Exploring Embodied Empathy Through Coronavirus Personal Essays, Bisbee ‘17, and Hannibal

Posted on October 30, 2020January 31, 2025 by Leah Carlson-Downie

Reenactors on a bus in the film Bisbee '17

Over the past several months, a peculiar category of personal essay cropped up all over the media landscape: the first-hand narrative of what it feels like to be ill with COVID-19. Although reported pieces about those suffering from COVID-19 and its long term effects also proliferate, the essays I’m thinking of are works of creative nonfiction. I should say upfront that I’m not necessarily a fan of the “pandemic personal essay” as a genre; however, these primary accounts of illness became a sort of exception to the rule.

The authors of these pieces seem more concerned with describing experience than analyzing it. The best of these works possess an immediacy that provokes a visceral reaction by asking the reader to imagine the physical reality of sickness. Envisioning this can be upsetting, which may be why some of these essays lodged themselves in my memory. In late March, reading Jessica Lustig’s piece about taking care of her husband when he was sick with coronavirus triggered my first real anxiety spiral of the pandemic. A small detail about keeping the cat out of the bedroom where the author’s husband lay confined sent me spinning; I obsessed over the heartbreaking thought of keeping one of my cats who is desperately attached to my husband away from him if he fell ill with the virus. Krista Diamond’s reflection about losing her sense of taste after contracting COVID-19 left me unbearably sad. I, too, have been relying on the small joys of food to get through this weird and awful year, and the notion of losing my sense of taste, as Diamond did, filled me with dread. Last month, Patricia Lockwood wrote a fevered “Diary” entry for The London Review of Books about the deleterious effects of a coronavirus infection on her mental state. Lockwood recounts her delusions and delirium with an almost shocking frankness, even if the essay ends on an ostensibly positive note.

Sure, these stories scared me, but, more than anything else, they moved me. These chronicles of sickness struck me differently than other pandemic personal essays—the ruminations on the nature of time in lockdown or the contemplations of the joys of baking bread—because they spark with a sense of urgency. These works ask readers to try to understand what the state of illness feels like on a subjective level. “What if I were sick?” “What if someone I loved were sick?” “How would I feel?” “What would I do?” I saw these essays as pleas for empathy in the face of a largely unempathetic national response to the pandemic.

In the midst of a concerted partisan effort to discourage any empathetic reaction to the situation, how does one provoke empathy in one’s fellow Americans? I’m consumed by this question as I read the news, watch case counts rise in places where my loved ones live, observe extended family members post disinformation on Facebook about the efficacy and safety of wearing masks, see the statistics on how the virus has disproportionately affected non-white and poor communities, and see how this reality only helps comfortable, white people “other” the problem of the pandemic. Obviously, I don’t want everyone in the country to know someone who has contracted COVID-19; it shouldn’t take that kind of experience and that magnitude of potential suffering for us to collectively understand the importance of keeping each other safe. As humans, we should be capable of an empathetic recognition of others’ suffering. To be empathetic is to understand another’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves; therefore, empathy is always an imaginative, interpretive act.* But what sets off our empathetic imaginations?

Reenactor in the film Bisbee 17, man standing in front of the Arizona flag — Fernando, reenacting a historical scene in the film *Bisbee ’17*.

I was already thinking about ways to generate empathy when I sat down to watch Bisbee ‘17 (2018), director Robert Greene’s third feature-length documentary film, for the first time last month. The film follows a handful of residents of Bisbee, Arizona, as they plan a centennial reenactment of the so-called Bisbee Deportation of 1917. As is the case with Greene’s other work, Bisbee ‘17 explicitly investigates the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction, as well as the line between acting and being. The reenactment forms the backbone of the project. Most of the activity shown on camera relates to planning and executing the reenactment, and filmed, reenacted scenes make up a considerable portion of the movie’s runtime. Greene intersperses the “real” scenes with the reenacted scenes indiscriminately and with little delineation, to slightly disorienting effect.

While labor historians and historians who study the Mexico-United States border are generally well acquainted with the event, Greene’s film presents the Deportation as a sort of tacitly suppressed history among those who live in Bisbee. In 1917, local law enforcement, at the behest of the copper mine owners, kidnapped suspected participants in a planned labor strike supported by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Mexican and Eastern European immigrants made up the majority of the strikers, who had organized the action to demand equal pay and better working conditions in the copper mines. The sheriff recruited a large posse of locals, mostly white men, to apprehend nearly two thousand striking miners and community members who supported the miners’ cause. After rounding up the labor activists, the sheriff and his crew loaded the strike supporters into cattle cars and sent them east to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to fend for themselves.**

Some residents of present-day Bisbee, the Bisbee of 2017 that Greene visits, are descendants of those who rounded up the striking miners. Since almost none of the deportees ever returned to Bisbee, no descendents of the victims of the Deportation live in the town. Greene’s film suggests that those who participated in enacting the Deportation—those who stayed in Bisbee and whose children stayed in Bisbee—perhaps had complicated feelings about the action and therefore did not want to discuss it or remember it. The centennial reenactment is thus positioned in the film as a sort of catharsis, a way for the residents of the town to relive this potentially painful incident in history and face it in a new way.

In a book chapter on the rise of reenactment as a form of historical study in the 1970s, historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawloska writes about the ways that historical reenactments enable participants to identify with historical subjects in affective ways.*** She refers to reenactments as “embodied history” and “experiential history,” and both terms point usefully to the ways that participants relate to historical reenactments. Essentially, historical reenactment gives participants unique insights into historical subjects by setting up the conditions to foster empathy across time. By reliving historical events and embodying historical persons, participants begin to develop a new sense of historical consciousness on the emotional level; this helps participants make connections between the past and the present in interesting and sometimes surprising ways. The framework outlined by Rymsza-Pawloska allows us to see historical reenactments as one form of practicing embodied empathy.

Reeenactors in the film Bisbee 17; men loading other men into a cattle car — Reenactors in the film *Bisbee ’17.*

Bisbee ‘17 documents how walking in the shoes of the 1917 deporters and the deportees allows participants in the reenactment to form new understandings of the Deportation one hundred years later. Some participants end up identifying even more closely with the figure they are tasked with playing; after the reenactment, a man who portrays one of the mine owners who set the Deportation in motion seems firmer in his belief that the Deportation was a justified, necessary action. One young man, a Mexican-American non-actor and resident of Bisbee named Fernando, takes a role as one of the striking miners. Fernando, who knew nothing about the Bisbee Deportation until participating in the film, finds meaningful resonances between the events of 1917 and his own life as he performs in the reenactment project. But some participants find their beliefs challenged over the course of the reenactment. In a stunning moment, one reenactor breaks character (as a member of the Sheriff’s posse) to say to the camera, “This feels wrong,” after herding the reenactors playing captured labor activists into a cattle car. This man previously expressed stronger sympathy with the law enforcement side of the Deportation, characterizing the group as well-meaning, patriotic citizens doing their duty.

Greene’s film makes a compelling case for the power of reenactment to engender experiences of empathy through embodied action. Although Bisbee ‘17 cannot be classified as didactic, this thematic throughline is fairly straightforward; the participants themselves verbally express what they’re feeling. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, by contrast, uses visual language to articulate and play with the close, instinctual relationship in our imaginations between reenactment and empathy. In Hannibal, the protagonist’s almost supernatural gift of “pure empathy” manifests on-screen as reenactment.

Overhead shot of Will Graham from the TV show Hannibal — Will Graham mentally reenacting a murder (*Hannibal* S1E9, “Trou Normand”).

Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the FBI criminal profiler who serves as one of the show’s two leads (the other lead being, of course, Hannibal Lecter, played here by a perfect Mads Mikkelsen), can catch serial killers by precisely recreating their thinking. Graham arrives at a crime scene, surveys the evidence, and slips into the mind of the killer to reconstruct the murder. The show—as well as the novel it’s based upon—describe this ability as a kind of extraordinary empathy, since Graham catches killers by identifying with them so closely that he can divine their motivations and predict their moves.

When Hannibal depicts Graham retroactively piecing together a series of events at a crime scene, the murders are shown as reenactments. Rather than show the murderer acting out the process Graham describes, like a flashback of sorts, the camera shows Graham himself going through the violent motions. As Graham describes what happened at the crime scene, he also assumes the voice of the killer, using the first person “I” to refer to the murderer.

It’s notable that Graham must go back to the scene of the crime to reconstruct it. He gains insight into the crime by seeing the evidence, but it seems important to his process that his body be where the killer’s body was. The significance of his being at the crime scene suggests that Graham is practicing embodied empathy by putting his body in the same conditions as the killer’s. He can only truly reenact the killing in his mind, but the way these scenes are filmed takes us into Graham’s psyche, where we see him “commit” the murders—making these reenactments “real” for the viewer.

As a way of visually communicating Graham’s powers of empathy, the reenactments are extremely effective. The show takes advantage of the audience’s deep-rooted sense of the link between walking in someone else’s shoes and the work of being empathetic; the images of Graham reenacting gruesome murders stand in clearly and plainly for his empathizing with killers. The reenactment scenes function thematically, as well. The show presents Graham’s extreme empathy, especially used to empathize with psychopaths as he does in service of the FBI, as something unbearable. The reenactments make explicit the implication of what it means for Graham to imagine himself as a murderer, and they lay bare for us what repeatedly and closely empathizing with serial killers does to Graham’s mental state. If he keeps imagining himself as a serial killer, how long will it be until he becomes one?

Will Graham from the TV show Hannibal imagines murdering a man — Will Graham in the act of imagining a murder (*Hannibal* S1E9, “Trou Normand”).

Bisbee ‘17 and Hannibal stand out for how they illustrate the potency and sometime unpleasantness of practicing embodied empathy. Locating feelings in the body and trying to understand others by putting or imagining our bodies in the same state as theirs is hard work. It’s vulnerable work. It’s scary work, particularly when one is trying to empathize with someone going through something disturbing. But it’s worthwhile work.

As confirmed COVID-19 cases rise to record high levels in the U.S. this week, I’ve been thinking about the utility of embodied empathy as a way to foster greater levels of compassion. Illness is primarily a physical ordeal. Confinement and quarantine are physical conditions. Working from home is a physical circumstance. Much of so many people’s understanding of the severity of the pandemic is bound up in whether their own physical states have been affected by it. Could practices of embodied empathy, then, be a fruitful place to start when thinking about cultivating more empathy in our pandemic response?

For me, the answer is yes. Isolated in my own apartment, both my spouse and I so far uninfected and still employed, I’m constantly tempted to ignore what’s going on—to think of no body but my own healthy, housed, and fed body. The personal essays detailing the physical reality of COVID-19 infection are ultimately so forceful for me because they ask me to empathize by requiring me to picture myself in the author’s physical state. They demand that I think about all of the suffering bodies I am so eager to ignore.

Absorbing these essays can be distressing, admittedly. Reading things like coronavirus personal essays, long Twitter threads from “recovered” COVID-19 patients suffering from long-haul symptoms, news stories about mass evictions, and the rest can feel like torturing myself over something I can’t control. Seeing these things as tools for practicing embodied empathy, however, changes the frame. They aren’t scare tactics to be ignored for my own self-preservation, but rather they serve as a critically necessary impetus to look outward—outside of my own body—and find empathy for those who are most adversely affected by the pandemic. From viscerally elicited empathy, positive action can spring.

While practicing embodied empathy can certainly be uncomfortable (as suggested by Bisbee ‘17), even horrifying (as posited by Hannibal), in both Greene’s film and Fuller’s show (at least for the first season), positive action does come from the understanding gained through the practice. Bisbee ‘17 implies that the reenactment of the Deportation might initiate a process of exorcising the town’s ghosts; emotionally engaging with history allows the participants to productively face the town’s violent past and begin to look towards the future. In Hannibal, Graham uses his unique talent to catch serial killers before they strike again. He saves innocent lives.

Perhaps we should cultivate an openness in ourselves, if we can, to practices of embodied empathy and challenge the people in our lives to do the same. Where appeals to logic and reason fail, maybe appeals to the body could prevail. We’re all human. We all have bodies. If we could all be pushed to imagine the experiences of bodies that are not our own, maybe we could collectively conceive of a more empathetic response to the pandemic.

*I would like to note here that real empathy requires a radical openness and a willingness to listen; to be empathetic is to take on another’s feelings as if they were our own, but it is not to project what we think another person’s feelings or experiences might be. Empathy must be based on information and evidence received from the person with whom one empathizes.

**The film implies that the men were left for dead in the desert; however, this is not exactly accurate. While the workers were deserted in a tiny New Mexican town with no provisions, New Mexican officials and the U.S. Army located the party, escorted the deported men to a larger town, and provided them with food and water. Some sources claim that the deportees were deliberately left in close proximity to a U.S. Army base, and evidence suggests that the deportees were meant to be found. For greater context, see Johnson’s introduction to The American Historical Review’s special roundtable on the film (Benjamin H. Johnson, “Introduction,” The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, pp. 955–958, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz590).

***M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, “Cultural Logics of Reenactment: Embodied Engagements with the American Past,” in History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. 118-138.

Your Dad Is Right: A Paean to Master and Commander (2003)

Posted on September 22, 2020January 31, 2025 by Leah Carlson-Downie

The HMS Surprise from Master and Commander

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World released in the fall of 2003, at the height of Russell Crowe’s stardom. The film, based on a long-running series of novels by Patrick O’Brian, had franchise potential and a subtitle that promised sequels. Despite a strongly positive critical reception, the movie famously could not attract enough people to the multiplex to make a profit against its generous $150 million budget. The film earned ten Oscar nods, including for Best Picture, but The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the competition at the ceremony.* Having gotten neither the box office receipts nor the awards hardware to justify a sequel, Master and Commander faded into collective memory as a particular kind of middling prestige picture and a failed franchise starter.

Seventeen years later, Peter Weir’s naval epic has its small share of passionate fans who will sing its praises whenever given the opportunity. It would be fair to say, though, that Master and Commander now has a bit of a reputation as a Dad Movie. It’s generally remembered as a solid war film made with impeccable attention to historical detail, even if the specific characters and events depicted are fictional. I’m not here to argue that the film isn’t a Dad Movie, because that would be disingenuous; however, inclusion in the Dad Movie hall of fame does not automatically disqualify the film from consideration as a truly great work. Master and Commander is the best kind of Dad Movie, and the film deserves a broader appreciation.

As the marquee star and the leading man, the film’s marketing positioned Russell Crowe front and center. Crowe, at the time relatively fresh off of three consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actor and considered a bankable headliner, received a reported $20 million salary up front for the picture. Although he’s continued to work steadily in Hollywood, many accounts of Crowe’s career mark the misstep of Master and Commander (in conjunction with increasing reports of his violent outbursts offscreen) as the beginning of the end of his superstardom. Given this context, reevaluating the film’s place in Crowe’s filmography becomes an excellent place to begin a larger reevaluation of the film’s reputation.

Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey

If Master and Commander is a generally underrated film, then it follows that Captain Jack Aubrey never ranked as one of Russell Crowe’s iconic roles. But for those of us who love the movie, Crowe’s magnificent lead performance stands out as one of the best of his career. The actor’s charisma and gravitas have never been put to better use on screen. Crowe gives a lived-in performance that feels effortless; he anchors the film, but he never seems to be working for your attention.

Crowe’s ultra-masculine screen persona has frequently led Hollywood to cast him as men capable of great violence. His imposing physique, coupled with his intense demeanor, lends credibility to his portrayals of brutality. Whether a Crowe character registers as a hero, villain, or antihero often comes down to how the film frames that capacity for violence. Captain Aubrey is of a piece with the rest of Crowe’s decidedly masculine characters; the role is not a pivot or a play against type. But Captain Aubrey epitomizes a masculine ideal rather than the toxic masculinity so often at the root of Crowe’s characters. (Remember, this is a Dad Movie!) As a successful military man, the violence Aubrey enacts is ritualized, justified, and honorable. It is controlled to the utmost degree by both military norms and the captain’s own rigid moral code. The Napoleonic wartime setting rationalizes the necessity of the violence in the film, as the killing occurs in the service of an imagined greater good.

Besides his facility with a bayonet, Aubrey displays another key trait of idealized masculinity: leadership. As Scott Tobias wrote last year in his superb “Revisiting Hours” piece on Master and Commander for Rolling Stone, the film works particularly well “as a study in leadership.”** The film takes a keen interest in what it means for Aubrey to be a worthy leader, and Crowe’s acting choices perfectly complement this thread of the film. Crowe possesses a natural charisma that provides authenticity to his portrait of a respected commander, but he doesn’t coast on this alone. He brings a three-dimensionality to Aubrey by subtly modulating his behavior depending on what image the captain needs to project in any given situation. Crowe reminds us that leadership is an act in both senses of the word—an action and a show. He communicates the way that Aubrey constantly performs leadership without drawing undue attention to his own performance as an actor.

Crowe’s work in the film stands out as some of the most delicate and nuanced acting in his oeuvre. Yes, he delivers stirring speeches with aplomb. (“England is under threat of invasion, and though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England,” Aubrey intones to his crew in a particularly rousing moment before the film’s climactic battle sequence.) He fixes his trademark Russell Crowe squint on the horizon as he watches for the enemy ship that Aubrey has been tasked with capturing. Aubrey is, to a degree, another one of Crowe’s serious men. As captain, Aubrey assumes responsibility for everyone on the ship and must bear the burden when men under his command die. But he also cracks jokes—one dinner scene in the captain’s cabin ends with a memorably bad pun about “the lesser of two weevils”—, mentors the younger crewmates, and generally tries to make all of his men feel needed on the ship. Crowe brings an attractive warmth to Aubrey, a quality that rarely shines through in the actor’s other roles. It isn’t all glowering from the deck; leadership also looks like forming honest connections and making people feel special. Crowe takes an understated approach, and this light touch belies the intentionality and thoughtfulness of the performance.

Dinner in the Captains Cabin on the HMS Surprise

Master and Commander undoubtedly provides a window into an exclusively masculine world. Women are barely alluded to visually or verbally; men comprise the bounded universe of the HMS Surprise. In addition to the military hierarchy of power codified and enforced by the British Royal Navy, a network of homosocial relationships defines life onboard the ship. These relationships are largely positive and entirely platonic; the crew members mostly support each other, with one tragic exception. This isn’t a film about problematic or alienated masculinity. As one would expect of a Dad Movie classic, Master and Commander mostly posits that men are alright.

The film does not completely gloss over the more unpleasant or even traumatic aspects of British naval service in the Napoleonic Wars. An adolescent midshipman undergoes an arm amputation early in the film; one character offhandedly mentions the practice of impressment, reminding the viewer that some of the men on the ship are likely there involuntarily; and several members of the crew who we have gotten to know rather well are dead by the end of the movie. But the crew members make a home for themselves on the ship, and life there isn’t unbearable. They make friends, they make do. Weir’s film suggests that there is something redemptive, something powerful, about male camaraderie. While this theme isn’t at all unusual for a war film, Master and Commander is especially compelling for the way it treats this idea as more than a truism.

The film takes male homosociality as one of its main subjects, and so, fittingly, the close friendship between Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin (an also excellent Paul Bettany) serves as the film’s center.*** Aubrey technically outranks Maturin, so it’s not truly a relationship of equals; but Aubrey treats Maturin as a confidant and sometime advisor. Aubrey and Maturin seem to hold each other in genuine high regard, and their mutual respect forms the foundation of their relationship. In fact, these two men respect each other enough to remain friends even as they almost constantly disagree with one another. Their opposing approaches to life lay out the final thematic preoccupation of the film.

Dr. Maturin and Captain Aubrey

I love Master and Commander most of all for the way that it captures the rhythm of pursuit. On the one hand, Master and Commander is literally about the thrill of the chase—the HMS Surprise follows the French privateer Acheron for the entirety of the film’s runtime. Aubrey has orders to engage the Acheron and hopefully take her; what little plot the movie has revolves around this objective. Weir mounts three battles between HMS Surprise and the Acheron, and each encounter thrills in its own distinct way. Watching Aubrey and his men outwit the superior French ship through various clever means proves to be an undeniable pleasure. Most of the film’s budget went into the action set pieces, and the practical effects on display are spectacular.

But the movie spends just as much time with the crew during the downtime between battles, providing a glimpse into everyday life on the ship. The texture of the film comes from this contrast between the action and the waiting, the forward momentum of the hunt and the stillness of the quiet points when action is impossible. Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin each embody one of these two states, to a certain degree. Aubrey always wants to push onward and take every opportunity for a fight that presents itself. He’s driven by duty and motivated by the thought of glory. Maturin thrives in the cessations, enjoying the moments when he can indulge his interests as a naturalist. He sees stalking the Acheron beyond what was explicitly ordered as a doomed exercise, and he repeatedly asks Aubrey to consider giving up on taking the enemy ship.

Aubrey’s desire to unceasingly chase the next goal exists in tension with Maturin’s wish to stand still and find contentment in the observable present; the way that the film doesn’t resolve this tension only strengthens the metaphor. Master and Commander never exactly comes down on the side of one man or the other. The film presents both men as reasonable, capable, and intelligent. Aubrey and Maturin each willingly concede their point to the other at different junctures of the film. We experience the gratification of a successful maneuver against the Acheron, but we also see the human cost of Aubrey’s refusal to call it a job done and leave the Acheron alone. The film makes us privy to the small joys among the crew during the pauses in fighting, but we’re also made to understand how an inability to go after a common objective can lead to discontent and unrest among the men. The film depicts this push and pull with an unusual clarity, resulting in a work that perfectly reflects the core truth of how it feels trying to balance ambition and fulfilment in one’s own life. Seen through this lens, the open ending of the film turns out to be rather perfect. There is no single achievement the attainment of which will satisfy the ambitious person. The pursuit is incessant.

The purity of this metaphor cannot be separated from the masculine milieu of the film. The drive to make one’s name, to leave some mark of one’s existence in a public way, has historically been coded as masculine in the Western tradition. Concepts of gender essentialism used to keep the status quo reinforce the idea that women aren’t naturally ambitious. Films about women’s ambition necessarily have to grapple with (or can be biased by) that complicated reality. On film, as in life, ambitious women face different treatment than ambitious men. Because ambition is often assumed to be an unquestioned positive value for men to possess, Master and Commander can more easily extrapolate its argument to the realm of the abstract.

As a film that deals with ideal masculinity, Master and Commander works so well precisely because of its Dad Movie tendencies. The movie presents an aspirational and positive, but not sugar-coated, vision of what it means to be an admirable man. Russell Crowe’s casting and performance are so perfect here because the actor trades in on his “masculine” reputation to create a paragon in Captain Aubrey. The film posits that these masculine ideals are valuable in and of themselves, in isolation. By sidestepping the subject of women almost entirely, the film never puts its masculine ideals into any oppositional, binary configuration with feminine ideals. Although the film shows a solely male domain, the movie never implies that only men can achieve these ideals. Like the true Dad Movie that it is, Master and Commander instead envisions these positive aspects of masculinity (like good leadership, camaraderie through hardship, and healthy ambition) as universally good values applicable to anyone on the gender spectrum. If you’ve written off Master and Commander as “just a Dad Movie,” it’s worth a second look. The film’s Dad Movie-ness is actually its secret strength.

Dr. Maturin and Captain Aubrey playing cello and violin

*Master and Commander won two Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing. These were the only two categories in which Master and Commander did not compete against Return of the King, which won all eleven awards for which it was nominated (and which still holds the record for highest clean sweep at the Oscars).

**This piece convinced me to revisit Master and Commander myself. Prior to last year, I had not seen the film since I was a preteen. Tobias’s framing of Weir’s film as the anti-Pirates of the Caribbean made me laugh; when I first watched Master and Commander, I disliked it essentially because it wasn’t Pirates, with which I was obsessed at the time.

***While I’m sure someone has written Aubrey/Maturin fanfic and published it somewhere on the internet, there’s no textual evidence in the film that Aubrey and Maturin are more than friends to each other. I would also argue that Crowe and Bettany don’t have enough sexual chemistry to support a ship. (No pun intended.)