At the Washington Post, an article talking about the 40th anniversary of ET.
It does praise the movie, but I think leaves out two key aspects of its success:
a. the operatic, deeply affecting, quality of the score. Does anyone doubt that it contributes enormously to the emotional weight of the key scenes in the last 20 minutes of the film?
b. although the article does say "Empathy is the film’s guiding philosophy", I would go further than that, and note that it doesn't really feature have true "bad guys" or enemies. Sure, there are scary police/government officers who try to recover the alien in heavy handed fashion, but a key aspect of the film is that the adults want to "meet" ET too, just that they approach it with adult concerns that are not readily understood by children (the concern for biological contagion). As with Close Encounters, the conflict is more a case of misunderstanding between groups - not deliberate ill will borne by one lot against another. In this way, the Spielbergian universe of this era is the opposite of the scare world that the American Right was just starting to talk itself into, with fear of otherness cumulating in Trumpist nativism and demagoguery. It's no accident that Right wing sites are always waiting to ridicule Spielberg and his movies for being a Hollywood woke liberal - he is their philosophical enemy for believing in a kinder world.
Steve if you feel inclined read The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal. It posits that animals have morals and demonstrate compassion. There is plenty of evidence for that argument. Religious types will argue that the animal behavior only looks like empathy. The same could be said of human behavior. Morals are their last bastion against the biological\nurture view of behavior so they will defend that position to the last syllable. de Waal's argument also punches holes in the view of evolution as being all about competition. It is only in recent years that co-operation has come to the fore as an important behavior component subject to natural selection.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6525532-the-age-of-empathy
Thanks for the recommendation, John, it sounds interesting. Oddly, I think the internet, with its video memes of amusing or heart warming animal behaviour, is probably turning a lot more people's minds to the question of animal consciousness than used to be the case (at least for urban folk whose exposure to animal behaviour is pretty limited.)
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I worry about in reading more of it may be that it will strengthen my increasing misgivings about eating meat. :) (I'm never going to worry about eating most seafood, though.)
It does raise issues about eating meat but in Australia at least the animals are well treated and to date the only example I can think of where animals display an awareness of death is elephants and perhaps some other primates. It is also worth remembering that in the wild animals often die a much worse death than the quick blows we administer. When I worked at the abattoir so long ago it was interesting that the cattle just went straight into the kill floor seemingly unconcerned but the pigs were going crazy trying to avoid the kill. Pigs are very intelligent. So perhaps pigs have an awareness of death or perhaps it was the general ruckus they were raising that caused the commotion. My assumption is that they are aware of death.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who has owned a dog knows that they express surprising array of emotions, including guilt. Do they know about sin?😈
Nonetheless like you I sometimes wonder ... .
I wouldn't have picked you as a person who worked in an abattoir, John.
ReplyDeleteI remember my Mum told me one of her brothers worked for a time in an abattoir, and said he had no great compunction killing cattle, which he considered pretty dumb, but there was something gentle and innocent about sheep, and the way they would look at him, that made him dislike killing them. (This was many, many decades ago, too, presumably well before modern methods.)
Steve I've been everywhere. Presenting talks at neuroscience conferences to being a neuroscience advisor for a terrible AI project(they wouldn't listen to me when I kept stressing the importance of inhibition!) to working in an abattoir and being a cleaner(working through Uni). I even have a proofing credit for a recent book on particle physics.
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