Psychology at the Movies
Page 22
25. The Usual Suspects (1995)
26. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
27. Se7en (1995)
28. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
29. Memento (2000)
30. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
31. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
32. Toy Story 3 (2010)
33. Forrest Gump (1994)
34. Leon: The Professional (1994)
35. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
36. Apocalypse Now (1979)
37. Citizen Kane (1941)
38. Pinocchio (1940)
39. Cleopatra (1963)
40. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
41. Goldfinger (1964)
42. Airport (1970)
43. American Graffiti (1973)
44. The Robe (1953)
45. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
46. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
47. Bambi (1942)
48. Blazing Saddles (1974)
49. Batman (1989)
50. The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
39. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
40. The Sound of Music (1965)
41. King Kong (1933)
42. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
43. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
44. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
45. Shane (1953)
46. It Happened One Night (1934)
47. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
48. Rear Window (1954)
49. Intolerance (1916)
50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
38. American History X (1998)
39. North by Northwest (1959)
40. American Beauty (1999)
41. Taxi Driver (1976)
42. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
43. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
44. Alien (1979)
45. Vertigo (1958)
46. Amelie (2001)
47. Spirited Away (2001)
48. The Shining (1980)
49. WALL-E (2008)
50. Paths Glory (1957)
* Retrieved from http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice.html April 13, 2011.
** Retrieved from http://www.afi.com/100years/movies10.aspx; April 13, 2011.
*** Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/chart/top; April 13, 2011.
Appendix C
Emotionally Arousing Movie Scenes
Emotion Film Scene
Amusement When Harry Met Sally Discussion of orgasm in café
Robin Williams, Live Comedy routine
Bill Crosby, Himself Comedy routine
Whose Line is it Anyway? Helping hands comedy routine
Anger The Bodyguard Bully scene
Cry Freedom Police abuse protesters
Disgust Pink Flamingos Person eats dog feces
Amputation
[Non-feature Film] Amputation of arm
Foot Surgery
[Non-feature film] Surgery on a foot
Fear The Shining Boy playing in a hallway
Silence of the Lambs Basement chase scene
Neutral Abstract Shapes
[Non-feature Film] ScreenPeace screen saver
Alaska's Wild Denali
[Non-feature Film] Summer in Denali
Sadness The Champ Boy with dying father
The Lion King Cub with dead father
Return to Me Dog and man after death of wife
Surprise Capricorn One Agents burst through door
Sea of Love Man is scared by pigeon
Adaptation of material from chapter “Emotion elicitation using film” by Rotternberg, Ray and Gross (pp. 9--28) in Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment edited by James Coan and John Allen (2007). (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.)
Appendix D
Therapeutic Movies
Therapeutic Issue Examples
Abuse This Boy's Life (1993)
Adolescence Breaking Away (1979)
Adoption and Custody Losing Isaiah (1995)
Aging Strangers in Good Company (1990)
Chronic Illness Philadelphia (1994)
Commitment High Fidelity (2000)
Communication and Conflict Resolution The Story of Us (1999)
Death and Dying My Life (1993)
Divorce Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
Emotional Disorders Dead Poets Society (1989)
Family-of-Origin Issues Like Water for Chocolate (1993)
Support Systems Steel Magnolias (1989)
Grief and Loss Ordinary People (1980)
Inspiration The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Intimate Relationships About Last Night (1986)
Marriage The Four Seasons (1981)
Women's Issues How to Make American Quilt (1995)
Parent-Child Relationships Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
Blended Families Fly Away Home (1996)
Substance Abuse When a Man Loves a Woman (1994)
Values and Ethics Shortcuts (1993)
Adapted from Hesley, J.W., & Hesley, J.G. (2001). Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning: Using Popular Movies in Psychotherapy (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Endnotes
Chapter 1
1. Keyser (1992).
2. Diamond, Wrye and Sabbadini (2007) point out that when Freud published his first significant work, Studies in Hysteria in 1895 (co-authored with Josef Breuer), the Lumiere brothers were screening what is widely considered to be the first nonfiction film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. The scientific-minded American Psychological Association had been founded a few years earlier in 1892 (Wertheimer, 1987).
3. Freud's appearance at Clark left an aura that pervaded even the physical space. Many of us were convinced that the reason the university never remodeled the worn wooden staircase was because Freud had made the stairs sacred by setting foot on them.
4. Werner (1980).
5. Many of the professors at Clark at that time had been mentored by Werner, including Bernard Kaplan, Leonard Cirillo, Roger Bibace, Seymour Wapner, Robert Baker, and the neuropsychologist Edith Kaplan. Other Clark professors who influenced my thinking were socioculturalists James Wertsch and James Gee and narrativists Michael Bamberg and Nancy Budwig.
6. Kristen and Dine Young (2009).
7. Amateur short films are becoming much more available, thanks to digital cameras and YouTube. Even as I write, my children are collaborating with neighborhood kids to make their own movie. Perhaps in another decade someone will write a book on The Psychology of YouTube.
8. Wade and Tavris (2005) define psychology as “the discipline concerned with behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state and external environment” (p. 3).
9. Method has strong religious connotations, deriving from the Greek root methodos, meaning “the way.” The derivation calls to mind Jesus’ proclamation, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Psychologists have been known to be almost as serious about their methods.
10. Interestingly, the only book on psychology and the movies as free-ranging as Gladwell's approach is Munsterberg's 1916 work which mixes history, technology, experimental psychology, textual interpretation, aesthetic philosophy and imaginative speculation.
11. Sternberg and Grigorenko (2001).
12. Another effective way of making this point is John Saxe's poem The Blind Men and the Elephant in which several blind men investigate an isolated body part (tusk, trunk, ear, etc.) of an elephant and come to erroneous conclusions about the nature of an elephant (concluding it is a spear, snake, fan, etc.). This poem is used by Tavris and Wade in their novel textbook, Psychology in Perspective, which introduces the field of psychology in a more cohesive manner.
13. The symbolic framework p
resented here is a simplification of the model presented by Werner and Kaplan (1984) in Symbol Formation. They draw their perspective, in part, from the symbolic philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1955–1957) and the rhetorical method of Kenneth Burke (1973). Symbolization, as understood by Werner and Kaplan, is as amenable to literary interpretation as it is to experimentation.
14. Since most of the examples used in this book refer to how visual and linguistic symbols are embedded in stories, narrative theory (i.e., theories about how stories are constructed and how they are received by listeners/viewers) pops up with some regularity. This theme is central in Chapter in which parallels are made between stories in movies and stories in identity construction (McAdams, 1993).
15. The fact that symbols have more than one level of meaning is taken by numerous writers, including Carl Jung (1964) and Paul Ricoeur (1970) in his study of Freud, as the defining aspect of symbolization.
16. Even if a small, independent film reaches “only” a few thousand viewers, it is still a significant social event, especially if a passionate “cult” audience becomes strongly attached to it.
17. These symbolic events are psychological both because interpretations comment on human nature (e.g., how people displace unacceptable tendencies like aggression on to acceptable actions such as heroism) and because the transformation between a symbolic object and its meaning requires thought (i.e., mental activity or cognitive processing).
Chapter 2
1. Greenberg (1975).
2. Payne (1989b).
3. Hopcke (1989).
4. Indick (2004).
5. Murphy (1996).
6. The open-ended use of “text” as an underlying narrative runs counter to the everyday definition of text as something written (as in a “textbook”), but going with the convention in literary, film and rhetorical studies, I sometimes refer to films as “texts.”
7. Kracauer (1960) and Bazin (1967) are commonly associated with championing film as an exercise in realism; this attitude found expression in Italian neo-realism (Rome, Open City) and cinema verité (Don't Look Back). Andrew (1976) asserts that realism ran counter to the earliest trends in film criticism that highlighted films for their dreamlike qualities exemplified by German expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and surrealism (Un Chien Andalou). Many modern studies of film in both psychology (Packer, 2007) and philosophy (McGinn, 2005) continue to emphasize film as dream.
8. Bordwell (1989a) steps outside particular theoretical frameworks to cogently explicate the general process that all interpreters use to make meaning out of films.
9. The most prominent interpretive approaches in the early history of film are reviewed by Andrew (1976). Casetti (1999) continues the task of reviewing film theory through 1995.
10. There are many possibilities for types of behavior (e.g., farming, flying airplanes) and types of people (e.g., private detectives, butlers) that could receive attention from social scientists but have not. Psychotherapy and mental illness, however, have been the topics of so much special interest, I consider them in detail in Chapter .
11. How movies impact the attitudes of audiences is considered in more detail in Chapter .
12. Rendleman (2008).
13. See Krippendorff (2003) for an overview of content analysis methods.
14. The interpretations of clever critics are discussed later in this chapter. Such critics are typically unimpressed by content analyses since content analytic categories have to be stated in a way that everybody can understand. The joke goes that they need to be so obvious, they could be identified by trained monkeys (or graduate students, whichever are available). The virtues of critics—cleverness, subtlety, and originality—may become liabilities when it comes to content analyses.
15. It is not an accident that these topics correspond to the social concerns of recent decades. Despite occasional claims of neutrality, the social sciences do indeed swim in the cultural stream, either as reflections or agents of change. The topics that receive attention in this chapter have also been studied for their effects on audience members considered in Chapter .
16. Wilson et al. (2002).
17. Mean Girls is partly based on Queen Bees and Wannabes, Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction self-help book about adolescent female cliques, which itself draws on research on relational aggression by developmental psychologists such as Nicki Crick (2002).
18. Coyne and Whitehead (2008).
19. Greenberg (1994).
20. See Gunter (2002) for review of research on sexual content in media.
21. Cowan et al. (1988).
22. An original content analysis by Molitor and Sapolsky (1993) was followed by a critique by Linz and Donnerstein (1994) and then a rebuttal by Molitor and Sapolsky (1994).
23. Welsh (2010).
24. See Sarafino (2008) for summary.
25. Glantz and Kacirk (2004).
26. Hazan, Lipton, and Glantz (1994).
27. Ricoeur (1974: pp. 12--13).
28. Ricoeur (1974: p. 99).
29. Examples of the numerous book-length studies that use traditional psychodynamic theory to analyze film include Greenberg (1975; 1993) and Indick (2004); many other interpretations have appeared in journals like Psychoanalytic Review and The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. In addition, semiotic and post-modern variations of Freudian theory are discussed in the “Spectatorship” section of this chapter.
30. There are periodic attempts to declare Freudian theory dead. Literary critic Frederick Crews’ (1995) sharp dismissal of the scientific validity of psychoanalysis was at the center of a 1990s debate known as the Freud Wars (see Forrester, 1998 for a defense of Freud). Despite such battles, Freudian theory continues to thrive in the humanities, and modern variations of psychoanalysis remain a powerful force in mental health treatment, with some psychologists and psychiatrists arguing that crucial elements of Freud's approach are validated by both research on effective psychotherapy (Shedler, 2010) and modern neuroscience (Schore, 2003).
31. See Hall's A Primer of Freudian Psychology (1999) as a classic summary of Freudian theory.
32. Freud (1960b: p. 58).
33. Psychodynamic is a broad term that covers Freud's original psychoanalysis and the many spin-off theories that came later.
34. Greenberg (1975).
35. Greenberg (1975: p. 14).
36. Cocks (1991).
37. When it comes to Stanley Kubrick, one can never be sure what was intended. One of my professors warned us never to underestimate Kubrick's attention to detail since the only thing more obsessively conceived than one of his films was big-time advertising.
38. Modern cognitive science has a mixed view of the psychoanalytic contention that people unconsciously perceive every aspect of their environment. On one hand, there is evidence that the mind is highly selective about what information it processes and remembers. At the same time, people do process and react to certain environmental stimuli which they cannot consciously identify, although there is no evidence that these “subliminal” stimuli are actually having an effect on behavior (see Chapter ).
39. Hill (1992) and Iaccino (1998) provide traditional Jungian analyses of a range of movies while Singh (2009) explores “post-Jungian” approaches to film criticism.
40. The best summary of Jungian theory is the succinct overview he wrote just prior to his death, Man and His Symbols (1964).
41. Jung's theory has often been accused of being mystical. One of Jung's (1969: pp. 43--44) most compelling responses to this criticism is an analogy he makes to instincts. He points out that the existence of inborn instincts—simple patterns of behavior that are not learned but crucial to survival (e.g., the rooting reflex in which newborns turn their heads and suck when their cheeks are lightly stroked)—are not controversial. He claims that the archetypes are merely patterns of thought that give people templates for making sense out of a complicated world.
42. Star Wars is a clear example of Jungian theory because Geo
rge Lucas was explicitly inspired by the prominent mythologist Joseph Campbell (1968), whose approach to mythology is grounded in Jungian theory. Lucas says, “It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs . . .so I modified my next draft according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent” (Larsen and Larsen, 2002: p. 541).
43. Iaccino (1998).
44. Hill (1992).
45. Ricoeur (1974: p. 99).
46. Ray (1985: p. 14), quoting Althusser (1977).
47. Many of the critical topics related to cultural psychology are reviewed in Cole (1996).
48. The ideological approach of Louis Althusser had a significant impact on the foundation of cultural studies. Storey (2009) provides an introduction to cultural studies while Ryan (2008) has edited a comprehensive anthology of significant contributions to the field.
49. See Fiske (1989) for a prominent example.
50. Haskell (1973: pp. 327--328).
51. Ray (1985: p. 57).
52. See Andrew (1976) and Casetti (1999) for reviews of the history of film theory.
53. Metz integrated his previous work on semiotics, Film Language (1974), with psychoanalysis in the highly influential, The Imaginary Signifier (1982). Other psychoanalytic interpretations in film studies are compiled by Kaplan (1990). More recent approaches to Lacanian interpretation can be found in McGowan and Kunkle (2004).
54. Greenberg (1993: p. 5), a practicing psychoanalyst, recounts a humbling experience he had at a conference where his traditional psychoanalytic reading of a film got a cool reception from the film scholars in the audience. In contrast, great excitement was created by a hyper-close Lacanian reading of 20 seconds of a Marlene Dietrich movie that “discovered” sexual hostility in an edit between seemingly unrelated scenes. In the first scene, a gun was fired off screen; if one followed the hypothetical trajectory of the bullet into the next scene (in a completely separate space), it would presumably hit a male character squarely in the crotch.
55. This difficulty may be intentional. Depending on who you ask, the complexity is either a reflection of the unstable nature of knowledge, or it is a neo-elitist tactic designed to aggravate concrete-minded Philistines (e.g., most Americans).