Medium-distance, group-focused framing blocks empathetic identification.

Evidence

Impersonality lodges: not a single one of the characters stands as a point of identification; empathy is not the spectatorial mode. Indeed, “not a single one” is something of a formal principle for the show, which rarely shoots individuals in close-up, offers no protagonist, and most commonly stages scenes as large-group affairs—board meetings around desks, family gatherings around tables. The camera works to encompass so many centers of gravity, usually focusing on the spaces and even furniture of interrelation (couches, consoles, vehicles), with a prevalence of panning shots rather than cuts or reverse shots that would atomize the relations. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely defines ‘impersonality’ as a formal aesthetic feature — refusal of close-ups, protagonists, and identification.
• XREF: connects to: Brecht’s estrangement-effect breaks spectatorial empathy to make social causality visible — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 307; Social media instruments natural empathy to modify behavior for others’ benefit — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1489