While certain groups of researchers (primarily in the social sciences) continue to assert that violence in media is bad, firm conclusions about why it is bad have failed to materialize.71
The debate among scholars is characterized by opposite conclusions, and the rhetoric sometimes gets nasty. One article by a prominent effects researcher characterized critics as “glib,” asserted that they argued with an attitude of “careful inattention and misrepresentation,” and accused them of being in “denial.”72 Critics of effects researchers responded with rancor of their own, representing the entire movement as overly zealous, and characterizing one researcher “as the enforcer on the violence/aggression causality hockey team.”73 Clearly, the media effects debate is not for the faint of heart.
Why is this debate so heated? Partly because the media plays such a significant role in the lives of most people. If media cause negative impacts, these should be addressed. Some effects researchers take it as a responsibility to help address social concerns. Critics, however, are wary about limits placed on information, images, and ideas in a free society. To the extent that there is a tension between the desire to improve social conditions and the caution against premature, ineffective solutions with unintended consequences, it is a healthy debate.
The debate is complicated by disciplinary differences however. Effects researchers are generally psychologists and social scientists with strong methodological preferences for carefully constructed surveys and experimental methods. They are concerned about the intellectual pitfalls of broad cultural analysis, or over-interpreting unique events. While a football coach might believe that showing his players The Fast and The Furious was a good way to let off steam after a practice, a social scientist would have important questions: How does the coach know that the players were calmer after the movie? Couldn't the players have calmed down if they just sat around for a couple of hours? Is it possible the players only seemed calm but were ready to go and race cars afterward?
Insights about the impact of cinema from outside the social sciences are sometimes dismissed as anecdotal. Even rigorous textual and qualitative studies are not integrated into research conclusions or policy recommendations. On the other side, the critics of effects research, often from the humanities, are skeptical of the scientific study of people, particularly artistic experience. They value techniques like textual analyses and case studies because of attention to details, complexities, variations and contexts. In contrast, laboratory experiments are seen as an unnatural attempt to force broad generalizations about media reception when the experience is complicated by personal, cultural and aesthetic factors. Critics sometimes move too quickly from qualifying the interpretation of a particular study to dismissing the study entirely.74
Communication (including mass communication) is an interdisciplinary field that manifests this tension. While it shares a social science dimension with psychology and a rhetorical dimension with literary studies, these alternative perspectives often seem to be in opposition rather than complementing each other.75 Because effects researchers and their critics do not hear each other well, they get stuck in a never-ending cycle of overstatement and misinterpretation. For example, effects researchers have set themselves up for a backlash with some unjustifiable rhetorical flourishes. One researcher claimed that if TV had never been invented, there would be 10 000 fewer murders every year.76 By arguing that the television industry instigates mass murder, the standard of proof for judging social scientific research shifts. In light of incendiary claims, studies which would otherwise be simply seen as incomplete pieces of a larger puzzle are now judged as woefully inadequate.
On the other side, there is overstatement as well. For example, the title of the book The Myth of Media Violence by art scholar David Trend might lead to the conclusion that he believes that concerns about the impact of media violence are a myth (a falsehood). However, Trend states the following: “My research over the past decade has convinced me that violent media do plenty of harm.”77 Instead of denying the effect of media violence, he claims to bring balance and context to the debate. Unfortunately, the subtleties of his argument may be undermined by the book's polarizing title. The heightened rhetoric provokes both sides to come out with their guns blazing and minds closed. The resulting disconnect is unfortunate for students and the public.
There is, however, a middle ground. Effects research provides a focused snapshot of discrete elements to a complex problem. I believe that there is strong evidence that media do sometimes have an effect on audiences. Movies are not inert; they play a contributing role in some of the behavior and thoughts of many people. However, several qualifications of this claim can be highlighted:
Media effects are not overwhelmingly large. When research results are statistically aggregated across individual studies, the measured effect (whatever it may be) is quite small. There is no evidence that large numbers of people are radically transformed by exposure to media, especially in the short term. This lack of dramatic effect is typical of the social sciences. When the degree of media effect is compared to such interventions as reading instruction, psychotherapy, and psychotropic medications, media effects are found to be comparable. 78 Therefore, while effect sizes are not dramatic, such research should not be dismissed.
Media do not affect everyone the same way. There are always individual differences; that is why statistics are necessary in the social sciences. The results of an experiment in which everyone responded the same way would be convincing (as they are in physics), but they never happen in the social sciences because people are the most oppositional of scientific subjects. The fact that effects studies always report general trends is relevant but not definitive.
Media exposure never causes anything by itself. All behaviors are over-determined (caused by more than one factor). A well-designed experiment may succeed in temporarily isolating an important influence, but additional factors are always present that could be revealed by other well-designed experiments.
I also believe that the critics of effects research have an excellent point. Movies are artistic creations. They vary along many different aesthetic criteria, and these criteria matter in how people receive them. As complicated symbolic objects, movies are open to an enormous variety of meanings by the billions of people who watch them. Scientific research will never be able to conclusively define and weigh all of the possible influences on all possible people.
One of the biggest limitations of effects research is that, as a rule, it tends to downplay essential aesthetic and narrative variations. All movies are treated as essentially the same, or are differentiated along gross criteria: Does it contain violence? Does it contain sex? Does it contain sex and violence? When I was an undergraduate, I remembering reading a study where one of the experimental conditions was referred to as “R-rated sex comedies” and included Fast Times at Ridgemont High, H.O.T.S., and other films from the early 1980s.79 As a teenager when these movies were released, I had seen several of them, including H.O.T.S. (at a drive-in theater I infiltrated by hiding in the trunk of a car—the movie still wasn't worth the price of admission).80 The idea that H.O.T.S. was placed in the same category as Fast Times, a well-constructed cultural satire made by respectable filmmakers,81 struck me as ridiculous. Its similarity was superficial, based on featuring horny teenagers. It made me wonder if researchers ever really watched the movies they were using.
Effects researchers sometimes lose aesthetic subtlety in statistical analysis and experimental design. Driven by social concern more than an appreciation of movies, they are better at imagining possible negative influences than positive ones. While one could stand in the checkout line at the grocery store and curse the invention of the printing press, we can step back and note the cultural advantages to the printed word that balance out whatever harm is being done by The National Enquirer. Technological innovation is always introduced with great hope and excitement, and while disillusionment is inevitable, most technologies retain the potent
ial for good, including the movies.
Further Reading
Bandura, A.; Ross, D., and Ross, S.A. (1963) Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66 (1), 3–11.
Bryant, J. and Oliver, M.B. (eds) (2009) Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, 3rd edn. Routledge, Taylor & Francis, New York, NY.
Grimes, T.; Anderson, J.A., and Bergen, L. (2008) Media Violence and Aggression: Science and Ideology. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Gunter, B. (2002) Media Sex: What are the Issues? Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
Postman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books, New York, NY.
Singer, D.G. and Singer, J.L. (2001) Handbook of Children and the Media. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Sparks, G.G. (2006) Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview, 3rd edn. Wadworth, Cengage Learning, Boston, MA.
Chapter 9
Movies as Equipment for Living—The Functions of Film
Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino, was released in 1975, with supporting roles played by John Cazale, Charles Durning, and Chris Sarandon. Frank Pierson won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the film was nominated for five other Academy Awards including Best Picture. It was a critical and popular success and is now seen as a 1970s classic. It was also a watershed film in featuring a gay character played by a major star. Much of the dialogue was improvised, including Pacino's famous chant, “Attica! Attica!” The story, based on real events about a couple of robbers, Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (Cazale), who hold up New York City bank on a hot summer day only to find the money gone. When the building is surrounded by police, Sonny and Sal take hostages and tense negotiations ensue. It emerges that Sonny attempted the robbery to pay for his lover's sex change operation. When Sonny requests a getaway car to take them to the airport, Sal is shot and killed by a police officer, and Sonny is arrested.
For writer Patrick Horrigan, the movie was more than an interesting plot, a critically acclaimed Oscar winner, or a biting cultural commentary.1 Patrick was 15 when he saw the film in 1979. He was from a large Catholic family in suburban Pennsylvania, and at the time he watched it on TV, he was struggling with his own sexual orientation. He was particularly struck by the film's portrayal of New York City, a place he found gritty yet inviting and pulsing with life.
Horrigan was attracted by the Pacino character at the same time he identified with his dilemma. He found the authorities well-meaning, but paternalistic and ineffectual in finding a resolution to the dire circumstances in which Sonny was trapped. Patrick interpreted the scenes in which Sonny is coaxed to come out of the bank building as a metaphor for the complexities of coming out as a homosexual. Even his mother's pleas for Sonny to leave the building could have had deadly consequences. Since Patrick was aware of the dangers associated with coming out as a gay teenager, such scenes evoked a great deal of turmoil. Patrick was particularly moved by the intimate phone conversation between Sonny and Leon. While that scene has been subsequently criticized because the use of the phone prevented the filmmakers from visually depicting any physical contact, the opportunity for Patrick to witness emotional intimacy between two men was more important than physical intimacy.
Dog Day Afternoon became part of Patrick's inner life. Prior to the film, he had engaged in a series of elaborate daydreams in which he was a famous actor and director. He integrated these fantasies into the movies he saw. He imagined writing a quasi-sequel to Dog Day Afternoon in which he played the part of Sonny's younger partner. His experience of the film and his elaborations ended up having a profound effect on him: “The real possibility of a gay identity and a loving relationship with another man, glimpsed in the film's portrayal of the hero's relationship to his boyfriend, first entered and altered my mind.”2
Sometimes people know that a movie is having an impact on them. They feel the film enter them, and are aware of the role it plays in their thinking and their actions. This is one of the powers of a symbolic form like film. In these situations, symbols are not just stand-ins for abstract concepts like love and oppression. Sometimes symbols really matter to how people live their lives.3
This chapter picks up where the previous chapter on media effects leaves off. Both deal with how watching movies filters into our lives, but with one a major difference: “effects” (impacts, influences) happen to people. When we say that a movie had an impact on us, we are treating the film as the active agent. Sometimes however, we self-consciously use a film for our own purposes. We apply the film to our lives, and it serves a particular function. In this scenario, we are the agents and movies are the tools.
Professional Functions of Movies
If we wish to influence people, film is one way to accomplish that goal. Used properly as communication tools, films can educate people on a wide range of subjects—oral hygiene, history, politics, coping with grief, and so on. The latent power of visual images can be harnessed and molded with any educational, therapeutic or moral goal in mind.
The Use of Movies in Education
The melodramatic and/or fantastic content of mainstream films do not match the standard picture of disciplined learning. Movies may appear much too fun to impart anything of value. The apparent ease with which people process visual images could discourage careful analysis promoted by reading and traditional teaching methods. Despite these concerns, many educators are energized by the accessible qualities of motion pictures. While higher education favors the written word, movies have become widely accepted as auxiliary teaching methods on a remarkable variety of topics.
Visual images for film, television, and computers are created explicitly for the educational market and there is substantial literature on the effectiveness of these methods.4 Even theatrical films are found to have educational value, particularly their potential for teaching values, virtues, and morals to children and adolescents. My childhood education provides a good case study. I was part of the first generation of viewers for PBS's Sesame Street. I can't say I definitively learned my ABCs from a television show, but I am quite sure that the depiction of communal harmony left a strong impression on me. In elementary school, we were occasionally shown short films with prosocial messages. One film in particular, Paddle-to-the-Sea, in which a carved wooden boat with an Indian is released into a small stream and eventually to the sea, resonated in my memory. I believe the film helped me identify with the interconnected natural systems and appreciate the importance of endurance and chance in the journeys of life.5
Educators have sought to catalog films that, with the help of a skilled teacher, can be used to teach certain values.6 Bridge to Terabithia, a live action Disney movie, features themes of friendship, death and bullying. A teacher might ask students about scenes in which the main character is taunted because of his poverty: How do you think it made Jess feel when the other kids laughed at him about his shoes? Why does it seem wrong to make fun of the fact that Jess is poor? How would you have reacted to the teasing if you were in Jess’ position? This cinematic technique has an advantage over simply teaching moral propositions (“It's wrong to tease people”) because the film heightens the emotional and empathetic experience.
For years, film's dubious intellectual standing made professors wary of using it as a teaching aid, but the progressive swing in the 1960s opened up a greater range of pedagogical methods. Professors started using movies to teach the classic liberal arts.7 In the new millennium, entire textbooks devoted to narrative films exemplify important concepts for many disciplines including sociology,8 political science9 and environmental science.10
There is still concern that using movies for higher education is a cheap tactic, pandering to unengaged students to increase enrollment. My own Psychology of Film course is always overenrolled, to the envy of colleagues teaching Kant or Spanish Imperialism. I am quick to acknowledge its popularity derives largely from the word “film” in the title. Clearly st
udents perceive that watching movies will only minimally interfere with the campus wiffle ball tournament and the other spring pursuits of young people. While I make sure to include rigorous reading and writing assignments to offset my colleagues’ suspicions, I am not above exploiting the visceral appeal of film to draw students to the material, deepening the learning experience.
Movies can also be used as educational tools in applied arts like medicine. “Cinemeducation” describes the use of commercial films in medical education by demonstrating situations and raising questions about a variety of medical concerns.11 While few movies would be helpful in studying the anatomy of the circulatory system, health treatment is more than anatomy, medicines and physical procedures. The practice of medicine involves psychological, interpersonal, and social dimensions that films depict well (or poorly, which can also be instructive):
The impact of chronic illness on a family: Steel Magnolias shows the impact a young woman's terminal illness has on her mother and extended family.
Giving bad news: The indelible scene in Terms of Endearment in which a physician is uncomfortable conveying a patient's poor prognosis contrasts with ideal doctor-patient communication.
Pediatric illness: Lorenzo's Oil features a husband and wife struggling to combat their son's chronic illness. The impact on the spousal relationship is highlighted as well as the mother's attempts to explore all possible treatments.
Despite distortions in depicting counseling and mental illness on film, some films have been embraced by psychotherapists as a means of teaching psychology. Several books use movies to instruct students about personality theory12 and psychopathology,13 and workshops are available for helping therapists refine their skills using movies.14 Film is utilized for its vividness, but it is also encourages identification, decreasing the stigma of mental illness among medical students15 and increasing empathy for patients.16
Psychology at the Movies Page 18
