Movies are a perfect record of our society. The basic dialogue scene is rich with examples of how we communicate with one another, and how our words can cause changes in emotion. We can also view them as a document of our society: how we behave in specific situations, such as in schools, stores, or restaurants. And by accepting that films are specifically designed to elicit specific emotions, we can quantify empathy.
Movies as Emotional Data
Cinema, the greatest art form of the 20th century, conveys psychological experience and emotional transformation through the use of plot and character. Characters are established, something happens to those characters, and those characters change. Films are chronologically linear: we can see direct cause-and-effect of emotional antecedents (or behavioral stimuli). For example, if we see a character smiling, and then two seconds later we see them frowning, we want to know what happened in those two seconds to make them frown. We look at the dialogue, and see that someone has said to this character, “I hate you”. We’ve just learned this phrase has a negative impact on emotion.
But we can take this further: what if we look at hundreds of thousands of movies, looking for all the times we encounter “I hate you”? The model can analyze the resulting change in facial expression to see how a typical human would react to this phrase. Usually it’s negative, but what if the character enjoys it? Perhaps then we look at how the line was delivered, with the speaker smiling, laughing, and maintaining a pleasant voice tone? We’ve just learned something new about the delivery of the phrase, that it’s not always uttered in anger. And then we can look at the surrounding context, maybe it was said in response to a corny dad joke. An emotional model learns that these are all valid applications of, and responses to the phrase “I hate you”.
Movies are Real Life
If this thesis seems too technical, let’s try a more abstract example. Pretend that we have a robot with a human body, that wanted to blend in with society. It could watch a bunch of movies and learn basic human mannerisms. Walk, don’t run. Make eye contact during a conversation. Don’t forget to blink. Movies, even without plot or character development, are footage of human mannerisms. A robot just needs to watch these to be able to mimic human behavior.
And at some level, isn’t this part of how we learned to be human and participate in society? Think about the effect of movies on your own childhood development. Did you ever pretend you were a specific character in a movie and repeated their one-liners? Envisioned yourself saving the world from terrorists or falling in love with a perfect stranger as snow fell around you? Surely films contributed to our understanding of the world (though perhaps it’s not as exciting as we’d hoped).
Scenes which take place in stores, restaurants, and offices are all documentation of common scenarios, in which we find ourselves. And perhaps we all haven’t been on golf courses, in prisons, or at black-tie galas. But we’ve seen enough movie scenes to know what to expect.
Movies are “Machines that Generate Empathy”
Movies are guided experiences, hand-crafted to elicit a specific emotional response. They contain many details specifically designed to make the viewer feel a certain, specific way.
These details don’t make it into the final cut accidentally. They are the result of a director maximizing the emotional response of his or her film. Though nearly invisible to an audience, a director consciously made the decision to include these details. By reverse-engineering these details, we can derive a “correct” emotional response: the simulation of empathy.