Where is the line between empathy and absolution?

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this newsletter has spoilers about the 2016 movie Trolls. So if that matters to you, skip this!

The 2016 movie Trolls explores the degree to which true happiness must come from within (yeah, this is where we’re starting). In this movie, trolls (broadly) are small, colorful, and inherently happy. Bergens, on the other hand, are big, ugly, and not inherently happy. Bergens have discovered that when they eat trolls, they feel happy. They then follow this to what they believe is a logical conclusion, even though it’s not: to feel happy, I must eat a troll. 

Very quickly, here’s why that isn’t logical: 

Let’s call eating a troll “A”, and feeling happy “B.” That means that another way to say “If I eat a troll, I feel happy” is “If A, then B.” 

The converse of “If A, then B” is “If B, then A”. The converse of “If I eat a troll, I feel happy” is “If I feel happy, I must have eaten a troll”. But as you can see in the diagram above, that’s not necessarily true! There are plenty of places you can draw a dot inside the blue “I feel happy” circle that are not inside the pink “I eat a troll” circle. Broadly, the converse of a true statement is not necessarily true. But sadly for the Bergens, they never took an introductory philosophy class!!! 

So those poor Bergens believe that in order to feel happiness, they must eat trolls. Over the course of the movie, the Bergens learn that actually, there are other ways to feel happiness, ones that do not involve eating trolls. The Bergens learn that actually, happiness can come from within rather than from without. 

Except for one Bergen, that is. The villain, a.k.a. The Chef. She never learns. And at the end of the movie, she is sent, along with the one deceitful, selfish troll, out of town on a flaming serving cart. The odds don’t look good for her. Sure enough, as the credits roll, she sits on a hill and tries one last time to eat a troll. The hill then comes to life and eats both her and the troll. 

The majority of the Bergens — all of them except for The Chef — seem to be granted absolution. They learn their lesson and they are given the chance to live a life beyond ingesting happiness, where they actually create it themselves. Most of them have already, ostensibly, eaten many trolls in their lifetimes. They are troll-killers. But it’s okay, the movie suggests, because they have learned to change. The villain did not learn to change, so she is sent out on a fiery cart and then eaten by a monster. 

For some reason, I wished the chef had more time. She had built a whole life around trying to make other Bergens happy by giving and preparing them trolls to eat. Early in the movie, the trolls make a surprise escape from their cage in Bergen Town, and the whole town blames the chef. She is thrown out from society, forcibly ostracized, and becomes obsessed with relocating the trolls so that she can once again cook them and make other people happy. In her obsession, she becomes an even more grotesque version of herself, hell-bent on troll murder. Her physical transformation from ugly and old to even more ugly and more old suggests that her obsession and isolation makes her worse, less desirable, less worthy of love. It was like, the harder she tried to earn the love of the town, the worse she looked, the worse she was, the worse fate she deserved. 

But all she wanted was to make her community happy, right? And no one told her that you don’t have to earn love, you don’t have to murder trolls to be loved, because nobody did love her (she’s single, childless, friendless, etc.). So why didn’t she get to learn the big lesson, to realize that happiness comes neither from ingesting others’ joy nor from creating others’ joy, but rather from within? 

Trolls posits that the Chef does not deserve absolution because she did not change. And I wonder, who is to blame for her changelessness? Is she to blame, or are they all to blame? The Bergens made her who she is, didn’t they, and then the trolls gave up on her capacity to change, didn’t they? 

It’s at this point in my thought process that I begin to wonder, can I empathize with literally anyone? Including a fictional character who is essentially a serial killer? Yikes! That seems bad and dangerous and also maybe, kind of insane?

Perhaps I prickled at the Chef’s fate because in my ideal world, every single person who has ever hurt anyone realizes the errors in their ways and decides to be a better person, and then is. I think that deep down, I believe that every single person is capable of that, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s not a personal failing. It’s a failing of fate, a result of all the shit life can throw at a person, or a failing of community, because communities can and do choose to leave some people behind. But those left behind are no less deserving of improvement, of happiness, of a better fate, are they? 

Maybe I’m wrong. Or more accurately, maybe the intentionality doesn’t matter as much in reality as it does my ideal world. If a person doesn’t change, does it really matter why they don’t change? Does it matter if it’s because of trauma, or societal failing, or class, or anything else, if the end result is, they continue to hurt people? At a certain point, I have to wonder, who cares. If a person doesn’t change for the better, who cares why? At the end of the day, they are not changing. 

But, and I’m so sorry to bring this up right now, when I’m seemingly so close to coming to a conclusion, that while we can know that a person is not changing in the moment, we can never know whether or not they may change later. There is always the possibility that change may occur, and there is always the possibility that change might not occur.

I think I want to see it like this: if someone truly understands themself, they can and will change. In other words: 

I want it to be the case that if you understand yourself, you incite positive change. I want it to be true that if you do not incite positive change, it must be because you don’t understand yourself, because I cannot comprehend understanding yourself and not wanting to change for the better and doing so. But maybe, outside of my ideal world, and inside of the real world, it’s more like this:

Perhaps inciting positive change in yourself occurs at the intersection of understanding and having confidence in yourself. And maybe, some people have more confidence than others, for any number of reasons. By the end of the movie, all Bergens — the Chef included — understood themselves enough to know that eating trolls was just one of many viable paths to happiness. And all of them, except her, had the confidence in themselves to accept this new information and form new lives accordingly. But the Chef, for whatever reason, didn’t. She couldn’t move on. Maybe she had her confidence beaten out of her, or maybe she was just born with a dearth of self-confidence. Maybe none of these things — she’s just a character, after all. 

I think I got lucky; I was born with a delusional amount of self-confidence that was enforced throughout my childhood and adult life. And because of that, I don’t believe that self-confidence comes exclusively from within; I think it comes from without, too. 

I wish the Chef had a best friend, or a parent, or a stranger, who sat her down, took her by the shoulders and told her they believed she was strong enough to change. Maybe the Chef still wouldn’t have changed. Maybe she would’ve realized how much hurt she caused and sent herself out on a fiery crate. Maybe that would’ve been a net positive for her community. Maybe she’d be a lesson. Maybe not.

Maybe there’s a change you want to make in yourself. Perhaps deep down you suspect that things could be better, that you could be better. Well, I’m here to say that you don’t have to be sure of it; you just have to be sure enough to try. This life isn’t a movie, after all — no one knows the ending.