real talk: on Empathy and ZooTV

Lately I can’t go a day without hearing talk of South Park and Family Guy. People sometimes call these shows “edgy” but to be edgy, don’t you actually have to dare to say something, something that means something? I can’t stand either of those shows but from what little I’ve seen of them, they never take a stand on anything. They never say anything other than “the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

Thinking about the emptiness of these shows reminded me of the pervasive emptiness of so much media in the early 90s that U2 blew up with all the ZooTV stuff, an emptiness that Bono personified with MacPhisto. One look at MacPhisto and you understood that character. You knew he was all artifice, that he was lost and sad and alone, unable to connect with anyone because his own ego had swallowed him. This was someone who could not carry on a sincere conversation to save his life.

And I think nowadays so many of us are afraid of sincerity. I often hear the words “real talk” said as a joke. If we’re at that point, how much truly real talk is happening?

(Thank goodness that alongside shows like South Park and Family Guy, at least we have Louie, a show on which real talk is not unusual, a show that dares to say things about loneliness and love.)

I just finished Sarah Schulman’s novel Empathy, first published in 1992, the same year that U2 kicked off the ZooTV tour. Both the novel and the tour are partially responses to America under the first President Bush–Bono crank-called the White House during some legs of the tour, and late in the novel, the Gulf War begins.

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Empathy is a book that’s all about real talk, and really listening. One character, Doc, is fixated on the idea of listening, having been hurt by someone he felt never really listened to him.

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Doc is right that people often don’t listen to each other, and that without listening, there is no love. Empathy is a book about the ways in which we sometimes don’t exist:

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and the ways in which we do:

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The characters of Anna and Doc in Empathy are “one, but [they’re] not the same.” I always thought that Anton Corbjin’s video for “One” cut through the irony of ZooTV. It’s a video that makes me think of real talk, the sort of honest conversations people maybe don’t have as often as they should, or not at all until it’s too late. Corbjin’s shots, closely reading Bono’s face, make me feel like I am that other person in this conversation, like I’m really, finally listening to what he’s saying. It is, to me, a video about empathy:


But I’ve always liked the way that, in this ZooTV performance, Bono seemed to let his guard down even a little bit more, singing, “Did you come here to play Jesus? I did.”

“One” fades right into “Unchained Melody.”

I’ve undergone a radical reorientation toward existence in recent months.

But I don’t have everything.

I hunger for your touch.