With the Golden Globes coming up, I’ve
seen a lot of highlight clips from previous awards. Meryl Streep’s moving speech last year keeps ringing in my head, particularly one line, “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like.” I think that this is the most important power of film, not just that it gives us entertainment or helps us feel a wide range of emotions, but that it teaches us empathy for people who we may not otherwise understand. I did not fully understand why someone would transition from female to male until a friend of mine came out and took the leap. I carried a bit of judgement towards couples with wide age gaps until I was able to witness one develop with love and mutual respect. If I had not known people in these situations, I would have struggled to bridge that gap between my understanding and the lived experience of another. Through TV and movies, though, I can get closer to understanding the motivation of people so different than me. I can hear their back stories and see their internal struggle and deep emotions, without having to re-traumatize someone by asking them to share their story with me.
To be clear, I don’t think movies are a perfect replica of life or that it replaces the importance of meeting people from diverse backgrounds. But it can subconsciously improve our ability to empathize over time. For example, I had difficulty empathizing with people serving in the military because I was privileged enough to know I could find ways of paying for college without it, and because I see my belief system as being in direct conflict with most of what our military stands for. When I met someone who had served, my unfortunate reaction was to immediately assume I didn’t have much in common with them. This began to change when I saw the movie Lions for Lambs. It did a beautiful job of critiquing our government and military while also honoring the reasons people choose to serve, and it finally helped me understand the various motivations and values enough that I can better find connections with real people around me.
This is one of many reasons why it is so crucial for our film industry to represent diversity. There is a great post circulating the internet about a woman bringing her father, with a Mexican accent, to see Rogue One, and the incredible effect it had. Our movies have begun to widen their scope, and it is so important. More characters are entering into same-sex relationships without it being made into a huge deal. The Danish Girl, Orange is the New Black, and Transparent have all brought different aspects of what it means to be trans into our consciousness. In fact, OTNB’s entire point, as far as my one brain could tease out, is taking characters who are not stunningly beautiful or perfected, not always kind or self-regulated, even downright uncomfortable, and represent a huge array of diversity, and then sharing their backstory slowly, until you realize that you actually can relate and can empathize with their situations.
So yes, we have seen a lot of improvement in representation. The huge gaps are slowly being filled. What I would now love to see, though, is blatant depictions of rape culture. I want to see representations of what consent looks like. I want to see the scenes in which consent is not given, or is in that weird grey are that people find so confusing, but with scenes following that show the emotional impact of those actions. I want to see films that model for our youth what it looks like for a woman to stand up and say no, this doesn’t feel comfortable and my body is not here for your use. I think if we could have young people in this country seeing depictions of the VAST examples of harassment and assault, paired with the emotional processing that is too often left unexpressed in real life, that maybe rape culture would not be so prevalent in the next generation.