The Use of Movies in Psychotherapy
Cinematherapy is the use of movies as tools in psychotherapy.17 Since movies allow viewers to make metaphorical connections between the content of the film and the real world, a skilled therapist can help clients make these connections to solve problems and facilitate therapeutic progress.18 Cinematherapy should be thought of a technique for therapy, not a unique type of therapy. While any therapist who uses film must assume the symbolic potential of film, there are many possible directions in which to proceed. One therapist may use movies as a means of helping clients understand troubling thought patterns (cognitive-behavioral therapy). Another might use movies to facilitate their clients’ understanding of their values and aspirations (humanistic therapy). Yet another therapist could use film to assist clients in understanding their inner conflicts (psychodynamic therapy).
Nightmare on Elm Street was used by a therapist in his work with a hospitalized adolescent boy, “C.”19 C. was initially hospitalized for substance abuse, oppositionality, poor school performance, and an incident in which he destroyed his guardian's home. Abandoned by his mother at the age of nine, he had a difficult relationship with his strict uncle. The boy was a fan of slasher films, which were banned as his problems escalated. After a period of isolation in the hospital, his therapist made a connection with him by talking about his favorite horror movies, something he was emotionally invested in.
The therapist made an agreement with C. to watch segments of Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master during their sessions and then discuss them. This coviewing improved the therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient, increasing C.'s trust, and allowed the therapist to carefully observe C's reactions. C. revealed that while he admired the power of Freddy Krueger, he also identified with his helpless teenage victims. He associated Freddy with authoritarian adults, particularly his uncle. The therapist helped C. identify his fear of abuse and abandonment as the source of his anger. Family therapy applied this insight, helping C. communicate his pain (not just his anger) to his guardians. This facilitated C.'s discharge and successful reintegration into family life.
In another variation, therapists match an appropriate film with the client's situation (problem type, age, gender, culture, etc.). After the client watches it, the film is discussed. Sometimes therapists rely on clients making their own connections, but in other situations, clients are oriented to the purpose of the video and may even reflect on particular questions.20 Searching for Bobby Fischer is used for working on parent-child issues. The young chess prodigy (Max Pomeranc) is pushed by his father (Joe Mantegna) and coach (Ben Kingsley) to abandon his kindheartedness in order to develop an aggressive attitude about winning. Eventually the father realizes he is hurting his child. The film can help parents realize how they project their own aspirations onto their children and warns of the danger of this kind of vicarious gratification. This insight can help parents nurture their children's talents while at the same time balancing the other needs of childhood. (A list of psychological issues connected to particular films is offered in Appendix IV.)
The use of movies in psychotherapy has the advantage of having a therapist present. Recent research suggests that the most important predictor of progress in psychotherapy is the strength of the interpersonal relationship between client and therapist.21 Still, movies offer important therapeutic qualities: they are both emotionally engaging and highly metaphorical. Because of this, psychologists and other writers assume value in movie-inspired self-reflection even when it is not led or shared with a therapist; their self-help books assert that reflecting on movies can lead to richer, healthier or more virtuous lives.
Jones’ Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence makes the case for why fantastical and violent images can help stimulate the imagination and facilitate a healthy sense of self through identification with powerful figures.22 Other books argue that movies can facilitate communication between parents and children on all topics including divorce, drugs, death, and even paranormal activity.23 Solomon's Reel Therapy: How Movies Inspire You to Overcome Life's Problems (2001) reviews several hundred films for their capacity to address a host of different life situations. Grace's Reel Fulfillment takes a similar path, except that the author arranges her movie suggestions within the context of a step-by-step plan for life improvement.24
The movie book most grounded in established psychological perspectives is Niemiec and Wedding's Positive Psychology at the Movies: Using Film to Build Virtues and Character Strengths.25 Positive psychology claims that throughout its history, psychology has focused on what is wrong with people—psychopathology, social atrocities, cognitive errors—rather than offering a vision of optimal human functioning.26 In contrast, twenty-four character strengths are associated with six core virtues. Systematic analyses are used to argue that that these strengths have been associated with human excellence throughout human history.27
Positive Psychology at the Movies identifies the presence of these characteristics in various films and creates a compendium. For example, creativity is associated with Life is Beautiful where Guido (Roberto Benigni) creates an imaginative world for his son confined in a concentration camp, the most soul-deadening of situations. Vitality is exemplified in Cool Hand Luke in the form of Luke (Paul Newman), who cannot repress his individuality even if it means death. It's a Wonderful Life captures the importance of gratitude when George (Jimmy Stewart) learns the true importance of his life after contemplating suicide. These and other films are presented as works of art that have the potential for improving human life.
General Functions of Movies in Everyday Life
Research on uses and gratifications is a social science approach to studying how the media fulfills the needs and desires of its audience.28 Gratification was reflected in the film preferences and enjoyment of film discussed in Chapters 5 and 7. But beyond enjoyment, do movies serve any other functions in people's lives? How do people “use” the movies they watch?
Uses and gratifications complement effects research; both fields seek to identify the practical consequences of media, with several important differences. Fundamentally, the guiding question of the uses and gratifications approach has been what people do with the media (as opposed to what the media do to people). Such researchers believe that viewers have a basic system of motivations, emotions, and cognitions, and that media provide an avenue to meeting these motivations. They also believe people are sufficiently self-aware to access their motivations and their media experience. And, in contrast to the social activism of effects research, this approach resists judgments about whether these uses of media are good or bad.29
The uses and gratifications approach identifies different types of function that films and other media fulfill. While distinguishable, they overlap considerably. A film may be useful for one person, and not another; one film might have many uses for different people. One viewer might get more than one need met by the same film, while another uses a particular film one way and a different film another.
One of the functions of film is entertainment, although this category is often used as a kind of black hole when other functions cannot be articulated. To refer to a movie as “just entertainment” implies that it does nothing else. Similarly vague descriptions of film functions include “leisure” or “killing time.” Questions about why something is entertaining or a preferred form of leisure hang in the background. While entertainment is closely related to pleasure, media enjoyment is a complex phenomena that requires deeper exploration.30
Another use of film is adjusting emotions. People frequently use films to relax/alleviate anxiety, and comedies are a favorite genre. It is evident that people often use action adventure movies for an emotional kick when they are bored and seeking excitement. These functions are complementary processes referred to as “mood management”: using media to achieve an optimal level of arousal (either to get higher or to come down),31 a use of media
that parallels how drugs and alcohol are used.
Movies and other media can be used for social purposes. Going to the movies is a social activity that can be relatively unrelated to the cinematic content. Some people look at a Cineplex marquee with The Hangover, Part II, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, or Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and declare they don't care which movie they go to see. Content is not so much a motivator as an excuse for getting out: meeting a friend or date, driving to the theater, sitting next to each other, talking about the movie afterwards, and so on.
Movies also serve a social purpose even when people are alone, providing a feeling of human contact that can mitigate loneliness. Since films are created by people, they are in themselves a form of communication.32 This communication may be indirect and one-sided, but is still a way to symbolically connect with other people through engagement in a universal story and identification with characters. While TV is most commonly used in this manner, home video and movie theater attendance can play a similar role.33
Mass media also allow people to share information. Primarily these are the functions of news and telephone communication, but it can also apply to forms of entertainment. Janice Radway's study revealed that a common reason for reading romance novels was “to learn about faraway places and times”34 even though education is not what most people typically associate with these books. Education is not the primary reason that people go to a Cineplex either, yet, since film vividly depicts places and activities to which most people aren't otherwise exposed, instruction serves a secondary function. People can learn about African genocide from Hotel Rwanda, British history from The King's Speech, or schizophrenia from A Beautiful Mind. Experts in particular areas may be concerned about the inaccuracies of cinematic portrayals35 but the realistic appearance of movie images creates strong impressions for people who would not know about them any other way.
Movies are commonly used as a means of escape. This function is so pervasive that it is sometimes manipulated in advertising and reviews—“Movie X is a great way to set your troubles aside.” This is a robust function because there are so many way of escaping.36 Seeking to escape one's current emotional state is another way of talking about mood management. Other times, viewers might seek to escape routine and do something different (one reasons why movie theaters still hold a special appeal for many viewers). Finally, some viewers use movies to escape from themselves.37 Rather than being bored or anxious, for such viewers movies provide an alternate reality superior to own current lifestyle. This alternative form of escape is exaggerated in films such as Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, and Sex in the City.
Another function of movies is self-development. Although it may appear to be the opposite of escapism, the two are related. Though self-escape allows people to avoid the reality of their daily lives, sometimes the experience of escape can offer a glimpse of other ways of being, serving as a catalyst for reflection on their own lives. Making meaning through movies is not only a form of pleasure, 38 it can make self-improvement possible.
Like effects researchers, uses and gratifications researchers prefer experimental and survey methodologies that provide a broad picture of film functions across the population. These methods are not designed to confront the symbolism of particular movies and the interpretive processes of particular individuals. A function like self-development, which is different for everybody, opens up subtler dimensions when individualized methods of data gathering are employed.
Personal Functions of Movies in Everyday Life
In his influential essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Kenneth Burke points out that the metaphorical use of words can affect human action, as in the proverbs “A rolling stone gathers no moss” or “The higher the ape goes, the more he shows his tale.” They serve as instructions on how to react to a particular life event. For Burke, the proverb is the most concise form of literature. Shakespeare's plays also influence our behavior, although in a more complicated and open-ended manner. For Burke, it is the critic's job to tease out the various categories through which literature can be used:
They [the categories] would consider the works of art, I think, as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off the evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like “tragedy” or “comedy” or “satire” would be treated as equipments for living.39
Burke contrasts this approach to literature with the attitude that literature exists in a pure aesthetic realm untouched by the outside world. From his perspective, literature is alive in how it intermixes with the lives of readers. Literature is not the only art that has this living quality. Any symbolic medium has the power to affect life.40 To borrow Burke's phrase, movies as equipment for living describes what happens when viewers self-consciously apply the meanings they find in movies to their own lived experience.41
Narrative films use symbols to tell stories about events that are linked in time and space, and audiences must understand and interpret these symbols.42 Making sense of the world through the stories we tell is a major component of the way the mind works.43 Dan McAdams argues that not only do we use narratives forms to understand fiction, we use narratives to understand ourselves.44 The reason people are always telling stories to each other (in the form of conversations, novels, plays, and movies) is because we are always telling stories to ourselves. Our “selves” are nothing but a collection of stories. The insights we glean from the books of neurologist Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Mind's Eye) don't come from a technical analysis of neuroanatomy, but from his ability to capture his patients’ stories. In these stories, he captures subjective experience and readers are able to empathize.
When we talk about using literature or movies as equipment for living, we are using a narrative art form to understand our own narratives. Fictional stories become part of our life stories. Fiction is a symbolic simulation of experience. Anything that can be experienced in life can be expressed by artists in a compressed form as fictional narratives. Stories are laboratories that provide lifelike situations in which audiences can test possible reactions.45 By engaging with these stories, we learn a great deal about many aspects of the social world, including extraordinary circumstances that we would never directly experience. These narrative simulations symbolically prepare us for future challenges, as well as help us understand situations from the past. Because engaging with stories often has an emotional component and involves identification and empathy, it can increase our capacity to empathize with real-life “characters”: other people.
Every fictional medium has advantages and disadvantages in the way it can be used as our equipment of living. Written stories require intellectual energy because there is a perceptual difference between the medium (ink marks) and the world of the story. In contrast, movies are pictures allowing for a relatively easy entree into the fictional world.46 This ease sometimes encourages viewers to escape, and discourages them from doing the difficult reflective work of comparing the fictional world to the real one. When viewers are able to achieve reflective distance from a film, however, the fact that the cinematic simulations are so vivid and lifelike can make the experience particularly fruitful, since the viewer feels like he or she has “been there and done that.”
Equipments for living can be identified through textual analysis, just like other approaches of spectatorship. For example, haunted house films (The Shining, The Amityville Horror and more recently, Paranormal Activity) can be analyzed for how they establish apocalyptic scenarios that mirror modern anxieties yet offer viewers examples of means of copying.47 However, looking directly at first person viewer accounts allows for the exploration of individual differences and can provide more vital examples.48 Many personally meaningful film experiences have been published (such as Horrigan's response to Dog Day Afternoon), and I wil
l refer to some of these as examples. In addition, I will utilize unpublished interviews (each 45–90 minutes long) in which I asked 50 participants, “Thinking back on your life, has there been a movie that was personally significant to you? What was the movie, and why was it important?” I gave participants at least a day to reflect on these questions. The resulting interviews produced rich and moving stories about the power of movies to touch lives.
“The Movie I Will Never Forget”: Autobiographical Functions
Memory has received a great deal of attention in psychology. While much of this has been concerned with recalling numbers, word lists, and factual information, an offshoot has focused on autobiographical memory (the recollection of personal experience).49 Results have consistently demonstrated that our memory of life events is subject to many inaccuracies, but some scholars have argued that autobiographical memories are not just an issue of accuracy—rather, memories of past experience may be incorrect with regard to the objective details, yet still capture the emotional and interpersonal essence of the events experienced. These kinds of memory often take a narrative form.50
In this way, movies can become a vivid part of one's personal memory system. This is not the case for all films, of course. Some movies leave no memory trace. A few years or even months after viewing them, people cannot recall details of the plot or characters (and sometimes forget having seen the movie at all). Still, scattered among the forgotten movies, a few stand out. Some of these vivid memories may even be traumatic,51 but other may be transcendent.
Psychology at the Movies Page 19