In my last blog piece on ‘Cinema and the person-centred approach’, I wrote about how watching The Green Knight inspired feelings of awe and transcendence. These feelings relate to Rogers’ view that the inner spirits of those present seem to make contact in therapeutic spaces, and that this way of relating feels qualitatively different to others. For this entry, I look at how a documentary about a cow reveals something about empathy.  

Rogers described empathy as one person sensing ‘accurately the feelings and personal meanings’ of another. I think of the times of difficulty in my life when another person – be that friend, relative, therapist, or whoever – has shown me that they understand my difficulty from my perspective and no other. Not how either of us think it should be, or is desirable, or lacking, simply how it is. Likewise, when I have most fully appreciated another person’s experience, how living feels for this person who is not me, a deeply connective space can open up. This space contains the potential for change and thus hope, for care and thus love. The power and potency of empathy is very real and very special.  

Andrea Arnold’s phenomenal feature-length documentary Cow (2021) follows the lives of a dairy cow called Luma and one of her calves. The movie starts with Luma giving birth at night. Arnold’s camera remains at calf level and is held loosely, mimicking mammalian movements and perceptions. Similarly, the sound is all muffled and tender. We hear the rasp of Luma’s tongue as she lovingly licks her new baby into wakefulness. Her drive to care and to love is deeply moving. 

The following scene shows their forced separation. By way of a complex system of gates, the calf is corralled into an area Luma cannot access. Her calls turn to sirens as she comprehends she’s being split apart from her baby. She is powerless and desperate, and it is gut-wrenching to watch.  

Rogers adds that true empathic understanding of another involves ‘temporarily living in his/her life, moving about in it delicately’. Where Arnold’s film is less fly-on-the-wall and more cow-in-the-barn, viewers experience Luma’s world from her perspective. There we are in the stall beside Luma as she is milked over and over. There we are with the calf in its tiny pen as it calls to its absent mother. There we are as [spoiler alert] Luma, economically unviable, is shot in the head one dank afternoon.  

Arnold stressed that Cow is not to be taken as polemic, nor even political. This distinguishes it from the hellscapes of such films as Cowspiracy (2014), which, however inadvertently, do not instil in me the same degree or quality of empathy that Arnold’s film does. Arnold’s film is neither darkly cynical nor rose-tinted. It portrays, as far as a movie can, how it is for Luma. It allows us to experience something of what it’s like to be a dairy cow, how this life looks, sounds, and – to a certain extent – feels. 

If I am to offer the core conditions to clients in a way that is most facilitative, one of my endeavours must be to sense the client’s world as they sense it: accurately, realistically, and without fear or favour, prejudice or projection. Cow illuminates this aspect of empathy, and the Rogerian conception of empathy illuminates the empathic qualities of Cow.  

In the next instalment, I turn to another depiction of a non-human being in cinema, Gojira (1954), to explore the struggle for collective symbolisation and congruence.  

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