Trust, Mistrust, and the Politics of Listenability: Double Testimony and Formative Empathy in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

This paper argues that trust is not only an interpersonal attitude but a psychosocial infrastructure—a set of socially learned, affectively charged, and often mediated conditions that determine whether a voice can be received as testimony. I develop listenability as a concept for these conditions: the thresholds of attention, timing, interpretive generosity, and tolerance for ambiguity through which speech becomes hearable as evidence rather than noise, threat, or spectacle.

Through a focused analysis of key listening scenes in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I propose that the film stages a double testimony. First, an injured subject attempts to speak from vulnerability and altered embodiment. Second, a community—together with its devices, rituals, and interpretive habits—must decide whether that speech can count, and whether the speaker can be held within a shared world. The paper tracks how mistrust operates productively as scepticism in some moments, yet in others congeals into distrust: a corrosive certainty that substitutes suspicion for discernment and reorganises community through exclusion.

To explain how such orientations are learned and reproduced, I introduce formative empathy, building on Steffen Krüger’s account of formative media environments and their unconscious, relational effects. Formative empathy names a distributed calibration of feeling-and-knowing: a pre-reflective shaping of who is expected to be believable, grievable, and worth listening to. It is not offered as a universal solution; rather, it specifies a mechanism by which communities stabilise (or destabilise) trust under conditions of uncertainty.

I conclude with a compact typology of listening failures—deflection, extraction, spectacularisation—and outline “reparative listening” as a psychosocial dynamic of rupture and repair.

Theme statement: The presentation addresses the conference theme by showing how trust, mistrust, and community are constituted through mediated listening infrastructures and formative empathic conditioning that determine whose testimony can count as truth.