76. Centerwall (1993).
77. Trend (2007: p. 1).
78. Perse (2001).
79. Linz, Donnerstein, and Penrod (1988).
80. For those unfamiliar with this movie, the tagline on IMDB.com says it all: “Danny Bonaduce and a cast of Playboy playmates get H.O.T.”
81. Directed by Amy Heckerling, written by Cameron Crowe, and featuring talented young stars including Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Chapter 9
1. In Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies, Horrigan shares his experience of Dog Day Afternoon, as well as films like Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, and The Poseidon Adventure, mixing personal reflection with film commentary. In explaining his choices, he says, “I focus on these [films] … because they happened to be the movies that meant the most to me as I was growing up and because in writing about them, I'm trying to understand as fully as possible who I am and why I think and feel as I do” (p. xix).
2. Horrigan (1999: p. xix).
3. Using movies self-reflectively is not inherently a good thing. A viewer may make life choices based on a film that she subsequently comes to regret (e.g., “I should never have believed that Prince Charming would rescue me after seeing Pretty Woman”). Alternatively, a viewer could be happy with the impact of a film on his life (“Rambo convinced me that might makes right”), yet have that impact judged negatively by others.
4. Fisch (2009).
5. This is an example of multimedia synchronicity. While writing this section, I recalled a movie about a wooden Indian in a boat, but couldn't remember the title. I Googled the plot and, to my delight, found it was called Paddle-to-the-Sea. On IMDB.com I learned it was a short film based on the book of the same name by Holling Clancy Holling. The next day I happened to be watching the 1990s TV show, Northern Exposure on DVD. In the episode, “The Final Frontier,” the erudite disc jockey Chris (John Corbett) is reading Paddle-to-the-Sea on air. Northern Exposure is a favorite of mine. The episode “Rosebud,” which uses Citizen Kane to make the point that movies are modern healing myths, was first aired at the same time I was reading Kenneth Burke's essay “Literature as Equipment for Living.” These influences shaped my research program and much of this chapter. And taking it back even further, Northern Exposure is clearly a version of Sesame Street transplanted to Alaska with adults and no Muppets.
6. Wonderly (2009: p. 12).
7. Murray (1979).
8. Sutherland and Feltey (2009).
9. Van Belle and Mash (2009).
10. Murray and Heumann (2009).
11. Alexander, Lenahan, and Pavlov (2005).
12. Paddock, Terranova, and Giles (2001).
13. Wedding, Boyd, and Niemic (2010).
14. Dr Fritz Engstrom leads summer workshops at the Cape Cod Institute where therapists reflect on psychology and film in the morning and enjoy the beach in the afternoon—the good life.
15. Kerby et al. (2008).
16. Gladstein and Feldstein (1983).
17. Cinematherapy was preceded by bibliotherapy, the use of books to promote therapeutic change (e.g., Pardeck, 1993). The term cinematherapy was first used by Berg-Cross, Jennings, and Baruch (1990) although the therapeutic use of film appeared earlier (Smith, 1974). Hesley and Hesley (2001), Rubin (2008), and Gregerson (2010) are all extensions of cinematherapy and other uses of popular culture in counseling.
18. Kuriansky et al. (2010).
19. Turley and Derdeyn (1990).
20. This is the approach of Hesley and Hesley in their Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning.
21. Shedler (2010).
22. Unfortunately Jones (2002) fails to consistently confront the studies on negative impacts of violence, an example of how the humanities and the social sciences remain segregated.
23. Madison and Schmidt (2001).
24. Grace (2006).
25. Niemiec and Wedding (2008).
26. Positive psychology encompasses many areas of psychology including clinical, personality, developmental, social, and neuropsychology. The movement was popularized by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000), building upon Csikszentmihalyi's (1997) work on “flow” (those moments when people are at their optimal level of functioning) and related concepts.
27. Peterson and Seligman (2004).
28. See Blumler and Katz (1974), Rosengren, Wenner and Palmgreen (1985), and Rubin (2009) for overviews of uses and gratifications research.
29. Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1974: pp. 21--22). Rubin (2009) points out that recent study has been more interested in practical implications.
30. See Chapter for an overview of this issue.
31. See Zillmann (1988), and Knobloch-Westerick (2006).
32. Note that “media” is embedded in the term “mediated,” a form of communication in which the text/screen/sound is a symbolic representation of its creator(s).
33. Perse and Rubin (1990).
34. Radway's (1991: p. 61) study is discussed in more detail in Chapter .
35. See Chapter for discussion on portrayal of mental health professionals and mental illness.
36. Wright (1974).
37. Tesser, Millar, and Wu (1988).
38. Oliver and Woolley (2011).
39. Burke (1973: p. 304).
40. The importance of symbolism runs throughout Burke's (1966; 1973) writings.
41. See Dine Young (1996, 2000) for further discussion of this phenomenon.
42. See Chapters and for further exploration of these ideas.
43. Narrative approaches to knowledge are discussed in Chapter .
44. McAdams (1993).
45. Mar and Oatley (2008: p. 183).
46. Mar and Oatley (2008: p. 186).
47. Brummett (1985).
48. Qualitative audience response methods allow scholars to consider idiosyncratic experiences that may not be typical. For example, the notion of catharsis has been widely rejected in the effect tradition in regard to aggressive (Bandura, 2009) and sexual (Harris and Bartlett, 2009) impulses. Given a broad sample of participants, it is difficult to systematically demonstrate that most people will experience a deflation of intense emotions (such as aggression) when exposed to emotional films (as opposed to assimilating the emotions of the film). This doesn't mean that catharsis never happens. Perhaps it is a more subtle, reflective process that occurs when people with sufficient ego strength are exposed to a well-done fictional narrative in a safe environment. Could such exposure help some people modulate aggressive tendencies in everyday life? Instances supporting this claim would me more accessible in open-ended interviews than they would be in social psych experiments.
49. See Rubin (1996) for an overview of autobiographical memory.
50. See Fivush and Haden (2003) for an edited volume exploring the relationship between narratives and autobiographical memory.
51. See section on psychiatric disturbances in Chapter .
52. Stein (1993).
53. McAdams (1993).
54. McMillan (1991).
55. Dine Young (2000).
56. All subjects from my interviews were assigned pseudonyms to insure confidentiality.
57. See Hills (2002) for overview of fan theory.
58. Austin (1981).
59. See Lieblich, McAdams, and Josselson (2004) and White and Epston (1990) as examples of narrative therapy and Payne (1989) for the therapeutic use of rhetoric.
60. Heinz Werner (1980) argues that development is more than just the aging process. What comes later cannot automatically be assumed to be more developed than what comes before. Instead, development is a conceptual framework that assumes that some modes of functioning have advantages over other modes and can therefore be said to have “progressed,” become “higher developed” or even to be “better.”
61. Dine Young (1996).
Chapter 10
1. For the record, I am not a Star Wars purist. I don't mind Lucas tinkering with the special effects, and I enjoyed Episodes I-
III. Nor I am particularly troubled by the imperious tone Lucas sometimes takes in interviews, and I am content with his decision to leave the series at six episodes. However, I was bothered when he started claiming in the 1990s that he had never intended a third trilogy. This seemed like a violation of the accepted fact that my pre-adolescent friends and I pondered endlessly, like a rug being pulled out from under my thirty-something self.
2. This figure is essentially a combination of Figure 1.1 and Figure 8.1.
3. Two other important dimensions of the film experience (conscious versus non-conscious; social versus individual) that I have repeatedly emphasized cannot be captured in Figure 10.1 without going 3-D.
4. Actually, I do remember that The Goodbye Girl starred Richard Dreyfuss but that was only because he would soon end up in a kid-friendly Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
5. Filmmakers also engage in multiple levels of psychological processing as they employ perceptual technologies (cameras), write scripts, and draw upon themes that resonate in their own lives. More scholarly attention has been paid to viewers mostly because they are a larger and more accessible group than filmmakers.
6. See Ch. 8 for an overview of these dangers.
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