Octopus Tears

Art about nature can help us become more empathetic

Hi all,

I was slated to give a plenary lecture (virtually) for a Vancouver film festival last Friday but, sadly, it was canceled at the last minute. In the days running up to it, I became increasingly aware of how behind I was in moviegoing because of the pandemic. I had watched almost nothing that had come out in the last two years because I prefer to see newly released movies in the theater. Of course, I am VERY caught up on television-but that is another story. Last week, I watched nine movies in order to try and catch up before my lecture!

All works of art have the capacity to help us empathize with their creators, their fictional characters, their real-life subjects. But there is something about the movies, their magical way of immersing us into another’s world by giving us such a multi-dimensional sensory experience.

The late great Roger Ebert had this to say on the subject:

“Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just stuck being myself, day after day.The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.”

In the short space remaining (that was a long quote!), I want to say a few words about one film I watched last week that fed my imagination for the good, helping me to empathize—My Octopus Teacher.

My Octopus Teacher:

I never thought I would cry over the struggle for survival experienced by an octopus. But I did—twice—when watching this beautiful film. My first tears came up before we even meet the octopus—when reflecting on the ways that we have protected and partitioned ourselves off from nature. My heart and mind have changed quite a bit on this subject over the last few years, and the film’s narrator vocalized a lament that I had not known was in my own heart.

For many years, the idea of a human being alone in nature truly depressed me. This picture seemed lifeless—the real LIFE was in human interaction. Of course, this makes sense to a degree, especially if we believe that humans are image bearers of God. I cannot tell you how down I felt after watching Tom Hanks’ Castaway. I also steered clear of nature documentaries and movies about people being lost in the wilderness.

But while spending time on sabbatical in Vancouver in 2018, my feelings about nature began to change. I loved walking outside alongside the mountains and the ocean and pedestrians walking their dogs. Human encounters were frequent, unpredictable, and exciting—but everything was enhanced by the shared love of nature that surrounded us. I wrote a good bit more about this experience in an article on Douglas Coupland’s environmental art exhibit in the Vancouver Aquarium.

I did not meet an octopus in Vancouver (I did not even ever see a whale OR an eagle) but the experience primed me for watching My Octopus Teacher. I was admittedly nervous going into it: Was it going to be boring? Was it going to be depressing? How in the world could any develop affection for an octopus?!

For a moment, I doubted the ways that a great work of art can open up new spaces/ new categories inside of our minds and hearts. But when the film’s main subject, Craig Foster, talked about his alienation from nature, I welled up with tears. What in the world? Foster is an admittedly quirky character, but his desire to see and experience the forrest just underneath the water, to immerse himself in it and reestablish a connection that has been lost, was truly moving.

In thinking on this, I am reminded of one of my favorite set of lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”:

“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

Wordsworth wrote these lines shortly before his conversion to Christianity. Up until this point, he admits to being a “worship of nature",” a pantheist, seeking the glory and wonder he finds in nature rather than the glory and wonder of its creator. But in these lines, he feels a “presence” and a “spirit” that MUST have created and, thus, connected nature, animals, and “the mind of man.” The same creator who made me, made the octopus. And in learning more about the octopus, the mountains, the donkeys living ten minutes away from me, and the dogs on leashes prancing around Vancouver, I am learning about God’s creativity and the objects of his love. This is such a simple point but something that has been quite lost on me—at least on a heart level—for many years.

An encounter with the natural world reinvokes that state of childlike wonder for us. As an adult, I ignored nature because I had more important things to do. But like art, nature itself invites us to be still, quiet, patient, contemplative. Nature is the art of the master artist.

In My Octopus teacher, Foster becomes devoted, attentive, patient, transformed. Soon after he meets his new octopus friend, he dedicates himself to learning all he can about her. In the process, he says that she “was teaching me to become sensitized to the other.” She was clearly not a human, clearly not him—she was so foreign, so strange. But he progressed slowly, made space for her, showed her kindness in the only small ways he knew how. He noticed “my relationship with humans was also changing” as the empathy he was developing for this wild Other translated into the same patience, empathy, and sense of wonder with other human beings, especially his son whose youth was already placing him closer to an instinctive state of awe and wonder.

My Octopus Teacher is not a film that can really be described—it must be experienced. Like all good art, it is relational and participatory. But I can relay a simple lesson that Foster learns (and so do we) as we watch his beloved octopus become more and more vulnerable to predators, to age, to the cycle of nature. She is fragile, and so are we. As Blaise Pascal writes, “Between us and heaven and hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.” Of course, I am not conflating a human life (Imago Dei) with an animal life—but I am saying that learning to see and care for the vulnerability and changeability within nature can teach us something about our own vulnerability and changeability. And in learning to see, be attentive to, and care for the natural world, we can also cultivate skills to care for others. When speaking of his son, now a fellow sea explorer, Foster says that “thousands of hours in nature can teach a child gentleness.” This is very true—but the child needs direction before and while spending time in nature. Nietzsche thought that nature taught us to hate fragility, following only our “will to power” that parallels the “survival of the fittest” life cycle that we see in the animal kingdom. But he is ignoring the delicate, fragile beauty in nature and our almost inherent desire to know it and preserve it (a desire that often competes with our more base desires for conquest and comfort).

The story of an octopus and his newfound friend truly touched me and caused me to shift the categories of my internal world. If you have not seen it yet, spend a few hours with My Octopus Teacher and let me know what you think.

Before I go, I want to mention that it is my birthday next week (the big one—FIFTY!), and I want to ask everyone who is interested to preorder my book! I also have a discount code that will give you 30% off, a little birthday present from me to you.

Simply go to Fortress Press and enter the code MCCAMPBELL30 at checkout.

As always, thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this, please share it, like it, leave comments, etc!

Mary