The entertainment industry functions to identify with a public through familiar sentiment and experience. While many motion pictures project fantastic storylines that are hard to relate to for common audiences, they usually establish strong universal emotions that are received and understood by the spectators. Over exaggerated and unrealistic storylines can be compensated for through themes of sentiment like love, sadness, longing, anger, etc. Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence recounts an unbelievable tale of three young, half-caste girls escaping the Moore River Native Settlement and walking some 1600km home to their families in Jigalong. Based on actual events and true life stories of 3 Indigenouns women, sensitivity is essential in the recounting of such emotional circumstances, consequences, and realities. This particular series of events is difficult to relay to, and provoke identification with, audiences who have not experienced the struggles of many native indigenous peoples. The commodification of experience is a controversial issue that questions genuine empathy, accurate representation, and the exploitation of struggle.
Empathy is a selling agent as well as a powerful method of rousing activism. When promoters of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence created a “marketing campaign that asked its audience to celebrate, deplore, feel, and reflect upon, in equal measure, the experiences of the girls,” their goal was to breed a reaction that would spark sympathy and the sensation of shared experience to give the film powerful emotional resonance. The problems with empathy and sympathy are not in their sincerity, but in the idea that these experiences, struggles, and emotions, cannot be fully understood or shared when one has only identified with them through the medium of a film. In the case of Daisy, Gracie, and Molly, their experience seems almost cheapened if, for example, a Caucasian, middle-class, North-American audience can draw emotional equality from an experience very far from anything they can even begin to comprehend. The concept of owning or associating oneself with an experience that is not entirely personal can create a dissonance between the sentiments and actions of the actors of the specific experience and the spectators consuming the experience.
The idea of ownership of experience, as described by Tony Hughes D’aeth, is ultimately reasserted throughout the entire story-building and filmmaking experience. Who has agency within the experience? Molly and Daisy who are still alive and speaking openly about their real-life struggles? Is it the filmmaker Phillip Noyce who has re-created the story through his own personal lens and gaze? Or is it the audience who decides what holds emotional importance, and what they will do with the knowledge they have gained or been reminded of? Accurate representation is dependant upon who holds agency and who is responsible in the re-creation and the event. Recreating a story, whether it is for commercial response or social movement, still involves the re-creation of an experience to sell, exhibit, and consume. Representations, identities, and raw emotion will change according to who is making this re-creation and their personal identification with the film and the cause driving it.
Film as part of the culture industry must grapple with ideas that are positive as well as negative. The most influential and striking films revolve around uncomfortable, emotional, and very difficult issues. Rabbit-Proof Fence provides the grounds for devastation and the ability of the filmmakers to create an audio and visual experience that will shake an audience whether they have any association with the real events. It is almost disturbing to think that people are profiting from a commodity which trades on traumatic memories, but maybe these are the kinds of stories that need to be told in order to make social progress and a more conscious society.
Drawing from class material, The Good Woman of Bangkok is a film by Dennis O’Rourke that exemplifies the vulnerability of the subject and the dissonance that is created between the audience and the reality of the experience. The question of ethics is obviously in question in this case, but the representation of the Thai prostitute’s life and person seems more appropriate to the idea of commodifying experience. Using the “interventionist”, “observationist” and “participatory” gaze, two terms researched by Linda Williams in her article on “The Ethics of Documentary Intervention”, this documentary is aiming to provoke emotions and reactions from those who watch and consume it. Whether or not the documentary was made to fulfill a political or problematic social agenda, it succeeds in bringing an honest and serious issue to light. The filmmaker and the camera use Aoi, the Thai prostitute, to get to the core of the issue and, in a way, exploit her emotions, opinions, undesirable lifestyle and mental state to dramaticize a problem for audiences that are very far removed from the realities of the lives of women in sex industries in lesser developed countries. The article suggests that there can be “no morally pure position” in the documentation or representation of another. Any story that is not our own could then be understood as a commodification of experience that provides a subscribed lens through which audiences are instructed to see situations, people. events, and emotions through.
Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Good Woman of Bangkok identify with their audiences through the establishment of emotional response. Audiences can relate to the depth and the drive of love and family in Rabbit-Proof Fence as well as find themselves compassionate and empathetic towards Aoi and the sacrifices she makes for her family in O’Rourke’s documentary. Providing the opportunity to make connections with the characters and events despite potential distance between our life experience and “theirs” is what connotes a strong and emotional film for most. Commodifying experience is not inherently negative as it can provoke thought and create a consciousness that may not have been there in the first place. Critical inquiry as to why events, people, and experiences are represented certain ways is crucial to a respectful and informed opinion of the implications affecting the subjects of our entertainment.
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