“If I could I wouldn’t want you/
but it’s getting late now and I can’t stop”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
We can’t always control our emotions. Hell, I’m not sure I have many of those myself and even I know that. I’m sure emotions arrive and disappear in different ways for different people. Are they like tides, ebbing and flowing with varying intensities? Is it a flame, there in an instant, burning brightly until it’s extinguished, easily able to roar out of control? Is it a gust of wind, sharp, sudden, there one minute and gone the next? I suppose I would liken my own to the Christmas lights in my neighborhood. Absent most of the time, appearing slowly at first, shining brightly but briefly, and then, in almost an instant, gone with no trace that they were ever there at all. But there are parts we can control. We can control how we express those emotions and convey them to the world, and we can control how we receive the emotions of others.
In Hollow Heart from Paul Allor and Paul Tucker, El is a tortured soul within an electromechanical body experiencing immense pain. He’s an amalgamation of organs and machinery who has led an existence sheltered from virtually all experience and therefore from a vast array of emotions. All he feels now, trapped, poked, and prodded inside a windowless room devoid of life, is a pain so intense that escape is the only option, even if it means death. This is El’s expression. This is the cry El releases into the world in hopes someone will hear him.
*Spoilers For Hollow Heart Will Follow*
Donny’s had enough of this sh*t. He just works as a guard at a facility dedicated to inhumane scientific research, he doesn’t make the decisions. He listens to El’s cry and chooses not to hear it. Donny probably even makes the connection that El’s escape attempts are also suicide attempts, but he chooses not to react. It takes too much time to handle and process feelings. It’s much easier to keep them all bottled inside, and when they do need a release, Donny wouldn’t dare let anyone see it.
Mateo feels sympathy for El, and also understands the benefits of lying to protect someone else’s emotions. He gives and receives enough to make him feel satisfied, like he’s a good person. Why not be a little nicer and play along with the tortured soul inside of a corporate basement as long as the company’s interests are still intact? It’ll be nice to give a better voice to someone with no friends or loved ones who will hear it. Mateo certainly felt okay about it, until he didn’t. It’s really tough at the beginning to be able to tell whether or not Mateo is a compassionate person or if he just wants to feel good about himself. Perhaps somewhere along the way he genuinely grew attracted to El and acted from a place other than moral self-interest. Perhaps I’m just cynical. Either way, one shouldn’t mistake Mateo’s sympathy in Hollow Heart #1 for empathy. There’s no way Mateo could understand what it’s like to be El’s tortured soul, unable to escape the prison he’s in. He just feels bad about it.
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El stifles his screams. Donny chooses not to hear them. Mateo chooses to buy El a new fish. “Imagine a world where everyone can scream and be heard.” What would that require? Sometimes it feels so hard to find those who barely listen, but what would it take for everyone to feel like their screams are heard or that they’re allowed to scream at all? As someone who cannot remember expressing a sound or emotion at a high amplitude but would also love to go to a remote location, so that I could have the freedom to scream without restraint, I wonder about this a lot.
“Fools falling in the dark like crazy/
No, nothing you can do will save me now”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
There’s an all too frequent line of thinking where if only we could convince someone to see things from our point of view, if only we can show, convince, persuade, hear, read, watch, or feel some time of way, they will reach an epiphany of understanding. If only El could see how hard Mateo is working to help him. All of the nights practicing escape attempts and subjecting himself to the same physical damage El experiences in order to feel what El feels. All of the nights studying on personal time how to provide pleasurable sensory response to an amalgamation of biomechanical matter so El can feel what he feels. When does a genuine attempt to understand become a naive act of selfishness?
I am always searching to feel what other people feel, and there is often a bit of selfishness to that. I do not believe I have the ability to experience a significant number of emotions, but I am always on the lookout, and always trying to feel more, as selfish as that may be, but there’s a line I never try to cross. I never try to change someone’s beliefs or behavior for my agenda, because that is where things get dangerous. One might read the beginning of Hollow Heart #2 and think that Mateo’s early attempts to understand the pain El is going through are noble, but after learning Mateo’s thought process towards the end of the issue, that could not be farther from the truth.
In my attempts to feel more, there’s a lot of effort that goes into really understanding how specific individuals process, act, react and feel in different situations. The scariest thing about Hollow Heart #2 is that I look at Mateo’s view that “if you can step into the feelings of another person, you can use that knowledge to control them,” and I see someone I might have become. I see this idea of weaponized false empathy, utilizing intellectual and/or emotional understanding for the purposes of manipulation, as one of the most dangerous and damaging actions one human being can do to another, regardless of their intentions. It does not matter how Mateo tried to use this ability, he thought he knew better about El’s character than El himself. In Mateo’s attempts to give El what he did not have and show El what he could not feel before, El learned what he had been deprived of all this time, and a small part of his soul died. In my experience, those who are more outwardly willing to give are better judged by what they choose to keep from others, while those who are inherently more reserved are best judged by what they choose to give.
Perhaps if El understood, intellectually, what his captivity taught doctors like Holly and Sue about artificial intelligence and self awareness, he would feel better about his captivity. Anything for the sake of science, right? Nevermind that El’s reactions only start to become less useful and more of a problem when they turn negative, angry, and potentially destructive. After all, it is extremely difficult to channel rage into an undamaging force and there are very few avenues where destruction is considered okay. There’s something to be learned from allowing people to freely express anger, sadness, and rage in a harmless and healing way, but it’s a lot easier to exercise physical and emotional control I suppose.
“Break my broken heart/
Give me all you got, all you got”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
Humans are very irrational beings who are often extremely preoccupied with assigning rationality to every action. It’s our fixation on understanding the actions of others and to have others understand our own that often gets us into trouble. But that’s not all. Any sort of explanation also has to meet our own collective intellectual standards. An emotional explanation such as having a bad day or really not being okay simply isn’t good enough in the moment is it? When anyone, friends, family, or complete strangers, asks me any variation of how I’m doing, I instinctually say “Pretty good, how ’bout you?” It does not matter what the real answer is, my response has already been conditioned. It’s rare to find people who are actually prepared to hear how we’re really doing. We’d all like to believe we’d be understanding if someone was just having a really bad day, but can’t be vulnerable enough to divulge when we aren’t doing okay ourselves. Which came first, our demand for satisfactory explanations behind every action or our reservedness to divulge daily emotional truths in public? I’m not so sure.
Donny had a bad morning. In fact, he hates his job, and really isn’t doing okay. After all, who wouldn’t hate their job when it entails safeguarding inhumane scientific experimentation? But Donny wouldn’t dare explain all of this to the guy he just met. Who’s ready for that emotional baggage?
It’s no wonder that Donny has an emotional reaction his partner couldn’t possibly understand. It’s no wonder that El’s anger derails an escape attempt so that he can destroy cruel and abhorrent research. New freedom can’t magically erase lasting trauma. These little things can happen seemingly without warning and eat at us for days. It can be as harmless as being not quite sure whether or not the person you passed on your way home from work was someone you went to highschool with, or whether that prolonged eye contact with your classmate meant something. It can be something we mutter under our breath or one sudden, instantaneous outburst with little last impact. It can be one stray insult about the piano playing Donny loves so much or one rich man’s hatred of bees and desire to cause mayhem and resentment within his community. We may never understand why people seemingly give all they have to breaking pieces off from others. Maybe they’re already broken themselves.
“Break my broken heart/
Watch me fall apart, fall apart”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
Humans are very irrational beings who are often extremely opposed to change that may be good for them if it feels like they are being deceived. It’s the same preoccupation with control that makes us think we know what’s best for others and makes us angry when others think they know what’s best for us. But that’s not all. No matter what benefits a decision made for us may have, they are overshadowed by the exclusion of our voices. Is there any sort of gesture, gift, or act that someone else can give with the intent of making a behavioral change that would be considered okay if the recipient had no say in the matter? In an attempt to feel more myself, I’ve paid a lot of attention to how others feel and react in certain situations and gotten pretty good at reading people. It’s a skill I appreciate, but it has also heightened my social anxiety. I question my motivations constantly to keep myself as genuine and honest as possible, and it can lead to a lot of overthinking and paralysis because I know that if I was ever deceived in a moment where I genuinely felt something, I’m not sure I could handle it.
El was deceived in the worst possible way. The freedom he thought he’d been granted was actually just an illusion. A larger cage but a cage nonetheless. El is feeling more intense and more positive emotions than he’s ever felt, but they’re all shrouded in an agenda of deceit, research, and manipulation. How else was El supposed to feel besides angry and betrayed? Emotional freedom is so valuable that it’s understandable when you hear what people are willing to sacrifice physically and socially in order to obtain it, but that doesn’t mean that these sacrifices should be necessary. It’s not right to simply expect gratitude now that El can feel happiness, optimism, ecstatic, and content because he also feels trapped. He feels trapped and chooses to escape, and that’s the hardest choice anyone has to make in this book.
Some emotions are uncontrollable. They’re so strong and intense in the moment that it can feel as though someone else has taken control of your physical or mental faculties. They are sharp, and piercing but can bounce around within your soul, sending shards that fragment throughout your body and remnants that echo for days, weeks, or longer. It’s my understanding that it is rare to feel this way often, perhaps on special occasions, but that it does happen. I hear it in the stories people tell, the memories they share, and the photos and videos they send. I almost never feel this way myself. Months and years can go by between feeling any sort of uncontrollable emotion. When I do feel more than the day-to-day flat baseline, I’m never sure if it’s my own emotion and wonder if it’s just a residual emotion from those I’m around at the time, but I’m not sure it even matters to me any more. I’m just glad to experience strong feelings, so if I had to give that up to escape a limiting situation, I’m honestly not sure if I could do it.
Escaping a trapped situation also depends on how people feel about their captors. It’s easy to stay in a situation that’s bad for your emotional health if you love the other person and they claim it’s in your best interest. It’s even easier if the blame is projected onto someone else. Holly is blamed for El’s fabricated escape, despite being a model company woman. She, in turn, blames her job for her inability to connect with her son. Hollow Heart #4 contains a remarkable allegory about a man who visited a hypnotist to lose weight but his wife had the hypnotist change a number of other behaviors that she thought would be in his best interest. The man was horrified to discover this, left his wife, thanked the hypnotist, and later did the same thing to his second wife. The man’s brother sent an anonymous letter the first time to his brother and wrote but never sent a second letter to his brother’s second wife. It’s an extremely poignant allegory that fits El, Holly, Mateo, and Donny’s situation and addresses parallel themes of deceit, blame, and self-interest. Our tendency to intervene frequently depends on our relationship to both parties and heavily skews our judgement of right and wrong. El may feel, but he is not human, and so far everyone else is on the side of his deception and captivity. Things only look bad when the lie falls apart.
“Ooh, ooh, I’m still breathing/
Ooh, ooh, so what’s one more scar?”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
Somewhere we all refuse to acknowledge is a line separating perseverance from delusion. Perhaps it lies where our perceptions of the present diverge from reality. Mateo never bought El a new fish. The tether was never disconnected, and El’s prison simply received an interior remodel.
As El escapes and gets farther away from his tether, his mental state begins to decline. He sees Mateo when he’s not there and refuses to cooperate with Holly or Donny’s attempts to reason. Then again, after the way El was treated, reason was thrown out the window. Sue, the head of this experiment, chooses to use this opportunity to distance herself from any wrongdoing. Mateo is overcome with guilt and uncertainty. Holly still has loyalty to a company that’s tossed her aside. Donny’s just angry. El doesn’t deserve any of this. Psychosis, dissociation, self-reproach, dedication, and rage. These are ways the characters move forward, or fail to, with the emotions and actions that weigh them down.
This boundary between perseverance and delusion often appears like a cliff. The best views are right up against the edge, but one dare not step over. As people’s efforts start to look more and more like they’re opposing something monumental, we actually encourage them to back away. Nature is an unpredictable and unstoppable force and it’s apparently where admirable perseverance becomes futile. When people’s dreams suddenly meet an obstacle belonging to some natural order (or something assumed to be on par like organized religion or the U.S. legal system) they best back down or can be seen as crazy. It’s a sad and often hypocritical part of perseverance that often leaves people fighting for things they believe in alone. There’s a paralysis that accompanies the mountain of emotions and obstacles intertwined to form large and important causes. If only we realized going up against bigger forces may only need more people.
It’s not just the bigger forces where determination meets opposition. People, time, and costs convince us not to follow through with small efforts we try to make to better ourselves. Normally it’s in the form of faceless advertisements and agreements that let us know it’s not worth it to pay extra for healthier food or secure our data instead of utilizing a convenient service. It’s when it comes from the people we care about that it hurts the most. It’s our friends letting us know that trying out a new hobby is probably too expensive or not worth it since we’ll never get that good anyway or family encouraging us to get a stable job since there are so few jobs in a creative field that will let us lead a stable life. Perseverance involves tuning those words out, but these small scars and lesser transgressions add up.
“Can we be this way forever?/
Got your silhouette locked inside my head”
-Winona Oak, “Break my Broken Heart”
When faced with an unbearable amount of traumatic experiences, treatment, and revelations about his own captivity, El did two things. He lashed out and retreated inward. Those caught in the destruction all died. All the humans who thought to use him for their own intentions, whether they seemed altruistic or cruel paid the price for doing so and, in their last moments, saw reflections of who they were. El ended up back in captivity, where he created a place within himself that new scientists are using to see if he can turn pain into pleasure. It is a cycle of torture that El cannot end and he instead clings to a shadow of Mateo for company.
Hollow Heart is a tragic story of suffering for the sake of abstract experimentation and the constant pursuit of intimacy and happiness despite it, but it is also something else. It can also be seen as a remarkable inversion to Harlan Ellison’s classic sci-fi story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Allor and Tucker take a story that warns us of recklessly pursuing technological advances and the dangers of a powerful artificial intelligence and reflects it so that humans are the cruel captors. If the situation were reversed, we would treat the AI with the same levels of cruelty seen in Ellison’s original story. The imagery of El hanging from the palette while in captivity, the question posed at the end of issue 1 about having the ability to scream and be heard, and the attitude towards death as an escape all seem to be nods to the sci-fi short story. El is presumably short for Ellison himself.
While the five humans’ lives were miserable in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, they had companionship. They had each other. El is utterly alone, and worse than that, he was given the illusion of companionship and taught what it was like to feel pleasure. Perhaps after hundreds of years, Ted no longer remembered what it was like to be happy, but El may not be able to ever forget. A broken body or a broken mind only degrade. Things only get worse for AM’s five humans. But a broken heart can be broken further, repaired, and then broken again, and it is humanity that continues to perpetuate the institutionalized torture.