Further Reading
Anderson, J.D. (1996) The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL.
Bordwell, D. (1985) Narration in the Fiction Film. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.
Grodal, T. (1997) Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Hogan, P.C. (2003) Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. Taylor & Francis Books, New York, NY.
Rottenberg, J.; Ray, R.D., and Gross, J.J. (2007) Emotion elicitation using films, in Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment (eds J.A. Coan and J.B. Allen),. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp. 9–28.
Chapter 7
Reflecting on the Screen—The Reception of Movies
William Friedkin's The Exorcist was released in 1973, a few years after publication of the novel by William Peter Blatty. If the novel caused cultural ripples, the movie set off shockwaves of controversy, acclaim, and fear.
At the time of its release, The Exorcist became the highest grossing film of all time. Adjusted for inflation, it is still ranks #9 on the list of box office earnings (see Appendix B; there are no other horror films in the Top 50). It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won two.
The Exorcist contains a host of indelible images that, almost 40 years later, have become part of the cultural landscape: the possessed Regan (Linda Blair) with her spinning head, copious amounts of pea green projectile vomit, and blasphemous language; and the exorcist, Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) approaching the Georgetown brownstone in the dead of night. The film ignited many discussions about the historical and modern practice of exorcism. Some viewers entertained the possibility of real-life demonic possession. Among nonbelievers, it was taken as a serious horror film that made a statement about science and faith in the modern world.
Critics were divided in their evaluation of the movie. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and claimed that Friedkin uses “the most fearsome resources of the cinema” to create “one of the most powerful [escapist movies] ever made.” Yet he also fretfully speculated, “Are people so numb they need movies of this intensity to feel anything at all?”1 Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was all-out condemning. She criticized Blatty's book as “shallowness that asks to be taken seriously”; she castigated the director for being so “mentally unprotected” that he felt a need to “make everybody sick”; and she argued that “the movie industry is such that men of no taste and no imagination can have an incalculable influence.” She ended her review by questioning the state of mind of the 500 parents who had unsuccessfully auditioned their daughter for the lead role: ‘[As they watch Linda Blair act like a little demon] do they feel, “That might have been my little Susie—famous forever”?’2
To kids like me growing up in the 1970s, The Exorcist was legendary. Like Saturday Night Fever, it was an R-rated film that was a frequent topic of conversation. I was not allowed to watch it,3 but some kids claimed to have seen it and vividly described the movie's green puke and twisting heads. Not to be outdone, other kids claimed that a distant cousin or family friend had been possessed. There was particular interest in the subliminal insertion of a demonic face into the film which we'd been told was the photograph of an actual demon taken on a spirit-hunting expedition.
I finally saw The Exorcist in my late teens in the early 1980s and thought it was a great movie. In the era of Friday the 13th, it was at once old-fashioned in its slowly building terror yet up-to-date in its graphic special effects. I was particularly disturbed by the intrusive medical interventions, and I was perplexed how the crucifix scene didn't merit the film an X rating. I appreciated the unrelenting, ominous tone. I definitely took the film seriously.4 When I read Pauline Kael's review, it disturbed me almost as much as the movie. Her criticism seemed a personal attack on not only my intelligence but my moral sensibility.
When I teach film courses, I sometimes use The Exorcist as an example of a film that has had a significant cultural impact. As with all films with graphic violent or sexual content, I give some spoilers and excuse anyone who is likely to be disturbed. Most of the time my students dismiss my warning, but in the case of The Exorcist, a few always take me up on it. There is something about the film that still hits a nerve, even among jaded college students. Some report that seeing the movie was terrifying or even traumatic. Others find it unnerving based on their religious beliefs (even non-Catholics). Occasionally students claim they find the film scary because “that can really happen.”5
When we watch movies, we follow the storyline and become emotionally involved with the characters. Generally, after the credits roll, we never think about them again. Sometimes, however, a movie stays with us, and we reflect on it—for an hour, a week, a year or a lifetime. The story and images run through our minds. We relive our emotions. We evaluate the quality of the movie and our experience with it. We make connections between the film and the rest of the world around us (maybe to our job or something we read in the paper). Our understanding of the film's story and characters becomes a grid that we map onto the rest of our lives.
Reflecting on a movie is another level of symbolic processing. Evaluation (determining enjoyment of a movie) and interpretation (determining the meaning of a movie) are reflective processes that can be added to perception and comprehension, as we see in Figure 7.1.
Figure 7.1 Symbolic activity in film viewing: Interpretation and evaluation.
Whether we keep these reflections to ourselves, or share them with other people, it is during this phase that movies invade other aspects of our lives.
Viewer Enjoyment of Movies
The old saying “everybody's a critic”6 is certainly true of moviegoers. Everyone evaluates their filmgoing experiences. Those who are more articulate, louder and/or verbose become academics or start blogs, but even the most unexpressive viewers base the movies they choose on previous cinematic experiences.7 For most people, this evaluation has a self-conscious, reflective component. We ask ourselves, was it enjoyable? Was it gratifying? Or was it a waste of time and money? Enjoyment and gratification are the primary issues when considering film as a form of entertainment.8 When people choose their forms of entertainment, we assume they are making decisions that they consider worthwhile.
The enjoyment of film is closely tied to emotional experience.9 Presumably, people want their entertainment to make them feel good. Yet the relationship between the emotions experienced during a film and the labeling of a film experience as enjoyable is by no means transparent. Even with movies that provoke such positive emotions as wonder, we can question why some people find one movie wondrous and not another? Particularly puzzling are movies that arouse negative emotions such as sadness and fear. Tearjerkers, horror movies, and thrillers have been popular throughout the entire history of filmmaking. Why do people seek out the experience of negative emotions?
Funny Movies
Laughter feels good. Comedies make people laugh. Therefore, comedy is perhaps the most robust film genre: To paraphrase the hippie mantra, “If it feels good, watch it.” This observation is consistent with a hedonistic theory of film appeal—we enjoy movies because they bring us pleasure.
As with everything that involves the human mind, there are deeper puzzles just below the surface. We may ask what makes something funny. Freud had an explanation that can serve as a starting point.10 He believed that jokes and humor were socially acceptable expressions of unconscious aggression. Some things in life are frustrating, but social and moral inhibitions prevent people from directly acting on their feelings. We thus use humor to express our longings and frustrations without doing any physical harm. Dirty jokes, sarcasm, and slapstick clearly exemplify this theory. Are people sadists for thinking the abuse dished out to the burglars in Home Alone is funny? Freud would answer yes.
Freud's ideas have been modified by modern experimental psychologists to form t
he superiority or disparagement theory of humor. The joker gains superiority over the object of the humor (an enemy, authority, or ambivalent loved one) by disparaging them. One experiment involved the degree to which a joke about a politician contracting an STD was perceived as funny.11 Participants who felt animosity toward Bill Clinton found the joke funnier than those who liked Clinton. The same pattern applied when Newt Gingrich was the subject. This finding is an explanation for the famous sight gag from The Naked Gun (from the height of the first Gulf War) that involved Saddam Hussein having a bomb dropped in his lap while lounging by his pool.
Not all humor is aggressive. The line, “I'll have what she's having,” in response to Sally's (Meg Ryan) faked orgasm in a diner in When Harry Met Sally is a cinematic example of a friendly joke. The woman who uttered it probably didn't have any aggression toward Sally, the lunch menu, or orgasms. While there is a sexual element to the joke, the attitude is not repressed and therefore doesn't fit Freud's theory.
The enjoyment of friendly humor has been explained by incongruity theory—the listener or viewer starts thinking of an utterance or event in an ordinary way, but the joke takes things to a surprising resolution.12 “I'll have what she's having” is usually a banal, shorthand method of ordering food. But uttered by a woman after hearing someone experience great pleasure, it implies Sally's food must have special qualities and be highly desirable. Humans find the mental jolts of verbal and visual twists to be cognitively refreshing and energizing.
Violent Movies
Why do people enjoy watching events filled with violence, destruction and human suffering? According to Freud, in civilized societies people's inborn destructive tendencies are punished when overtly expressed, so they are relegated to the unconscious. Because they don't go away, we experience internal tension. One solution is to displace (or sublimate) our aggressive urges from activities that would get us into trouble (starting a bar fight) to activities that are more socially acceptable (watching a bar fight in a movie).
Evolutionary psychology makes a similar argument using different language. Throughout human evolution, violence has proven to be advantageous to our survival against predators and enemies. Therefore violence as a problem-solving impulse is deeply imbedded in our genetic code. Yet, in the modern world, violence is not an effective way to resolve daily situations. So our violent urges finds expression in symbolic media, and violent movies are experienced as satisfying and enjoyable.
These broad formulations don't explain the enormous variation in violent circumstances depicted in movies. A film of random scenes of explosions and gunfire would not attract a very large audience.13 Instead, enjoyment of violence likely depends on plot and character. Dolf Zillmann's dispositional theory of media entertainment specifies how certain kinds of media violence are particularly enjoyable. For most viewers, enjoyment comes from the moral dispositions that they feel toward the characters. If a character (usually the hero or the protagonist) is seen as positive, viewers empathize with him or her. They enjoy the film if good things happen to the character but do not when bad things occur (particularly at the end). On the other hand, if a character is viewed as negative, viewers experience gratification when bad things happen to him or her, since these events are felt to be justified by the character's evilness.14
This theory applies to all age groups, but is particularly pronounced in younger audience members. In one experimental study, children reported enjoying a film when a likable character received a new bike at the end.15 In another variation, they appreciated when an obnoxious character fell off his bike. The children didn't enjoy the film when the likable character fell off his bike or when the unlikable character emerged unharmed with a new bike. A quick survey of box office hits (Appendix B) supports this theory: almost all of these films are resolved by the hero getting rewarded and the villain being punished.
Horror Movies
Horror films have received a great deal of attention from psychologists studying entertainment.16 Fans of horror films may detect a patronizing subtext to this research (what kind of person enjoys this stuff?), but the horror genre is defined by a compelling paradox. Horror films are frightening; fear arises when people are threatened by bodily or social harm. Normally people will go to enormous lengths and expense to avoid fear-producing situations. How then does the existence of the horror genre make sense?
Dispositional theory has relevance to horror films. While a horror film may contain fear- and terror-arousing moments, traditional horror films generally end with the monster/villain being vanquished and some of the good characters surviving. When the moral order is restored through the survival of the hero and the destruction of the villain, the anxiety experienced during the film is relieved, adding emphasis to the final payoff.17 Since horror films combine fear with disgust for a nonhuman monster, the killing of the monster doesn't arouse the residual human sympathies that might be present in suspense movies. This pattern is common and can be vividly seen in Alien and Aliens18 which feature extended showdowns between Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the oozing alien. While the monster is intelligent, it is also loathsome and unsympathetic. Encounters between Ripley and her nemesis range from slow-building suspense to horrific violence, yet each film ends with the dramatic destruction of the monster. The viewer is rewarded with both relief and moral satisfaction.
The pleasure of perceived justice is also noticeable in the “virgin survivor effect” in slasher movies.19 The “pure” characters, with whom the audience presumably empathizes, are spared in the end while the “impurity” of sexually active characters is a justification for their gruesome deaths. They find the fate of morally deficient victims gratifying for the same reasons as the death of a villain. Research has found that teenage boys who hold disapproving beliefs about female sexuality along with punitive attitudes (“I like to see the victims get what they deserve”) reported enjoying the murders of female characters who are sexually active more than the murders of male characters (regardless of sexual activity) or non-sexually active female characters.20
Sad Movies
The enjoyment of sad movies raises a paradox similar to horror movies. Since most people consider sadness a negative emotion and generally avoid the feeling, then why are so-called “weepers” or tearjerkers so popular? On the surface, this seems to be run up against the idea that people don't do things that don't feel good. In many movies sad events are not much of a problem if the movie is viewed holistically. Depressing events at the beginning or middle of the story establish challenges for the characters which are overcome in the course of the film, thus increasing the pleasure of a happy ending. An epic like Lord of the Rings can compile many tragic events over a long narrative, so that the characters can repeatedly triumph in the end.
Movies with unhappy endings are more puzzling since there is no obvious payoff. Why do people subject themselves to The Notebook or Old Yeller, stories where sympathetic characters (an elderly couple and a Labrador retriever, respectively) die tragically due to no fault of their own or as the result of heroic behavior? One possibility is that viewers are motivated by something other than experiencing a particular emotion. Research has found that participants in a “tender affective state” (warmth, sympathy and understanding) showed a greater preference for sad films than participants in happy or sad affective states.21 The people in the tender state were also more interested in other movies that explored intimate human relationships, sad or not. When participants adopted a sympathetic attitude, their motivating interest was to watch movies with meaningful insights, not to experience a particular emotion.
Old Yeller's beloved standing among viewers demonstrates a willingness to tolerate heartbreaking emotion if the experience is attached to meaningful events. Old Yeller offers themes like courage, friendship and loyalty, and the ending encourages reflections on growing up and responsibility. The emotions associated with watching the movie are important, but they are secondary to the insights that come from viewing the fi
lm. This observation expands the notion of what it means to enjoy or to be gratified by films.22
Viewer Interpretations of Movies
Based on what we have seen, viewing movies in order to feel good is a useful starting point, but it is not the whole story. Viewers experience both positive and negative emotions while watching movies. Whether they positively evaluate their overall viewing experience is based in their understanding of the story, their empathy with the characters, and their discovery of the story's meaning or significance. Viewer evaluations and interpretations occur simultaneously, as complementary forms of cinematic reflection.23
Interpretation is generally regarded as something that critics do to movies in order to discover the meanings contained within them.24 In this chapter, however, I treat interpretation as a psychological process that takes place within ordinary viewers (see Figure 7.1).
Historical Studies
The interpretive approach of film studies is to pick a movie and then analyze it; historical approaches select the film and then look at how other people have analyzed or reacted to it.25 Researchers use many sources including movie reviews, news stories, opinion pieces, commentaries from filmmakers, industry data, and advertising campaigns. Every source is understood as reflecting the diverse qualities of the film in question and is not evaluated for absolute truth. The sources are not considered to cancel each other out; rather, they suggest that different people can have different perspectives. These artifacts are then pieced together to create a picture of the film's cultural significance and to identify patterns of audience response. The lenses used to evaluate a film's reception often relate to some controversial issue, such as race, gender, or sexuality. Because it involves close analysis, historical reception is a humanities-friendly middle path between textual analysis and the data collection used by social scientists.
Psychology at the Movies Page 14