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WARNING: "HEREDITARY SPOILERS" spoilers below
Not sure why the audience needs to empathize with Charley, for the audience to understand her mother's grief. There are certain things a director doesn't need to inform us about. They are taken as a given. Mothers love their children. This is such a universally understood truth it feels weird needing it to be articulated on screen for us. I'd be equally baffled if you need to see your characters eat at some point from fear they might starve to death before the movie ends.

Collette's performance is all we should need to make the emotions of the film real for us. I wouldn't care if Charley was a pet rock. As long as we understand it is her child, the emotions she feels show us all we need to understand the pain. There is no reason to muddy the waters with our own personal feelings towards her child. Because we are watching as members of the audience, we naturally know more than she does, which includes the true nature of her child. To take this knowledge, that Charley is evil, and hold it against the emotional core of the film, just seems a little weird.
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I didn't intentionally choose to not empathize with Annie's grief for Charlie because, since I know I'm watching a creepy kid in a Horror movie, I instinctively know that she's probably possessed by a demon (or whatever the **** was supposed to be going on; it was all pretty vague, to be honest), and I think that Annie shouldn't be sad for her as a result of that, or something. Of course I understand Annie's grief on a basic level, but I ultimately can't empathize with it the way I was meant to, because even putting aside the Horror-based background of the story, Charlie had still been nothing but a black hole of creepy, anti-social behavior and bad, negative vibes the entire time she was onscreen, so I couldn't help but feel a natural sense of relief when she was out of the film, because that's just an inevitable reaction to the sudden absence of such an unlikeable characterization. It's no different from when the first major character to be killed off in Battlestar Galactica was the one that everyone disliked the most anyway, so even though the show tried to play it off like it was some big tragedy, it held little impact when it happened. And I felt that way about Charlie after only "spending" a half hour or so as a movie-watcher, so I can only imagine how big an emotional drag she would end up being on a mother when she has to spend the child's entire lifetime living with and raising her 24/7, you know?



I’ve read through the Ari Aster bit of this thread with great interest. Two lots of two cents from me.

First, I believe Yoda and some others have previously commented on the ‘glorification of despair’ that Aster is becoming known for. I appreciate the criticism, but to me this is by no means a trait unique to Aster, and a part of me thinks that to dismiss the deliberate build-up of despair as ‘excessive’ or lacking purpose is to dismiss authorial intent. I, for one, remember having similar thoughts about Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone (1998). It seemed like a never-ending exercise in despair porn with little purpose.

But the thing is, if you take the view that the main purpose of horror is to entertain whilst evoking existential dread in the viewer, then why should this be a problem and why the constant search for a ‘deeper’ meaning to a film? I recently rewatched Funny Games with friends less well-versed in horror than I, and it’s the ‘excessive’ and ‘meaningless’ dread buildup part that they found most disturbing. They were on edge.

Isn’t that why we watch horror? I do believe that this feeling of despair is in a sense integral to the genre. People watch erotic films to feel aroused. I would argue horror exists to evoke despair, then Adrenalin, then despair.

Quite possible that Aster overdone it and the despair element loses impact for that, or that his execution is clumsy or not nuanced enough, but I think he’s on the right path if he wants to do Funny Games-type isn’t-this-simply-awful-and-getting-worse-by-the-hour films.

Now, my second two cents.

I found this very interesting re: Charlie. I often wonder about the mechanics and supposed logic of empathy in cinema,
WARNING: spoilers below
especially when it comes to ‘evil’ characters.
I guess I personally just don’t see the relationship between empathy and what you see objectively happening with the child/character. But that’s definitely due to my own share of weirdness. To my mind, you feel whatever you feel due to whatever is actually happening to the character, regardless if the person is likeable or not. And that’s not me playing the devil’s advocate, I just don’t see the big deal about empathising with characters, i.e. being able to feel as if we are them.

And re: Damien and Charlie, I always thought life must be very bizarre for them, not being able to relate to people, feeling left out of society,
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having that one connection to a demon to turn to.
That’s very isolating. Doesn’t seem to me like reason enough not to empathise, if we indeed must empathise with characters to maintain interest. (I would argue not.)

I’ve read pretty much every comment on Joker here on mofo, probably, and though I largely agree that the film is far from perfect, I do sympathise with Arthur just because he is isolated from the world. That’s not his fault and that’s what the author is trying to say, I feel. I don’t need to ‘like’ him for that. Same with Travis Bickle.

There’s also the distinction between ‘empathise’ and ‘sympathise’, feels to me like they’re being conflated a bit.

May (2002) and especially Christine (2016) seem similar to me in that way, in the sense that the character is not likeable, but surely it’s easy to understand their state of isolation even if we don’t ‘like’ them? I think it was tough for Charlie to live where people expected her to show ‘normal’ human emotion when she simply couldn’t. I really like the scene when Annie is kind of probing Charlie about how she’s feeling after the funeral. ‘Do you feel sad?’, etc. I have experienced that so many times. People just assume that you have to react to things in a certain way, show empathy and emotion, and if you don’t, then you, in turn, are not deserving of sympathy. Isn’t that ironic?

I agree with this: But I also feel we are perfectly free, if we want to, to empathise with Charlie too. Can’t remember which postmodern philosopher said this, but empathy is a choice. You could very well decide to walk in the shoes of The Other, overcome the alienation and feel what this person feels, if you wanted to.
In a vacuum, I'd say that I felt empathy for Charlie when she expressed her sadness at her
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Grandmother being dead, especially since I lost my own a while ago, but, regardless of what the in-film reason for it was, when I watch her emotionlessly decapitate a dead bird, my first natural response is not to think about how lonely she must be, you know?



In a vacuum, I'd say that I felt empathy for Charlie when she expressed her sadness at her
WARNING: spoilers below
Grandmother being dead, especially since I lost my own a while ago, but, regardless of what the in-film reason for it was, when I watch her emotionlessly decapitate a dead bird, my first natural response is not to think about how lonely she must be, you know?
Yes, I get that, but I was looking at the bigger picture. Not necessarily even about Charlie. The bird scene makes her less likeable, fine, but I was saying I find the very idea we only empathise with ‘likeable’ people (in film or otherwise, actually) problematic. It’s projecting at its core: we want to think of ourselves as nice so we choose to feel empathy only for the ‘nice ones’, right? I find that simplistic, though I admit that’s human nature.

For my part, I think I tend to empathise with characters whose course of action makes sense to me. In a rational/logical way.

Hence, I don’t know about Charlie, but
WARNING: spoilers below
the grandma’s gamble paid off, the whole cult and the family did attain access to Paimon and the ‘good familiars’’, so in this rational sense, I empathise with her. I guess if her aim was to ensure all of the above for her family, then she was right, and she even told Annie the sacrifices would pale in comparison to the rewards
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Yes, I get that, but I was looking at the bigger picture. Not necessarily even about Charlie. The bird scene makes her less likeable, fine, but I was saying I find the very idea we only empathise with ‘likeable’ people (in film or otherwise, actually) problematic. It’s projecting at its core: we want to think of ourselves as nice so we choose to feel empathy only for the ‘nice ones’, right? I find that simplistic, though I admit that’s human nature.

For my part, I think I tend to empathise with characters whose course of action makes sense to me. In a rational/logical way.

Hence, I don’t know about Charlie, but
WARNING: spoilers below
the grandma’s gamble paid off, the whole cult and the family did attain access to Paimon and the ‘good familiars’’, so in this rational sense, I empathise with her. I guess if her aim was to ensure all of the above for her family, then she was right, and she even told Annie the sacrifices would pale in comparison to the rewards
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I think it makes perfect sense for someone's sense of empathy for a particular character to go up or down depending on their characterization, because with movies, we're talking about an artform, an inherently artificial medium that's dependent on the intentional manipulations of the filmmaker for its power (and I don't mean "manipulation" in any sort of a negative manner, it's just a neutral statement of fact). Whether those manipulations end up being good or bad all depends on the specifics, and it doesn't make sense to me to act like our feelings about a character should never change at all depending on their particular characterization. because then it would be impossible for a filmmaker to ever mess up a characterization; like, if the first Star Wars had killed off Darth Vader and then took a significant amount of screentime to focus on Grand Moff Tarkin's grief because they happened to be good friends or something, I would "get" his response on an intellectual level, but wouldn't feel it on an emotional one, which is why that wouldn't have worked if it had happened in that film.