squad on imdb.com has several dozen other anachronisms you might want to note; none of them hurts the film). The more you study the details of the movie, the more you’ll be able to grasp the comparative innocence of the moment.
So, if that’s 1979, then why 1979? The movie is autobiographical in many ways, and Abrams came from a movie-making family and started making Super 8 movies when he was about eight years old, so by the time he was thirteen, he was probably pretty far into what he would do for a living. He did enter film contests when he was a kid, and I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a Super 8 zombie movie in a can somewhere from, oh, about 1979. But nothing depends on that hypothesis. Instead, I stake my case on this: we all have to concede that age thirteen is the paradigm for the last year of innocence. Many critics have remarked how good this movie is at making them feel like kids again, and there is the gotcha device that the film uses to make you care, to evoke not just your sympathy but your empathy, your identification with the characters. Not all of us lost our mothers or had drunk fathers, but we all were thirteen once. If I were a writer-director and I wanted to capture thirteen, I would use my memory rather than just my imagination. Setting this film in 1979 enables Abrams simply to remember his way through a million decisions.
But I think there is more. I see the middle-aged man Abrams, at the height of his artistic powers, reflectively at work here too. There is a retrospective understanding that intensifies this particular year, this time, and it isn’t nostalgia. These kids are the first Gen Xers, but of course, they also don’t know that yet. Capturing this variable innocence and ignorance in his characters as well as his setting was, in my view, important to the message Abrams wanted to convey, and it is the retrospective understanding that is crucial to building the terror. I think most thirteen-year-old kids in America during that year heard Elvis Costello ring out the death knell of the seventies with the following repeated lament:
So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?3
I suppose one could say that 1979 was the year that we collectively ceased pretending to care about the absurd Age of Aquarius and the ridiculous promise of Woodstock. It was the year the baby boomers became honest with themselves about wanting a lot of money. Not everyone went along, of course. Spielberg didn’t, for example. But for Abrams, the experience of Gen X was beginning. The baby boomers were too self-absorbed to notice the path of cultural and political destruction they were leaving in their wake. There was nothing but scraps and hair bands for a boy like Abrams, born in 1966. But my oh my, there were scraps. Super 8 doesn’t just quote them, it is made of them.
Tom Wolfe famously described the 1970s as the “Me Decade,” in contrast with the sixties, and with some justice. But if that was true of the seventies, then the eighties must have been the “not you” decade, for then, in our boredom, we took the opportunity to ignore interests beyond our own narrowest ones, deregulating everything and everyone, declaring war on labor, taxes, public support for education. Our free-market fundamentalists opened the gates to global exploitation of the poorest of the poor so that we could send domestic working-class jobs to places with no laws or unions protecting the men, women, and children who took on the work—often suffering on the brink of starvation, but conveniently out of sight. We decided to arm any group of thugs who would do our bidding in tiny countries too poor to resist their tyranny and, unsatisfied with doing this sort of thing passively, we organized coups to take down independent-minded democracies. Yes, all was done with the cooperation and full approval of the baby boomers. They didn’t want jobs in the steel mills, they wanted executive salaries, and they didn’t want to think about what some child was doing for food in Bangladesh or Indonesia. By 1989 it was over—both the Cold War and the transformation of the Third World into the unseen, unheard, and underfed sweatshop to sate our consumerist appetites (not that they ever can be sated, really).
In short, in 1979 we were about to take our selfishness global in a neo-imperialism aimed at making others pay for our party back here at home. That was the alternative Carter failed to mention in his malaise speech.4 There may have been better parties had on the backs of oppressed and starving people, under the reign of Caligula, for example, but I doubt there has ever been a bigger one. I give you genuine human terror. We have met the enemy. We looked in the mirror and failed to recognize that Ridley Scott’s alien was looking back at us. It was a baby boomer’s reflection, a selfish, violent, inhuman consumption machine. It was the USA, in the hands of 78.3 million spoiled fools who have yet to turn loose and probably never will. If I weren’t a baby boomer myself, I’d be pretty cynical.
Generation X watched helplessly and tried to understand. They still do. This younger group collected a reputation for cynicism, for being without ambition and without distinct achievement. Still, it isn’t easy to imagine what they could have done, and many have not been slow to wag a finger at the boomers and say, “Look at the mess you made of everything, you unfeeling murderers of all hope.” And here, here I believe we reach the heart of the matter. The problem that constitutes the moral backdrop for Super 8 just is the problem of empathy. The baby boomers lack it in Super 8—although the only examples we are given would be chubby Charles Kaznyk’s sexpot older sister, Jen, and her drugged-out, lusty admirer, Donny. These fine citizens will soon be in charge of everything.
The adults in the movie are people born during the Depression or during the Second World War itself. They have lost their power of empathy, not due to hunger for the pleasures of the flesh and pure consumption but from fear itself. The Depression, the war, and the Cold War have done them in. They were the officers in the Vietnam era, taking their orders from veterans of the Second World War and carrying them out without asking too many questions. After all, their elders won the big war and they knew what is best. Not one of the Depression babies would ever serve as U.S. president. They are a silent and lost generation, and the movie captures this, but it also provides one exception: the science teacher, Dr. Woodward, who essentially sacrifices his life to help an alien creature. His last words, to the evil air force colonel Nelec, is an assertion of the primacy of empathy, which comes down to saying that the alien is in him and he is in it. Nelec is unmoved and orders another black soldier to execute Woodward. That’s pretty much how you kill conscience.
It is fair to note that if Dr. Woodward had a Ph.D. in some sort of biological science in 1958, when he was among the scientists the air force chose to study the alien, he was something of a pioneer. There were precious few black Ph.D.s in that day, and those who were around had reason to understand the alien’s predicament. Being surrounded by white people who were completely unconscious of their privilege and in deep denial about their racism must bear some analogy to the predicament of the alien. Woodward is transformed by the alien’s touch, but we are not told whether the alien is aware of it—an important detail.
In any case, Dr. Woodward understands that the basic moral requirement in this situation, for any intelligent being, is that the creature must be set free, at any personal cost. That alien’s treatment is thus a symbol of what fear does to us over time. In short, Dr. Woodward becomes conscious of the genuine terror, and that is the idea of a world full of pod people, people who refuse to feel the longing of others, who would defend their own physical safety, and their power and privilege, at the cost of their souls. Being robbed of peace and love for two generations, we lost our capacity for understanding. It isn’t funny.
Thus the terror relevant to longing is the way in which we can come to fear losing ourselves, our very souls, to any set of social protocols that requires us to be, well, zombies. The kids in Super 8 are surrounded by zombies—hunger zombies and fear zombies, like those in the military. What are they? As Joe says to Alice, “Pretty much be a lifeless ghoul, with no soul. Dead eyes. Scary. Did you ever have Mrs. Mullin?” All the adults they know are terrifying and terrified, even though no one knows it, because that is what fear will do over time. The Cold War was so old by 1979 that no one could even remember what it was like not to live on the brink of apocalypse, and so in Abrams’s script, the zombie apocalypse did happen. But it was gradual, so no one knew when to declare it openly. The effect of two generations of Cold War was that no one noticed when our souls were gone and we just became hungry, frightened, consumerist pod people. We were ready for Wal-Mart. And so Abrams did actually make a zombie movie, in the scariest sense of the word.
The problem of empathy doesn’t have a long history in philosophy—at least, not when compared to other long-standing problems in Western thought. For most of our history in the West, the prevailing view was that the power of reason is the distinguishing trait of humanity. In all fairness, people in the Eastern world were talking about whether the power of sympathy might be the distinguishing trait of humanity for over two thousand years.5 And there were certainly wise ones in the West who placed great value on fellow feeling. But in the West, somehow these common-sense observations never became a central part of the philosophical conversation.
Philosophers from Plato onward were critical of anyone who deployed human intelligence or persuasive speech for the purpose of stirring up the emotions of those who heard or read such rhetoric, and over time the general opinion came to hold that emotion in general degrades and distorts our powers of reason. One could say we chose to philosophize like zombies, and having developed the habit of doing so, we came to be unfamiliar with the very real (and positive, constructive) relations between feeling and reasoning. It’s kind of scary, actually, but we got used to it.
So it came as something of a radical suggestion in 1755 when Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that our power of sympathy (along with our power of healthy self-love) is essential to our humanity.6 Obviously there is a very great difference between sympathy—the pity we feel when we witness suffering—and empathy, which is feeling exactly what another person (or being) feels. But the question of empathy doesn’t arise philosophically in the West until the questions of sympathy and healthy self-love are under discussion.
Most of the attention of philosophers in the nineteenth century, insofar as they addressed this question at all, was devoted either to justifying or attacking self-love and sorting out the good from the bad kinds of love. There was significant discussion of sympathy, but the prevailing opinion among those Europeans who had colonized the world, and who intended to exploit and oppress it further—almost like alien invaders—was that sympathy makes human beings weak and unable to do what is necessary for the advancement of the race. (Granting that the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italians, and Germans had very different ideas of what would advance the human race, they seemed to agree that sympathy was a luxury no powerful nation could afford.) The colonizers had Herbert Spencer and August Comte and Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley and Arthur Schopenhauer to gird up their colonizing loins and assure them that all the invasion and murder of less civilized people was absolutely necessary, or at least not morally significant. The Marxist reaction to all this slaughter and misery wasn’t exactly characterized by an emphasis on compassion. Thus, after Rousseau’s assertion, it took another 150 years before any major Western philosopher took up empathy as a subject.
The group of thinkers who finally examined the question were phenomenologists. They were committed to giving reflective descriptions of subjective experience. They took for granted that, as a matter of necessity, my experience is mine and yours is yours, so the issue of whether we could have “the same feeling” posed a number of formal problems. Since your feeling is in you and mine is in me, so the story goes, they can’t be “identical,” and so if they are somehow the “same” feeling, they must have either the same form or the same content, or both, but they are different instances—in sort of the way that two sisters can belong to the “same family” or the “same parents.” But obviously siblings are also different. By analogy, wouldn’t there be differences between my version of, say, feeling your suffering and your version of it or of your version of feeling my suffering and my version of the same? And would the difference be greater still if someone steps on your toe and I say “ouch” and reach for my own toe in empathy? At what point do we simply just admit they are different, or different enough that empathy is not real, just a story we tell ourselves?
Questions such as these are addressed in the writings of Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Edith Stein (1891–1942). In 1913 Scheler criticized in detail those thinkers after Rousseau, from Adam Smith to Sigmund Freud, who collapsed sympathy into self-love and insisted that the roots of sympathy lie in self-interest. That, Scheler believed, was a very great mistake. Scheler sorted out the various modes and types of sympathy, including fellow feeling, identification, egoism, love, hate, emotional infection, and empathy.7
In 1916 Stein (who subsequently was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church) framed and published her theory of empathy—the word in German is revealing: Einfühlung, or single-feeling. Stein believed that the questions associated with the experience of empathy were among the most revealing philosophical questions we can ask. The very structure of all human experience is bound up with feeling what others feel. Without belaboring the subtle story, Stein claims that what I experience, what is truly mine in an experience, is the act of experiencing. The content of my experience, whether it is a memory, a fantasy, an anticipation, or a feeling, is not exclusively mine—even if it is my memory, the immediate mine-ness is in the act, not in the content. The content, whatever it may be, “announces” itself to the act of experiencing. So even my own memories must be announced and relived to be experienced at all.
If this is right, then there is no requirement that any content of experience must be the private possession of the experiencer. When we empathize, then, we do not infer what another is feeling (by interpreting bodily responses or facial expressions), and we do not project our so-called private feelings onto others, and we do not make conjectures or guesses. Rather, the content of the experience “announces” itself to the act of experiencing. Hence, we really could share a memory, an anticipation, or a fantasy as well as a feeling. In empathizing, we actually share the same feeling in two different acts, yours and mine (which need not even be simultaneous). Stein does not claim that the feeling content is identical in every respect, but she does claim that ideally it could be.8
This brings us back to Abrams’s exhibition of empathy in Super 8. What is it, for him? It isn’t the self-sacrificing love Christians call agape. Agapic love is not a kind of understanding, it passes understanding. It is self- sacrifice for those who cannot understand, either what they are doing or what is being done for them by a being that is morally superior. Neither our Goonies nor our alien is in any such frame of mind. Dr. Woodward might be, but he dies vowing revenge, and Abrams makes sure he gets it, so I don’t think this is agape.
Is it friendship? Friendship (philia in Greek) in the highest sense is based on equality, Aristotle says; one discovers a sort of “second self,” and the two souls are alike not just coincidentally but in their moral achievements and judgments. They are alike in virtue, and that is the basis of such friendship.9 One would expect an ideal empathy in such friends, and I think that is what happens. But the interesting thing about empathy is that it can exist across great distances and differences—in time, place, virtue, even species. Whatever it is that enables us to share the same feeling, it does not require very much sameness of circumstance, or of past experience, or even of physiology. Empathy is not a kind of friendship.
Is it erotic attraction? Not in Abrams’s view. First of all, Abrams is very, very careful not to objectify or sexualize any characters in the movie except Jen Kaznyk and lusty Donny. The relationship between Joe and Alice is basically nonerotic—yes, he thinks she is sad and beautiful, but he is awestruck, not enamored. Abrams is very careful in how he frames the shots Alice is in so as never to do with her what (male) directors always do with pretty young girls, which is to make sure we lecherous men can gawk at their bodies. And even on a set with an entire passel of young boys, Abrams steers away from having them even so much as notice how attractive she is; they are amazed by her acting ability and that she has the guts to take off in her father’s car.
No, Abrams refuses the standard moves and that is because he wants to show us the person, not the thing that Alice is. So she sneaks out to see Joe, knocks on his window, and the romantic possibilities become an empathy-fest. That, friends and neighbors, is deliberate on Abrams’s part. It blocks our voyeuristic efforts to sexualize Alice. He is saying, “Hey, you, zombie pervert in the tenth row, yeah you with your mind in the gutter, I’m talking to you. Would you give your lizard brain a rest and think about something else for the balance of this movie?” And this shows, pretty clearly, that Abrams is aware that erotic feeling really isn’t empathic at all; it takes us beyond ourselves, projects us into a realm of desire that seems to be shared with another for a time, but that relation turns out to be unsustainable. Yes, the soul grows wings under the sway of eros, but the wings get tired and the soul descends. We do not know whether the alien is male or female, or whether gender applies to it at all. The reason is simple. This isn’t about eros.
And empathy is not self-transcendence and it is not ecstatic or mystical. There is just no religion or spirituality in this film. No preachers, no prophets, and no churches. The funeral scene at the beginning of the movie would have been the obvious moment for at least a shot of a church, whether interior or exterior. Abrams explicitly avoids this. It’s a conscious decision. There will be no revelations in Lillian, Ohio, in 1979. The people will have to solve their problems without that kind of help.
For Abrams, empathy is centered in the body, not the soul, and it does not, by itself, cause action. Yet empathy is also not strictly passive or a passion of any kind. It is not something we suffer. What the devil is it, then? It is clear rather than cloudy, a clear moment of understanding of some sort. It doesn’t lift us up and it doesn’t bring us back down, so it isn’t levity or gravity. It’s a moment of presence. I think Abrams thinks that we come to recognize empathy when together we find that we are, together, hungry, afraid, and homesick. The solidarity of the friends in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz provides a paradigm.
We recognize that combination in others, across the most varied of circumstances, but it is difficult to do so when we are sated, secure, and home. In fact, the killers of our empathy for others are just those three things, which is why Americans of the Second Gulf War era don’t give a tinker’s damn about their own troops, either when they are fighting or when they come home ruined. There is something cloudy and grave about satiety and security, especially when we think that home is something we can possess and defend. I, for one, would sooner be homeless than call the United States the “Homeland.” Who cannot see that this view of “home” is the essential ingredient in fascism? No, we shall have no homeland, and here I am pretty sure that I simply state Abrams’s (and Spielberg’s) view of the matter.
And it is good to be aware that the hunger without the terror is just as dangerous as the terror without the hunger. I think I just described the two American political parties, but they seem to agree on the homeland idea. What have we become? Yet at the very bottom of the well of longing is the absence of home. The truth is that humans are vagrants on the doorstep of being; we are frail, stupid, dying creatures with nothing to guide us back to our cosmic Kansas except our own pathetic cries and yelps of pain. That is why we can feel each other’s feelings. It isn’t our intelligence, it’s our emptiness, our homelessness, that we can share.
Go home again? But we have no homes, at least not after about age thirteen. I guess 1979 was the thirteen of U.S. history. Sometimes we do feel, together, that there is no home, no place where the steel mills are still open, no way back to Lillian, Ohio. The only aftermath of the zombie-alien apocalypse we get in Super 8 is the kids’ movie itself. It lacks much in the way of “production value,” but it’s innocent. We notice our homelessness when we reflect on lost innocence. And we wouldn’t want to have known then what we know now. And we are in the frame of mind to make this leap into the emotional arms of others mostly when we are hungry and frightened and far from home, in some sense of those words. I think this is why we still like to leave home and go to the movies, with strangers, and munch on overpriced popcorn, and get the shit scared out of us by monsters, and feel the same things everyone else is feeling, alone, in the dark, with our friends, and with others.
The longing that brings us out of our homes is what we really share, it is our civic bond, a resoluteness to come clear about our weaknesses and that is what makes us human. Obviously the twist in Super 8 is that the alien’s moral decency is never really in question: ours is. Any being, whether divine or alien, that can see the longing in us can also know that our weaknesses are understandable. And that isn’t redemption, exactly, but it isn’t damnation either. Once the alien understands that the monsters are the menschen, it’s time to go home, and that’s true whether you’re in the movie or you just went to see it.
And, as promised early on, here is the opinion: I think Abrams would have been a healer of some kind, perhaps a veterinarian, if there were no movies. I leave it to you to puzzle out why I might think that, but I will offer this much of a hint. Abrams has a whole stable of monsters, and he seems to be responsible for their care and feeding, and when they get sick, monsters can’t tell you what’s wrong with them. They don’t know. But remember, as you consider this opinion, who the monsters are in Super 8.
1. See the informative essay by Carl Matheson, “The Simpsons, Hyper-irony and the Meaning of Life,” in The Simpsons and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin, Mark Conard, and Aeon Skoble (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2001), 108–28 (chap. 8). The entire essay is about quotationalism.
2. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 89–90.
3. These are lyrics from the Nick Lowe song “(What’s so Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” written in 1974 but recorded by Elvis Costello and the Attractions and released as the B-side of a Nick Lowe single in 1978. Recognizing the song was going to be popular, the record company added it to the American release of Costello’s 1979 album Armed Forces, and it proceeded to end up in the record collections of a high percentage of thirteen-year-old kids that year (including, unless I miss my guess, Abrams).
4. There is an outstanding analysis of this time, and especially Carter’s malaise speech, in Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Macmillan, 2008).
5. The entire philosophical school of Daoism grows from insights relevant to empathy. Consult the Daodejing.
6. These assertions were part of the argument in Rousseau’s famous “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” also known as his “Second Discourse,” which has been translated a number of times. I prefer the translation by Roger and Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969).
7. See Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath, 2nd ed. (New York: Archon Books, 1970).
8. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, in The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1989).
9. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, books 8–9.