Secrets & Lies: The Weight of Empathy

The term “sonder” was coined by writer John Koenig as part of his project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and is defined as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” It’s a feeling that comes on suddenly, and completely rocks you when it does. We go about our lives focused on ourselves, on doing what we need to do, getting what we want, working our way through all the trifles and inconveniences that festoon our days. We work our way around other people who just by virtue of existing get in our way. Usually, we either want something from them or we just want them to go away. And then the sonder sneaks up on us, and instead of seeing an obstacle, a background piece, the fog clears and we see a person. The car that just cut you off is driven by someone trying to help their child through the turmoil of burgeoning new emotions but who can’t find the words that will make everything all right. The person you edge past as you move in opposite directions down the aisle of the grocery store is counting down the days until they get to go to their favorite musician’s concert. The person across from you on the subway is irate that their boss has called an all-staff meeting which will undoubtedly run thirty minutes past its scheduled end when they are already behind on their work. That coworker with whom you are cordial but rarely interact has their own incomplete impression of you in their head, just as you do of them. Sonder can be beautiful, as for a moment we pierce through our solipsistic mindsets and recognize humanity in our peers, but it is also utterly overwhelming. We can barely handle all our own feelings and fears and problems. To consider that all that complexity, all those emotions and struggles, exist in another person as well – nay, in every single one of the 8 billion people on this little rock – is more than we can comprehend.

Secrets & Lies, the 1996 Palme d’Or-winning drama from British master Mike Leigh, is about this experience. (Spoilers follow.) It is about the weight and the catharsis of coming to see those around you as full, complete people. It is about a family torn apart by a mutual lack of respect, an inability from all its members to see each other as anything more than objects and problems, and how those long-festering wounds can begin to heal through collective empathy. Sonder, as Koenig described it, usually focuses on our relationships with strangers, those random people we glimpse or briefly interact with in public and then never see again. But it is a phenomenon that occurs just as much with those we know, and think we know well. More often than not, we see our close friends and family not as full people, but as sets of obligations, issues, and interests. They are the ones who cook you dinner at the end of the day, or who are the reason you never get to eat bacon anymore. They are the ones for whom you must find a suitable birthday gift, or who can never load the dishwasher in a sensible manner. They are your ride home from baseball practice, or the reason you have to be at a PTA meeting on a Thursday night instead of hanging out with the friends you never see anymore. They do things for you, and you in turn have responsibilities to them. Usually, what we are after at a given moment is not a genuine connection, but just the ability to coexist.

So it is with our central family in Secrets & Lies, where every member initially sees every other as a problem that, if it cannot be solved, must at least be tolerated. Maurice and Monica have a marriage strained to the breaking point. Monica and Cynthia, Maurice’s older sister, hate each other, and Maurice is caught in the middle trying not to set either of them off. Cynthia, meanwhile, has a volatile relationship with her 20-year-old daughter Roxanne, whom Maurice and Monica feel guilty about never seeing. Each member of the family harbors privately their own turmoil, and as they all guard against the perceived threats the others pose, they silently sink together ever-deeper into dark loneliness. Their journey toward empathy is spurred by the arrival of our other main character, Hortense. Following the death of her adoptive mother, she has gone in search of her birth mother, who turns out to be Cynthia. As the two meet and grow closer together, the web of reciprocally held secrets and lies that have destroyed this family begins to crack until, in a climactic sequence where all the main characters gather for Roxanne’s birthday, it bursts entirely, and everyone is forced to confront each other’s pain and humanity. Ultimately, they emerge stronger for it.

When we cannot handle a full comprehension of each other’s humanity, which is most of the time, we manage our interactions by creating shallow sketches of people, neat little boxes that give us easy summaries of who they are and what our relation to them is. We simplify people into archetypes: so-and-so is shy but kind, or a tech bro, or the responsible friend, or a soccer mom, or a Karen, or the racist uncle. We develop rapid impressions of people that we feel give us everything we need to know about them. The film exemplifies this practice in Maurice’s profession as a photographer, a job that consists in developing such shallow impressions. In an early montage we take the perspective of the camera in Maurice’s studio, cycling through about a dozen clients that range from those taking conventional family photos to people posing with their pets to a boxer trying to make intimidating faces to a woman posing seductively in lingerie. In each case the clients put forward an incomplete image of themselves, and it is Maurice’s job to see and capture these incomplete impressions, to advance a shallow narrative of each person or group that will allow others to easily label them by their preferred archetype.

We use this same shallow labeling in understanding the film’s characters, who initially seem much simpler than we later discover them to be. In particular, Cynthia and Roxanne’s relationship seems easily definable at first as one of typical mother-daughter projection, with Cynthia resenting Roxanne out of jealousy for her youth, something she feels she was robbed of in large part because she had a child at such a young age, while at the same time depending on her as a way to vicariously reclaim some of that youth. We peg Roxanne immediately as a frustrated young woman trying to distance herself from her overbearing mother and Cynthia immediately as a woman lashing out against a family she feels is ungrateful for her sacrifices. The characters within the film see each other just as simplistically – Cynthia calls Monica a “toffee-nosed cow” and Monica refers to her in similarly unfriendly, though subtler, terms – and it is because of the shallowness with which they relate to one another that none of them can truly support each other. Each character has their own problems, fears, and insecurities, and by recognizing their loved ones only as shallow, incomplete images of people, they shut themselves off from the best means of working through those problems.

Another consequence of this shallow archetyping of our fellow humans comes in the film’s themes of grief. The inciting incident is the death of Hortense’s mother, it being the event that catalyzes her search for her birth mother. In the scene where we see her at her least guarded, talking with her friend Dionne, she speaks of all the unknowns her mother’s death has left her with permanently. “I liked my mum as a person, but I didn’t know her. I wish I’d known her,” she says. “You don’t pursue things because you’re brought up not to. There’s stuff I wish I knew.” We tend to view our parents by default as archetypically all-knowing authority figures. If they die without us learning to see them as fallible human beings, then all we are left with in remembrance is the incomplete image we held of them. There is no longer a person behind it, and that image alone is severely lacking. The same problems of grief plague Cynthia and Maurice, whose mother died when they were very young and whose father is implied to have been distant following her death and died at some undisclosed time after that. Nevertheless, their room in what is now Cynthia’s house remains untouched, their mother’s things still strewn about as she left them, the image of a parent who cannot provide parentage anymore haunting her child now struggling to provide parentage herself. See those around you only as shallow images and you will have little to remember the actual person by when they leave you.

It is this unresolvable mystery that Hortense is left with regarding her adoptive mother that we can infer drove her to find her birth mother. When speaking with a worker at the adoption agency, she cites her reason for seeking out her birth mother as that she just needs to know. She has been compelled to work past simple stories and seek out the truth about people, about herself, and is prepared for the emotional weight it might bear. Hortense is an optometrist, a thematic counterpoint to Maurice’s job as a photographer. Both jobs have to do with seeing, but where Maurice’s is centered around facilitating the quick, digestible kind of seeing, the kind that delivers us images rather than actual people, Hortense’s is about helping people to see clearly themselves, to focus the blur and bring out the details. The job is a representation of Hortense’s role as a catalyst for the empathy that will soon wash over all our main characters.

It comes first with Cynthia, who is blindsided with emotion when Hortense first introduces herself on the phone and then again when they discretely meet in person. Cynthia’s initial reaction to Hortense is the usual one of trying to find an immediate impression under which to categorize her, which ends up being as a woman who is clearly mistaken as soon as she realizes that Hortense is black and thus cannot conceivably be her daughter given Cynthia and the rest of her family are white. But Hortense is persistent, and when Cynthia eventually comes to a moment of realization, that this woman really is her daughter, her shallow image of Hortense is broken, and she begins to recognize a complete person sitting next to her. Her journey to deep empathy has hit a milestone. The sequence of their meeting is shot in two oners: the first showing their initial encounter outside a tube station, and the second their conversation in a nearby café. Both shots are done with long lenses, creating an image that places us at a distance from the characters which emphasizes their guardedness as they meet and, especially in the café shot, creates a shallow depth of field that isolates these characters in the focus plane, forcing them to interact with each other. This sequence marks the birth of honest connection between our main characters.

The journey towards empathy culminates in the film’s climax as Maurice and Monica host the other main characters for a barbeque to celebrate Roxanne’s 21^st birthday. Hortense comes along at Cynthia’s request, posing as a friend from work, and the tension simmers across the sequence. Cynthia cannot contain herself for long and soon enough reveals Hortense’s true identity. The dam breaks. The resentments the characters have tacitly held for years come out in full force, and as they do every secret the characters have kept from each other spills out. Maurice reveals Monica’s infertility and Cynthia tells Roxanne about her father for the first time. Everyone has put their cards on the table, and they are forced to reckon with each other not as convenient images but full human beings. What results is a shared emotional experience in which ego falls away and the characters feel the full weight of all their humanity together.

Even Maurice’s assistant Jane, whom he invited to the party and who has no place within the drama unraveling, is quivering in tears by the end of the scene. In such a moment, the film produces a remarkable effect: in opening us up to the emotional turmoil of so many characters at once, we come to realize that Jane too, who has been an insignificant background player the whole film, is herself a complete person, with a personal life and emotional landscape every bit as detailed as the characters we have been following for the past two hours. Sonder has taken hold to the maximum degree.

Plenty of films aim for well of emotion and catharsis that bursts in the climax of Secrets & Lies, but few films do it as effectively, in a way that makes us reckon with the real weight of another person’s humanity. Part of the credit for the effectiveness of Secrets & Lies in this regard may go to Mike Leigh’s famed process for developing a film. Leigh does not work with in initial script but rather starts with a very broad concept (for this film it might have been as simple as an adopted person searching for their birth parents) and then works very closely and individually with each actor to develop their character, fleshing out a complete personal history and psychology. Only when the actors have thoroughly acclimated to being their characters does he bring the actors together in improvisations to see how the characters would interact. This is the start of a months-long rehearsal process in which Leigh and the actors work collaboratively to develop each scene, and only then does Leigh finalize a shooting script. This process is inherently focused on the humanity of each key player; every actor, no matter the size of their role, starts work only knowing about their own character, developing a full being for them as though they are the centerpiece of the film. Thus, each character in a Mike Leigh film feels like a full person unto themselves because they have been developed as such. The process effectively replicates the reality of each person being the main character of their own lives, having their own fears and desires and narratives about how their life is going. The film can then exploit this widespread depth of humanity to evoke the sonderous effect we get in Secrets & Lies. Leigh’s films are not, like most films, the work of a single mastermind voice working from a preconceived story that assigns each element a role of variable importance. In Leigh’s films, the humanity of each individual present precedes their specific function.

Roger Ebert famously referred to movies as “empathy machines,” works that help us to understand someone else’s perspective, walk a mile in their shoes. Secrets & Lies does this on a radical scale. It is a film that does not just generate empathy but is about empathy, and how true empathy is not easily achieved. We usually do not have the bandwidth to recognize and participate in all the complex feelings that exist in our peers every day, and when we do it is liberating but also totally draining. But perhaps an effect of art such as Secrets & Lies can be to help us increase that bandwidth. “The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people,” Ebert said. The word that stands out to me is “enlarge.” Art may not be about making us better humans as much as it is about making us more human. For if we have more humanity in ourselves, perhaps we can open ourselves up more to all the humanity around us.