Feeling good: Humanitarian virtual reality film, emotional style and global citizenship

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film’s immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the script of suffering and hope. Through analysis of humanitarian VR films, the use of character, narrative, and formal VR film devices, we show how empathy is created. Thereby, we focus specifically on the simulation of particular locales, intimate encounters with the suffering Other, and gratification of viewer needs. The paper concludes that humanitarian VR films simulate an engagement with global problems when, in fact, they are catering to the emotional needs of people engaging with those problems. The global citizen as a feeling self becomes caught in interpersonal affective textures, which obscure geopolitical causes of humanitarian crises. Hence, the paper questions empathy as a universal way to better the world and diverges from the celebration of humanitarian VR film as a universal empathy machine.