Psychological Trends and Needs Reflected in Movie Choice

PSYCHOLOGICAL TRENDS AND NEEDS REFLECTED IN MOVIE CHOICE

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.     11-13

ABSTRACT:  Human beings manage their emotions in various ways, including the stories and narratives that they choose to hear or view.  Movie choices can indicate emotional themes of concern, and trends in movie themes can indicate trends in emotional concerns in response to societal changes.

KEY WORDS:  cinema, movies, emotions, societal trends

As human beings, we all manage our emotions in various ways, including expression, reflection, psychological “defenses,” and engaging in activities that can help us to moderate or forget about unpleasant emotions and/or feel more pleasant emotions.  One of the ways that we do this is by listening to stories or observing others who are engaged in feeling and reacting to emotions, and this occurs for us today in movies, plays, sports, etc.  Since in this day and age we have many choices of such stories or observations, the movies that people choose to see can tell us something about emotional concerns and themes that are common to large groups of people in our society.

I have been struck over the past ten years or so with the number of movies involving fear of harm.  These include crime and police movies, mysteries in general, war movies, conspiracy movies, movies about predators (kidnapping, sexual abuse, etc.), horror movies, movies about aliens, zombies, and other scarey entities, and movies about superheroes, who exist, of course, only to help people with harm or threatened harm, usually harm by other human beings.  I believe that the large number (and percentage) of such movies suggests that fear of harm is a major concern for us.  

It is my interpretation that choosing to watch movies in the “murder, war, predation, other harm, conspiracy, crime” category is motivated by fears of harm from other human beings and a desire to believe that such things can be managed (crimes are solved; hidden or mysterious behaviors of others can be figured out; there are competent people trying to help; kidnap victims are found; wars are won; etc.).  (I would assert that there would be little viewership of movies in which the criminals win, nobody cares, things remain mysterious, crime is not avenged, etc.)  Watching fantasy/horror movies would be interpreted as also dealing with fears of harm but particularly harm from inhuman or inhumanly powerful sources (or perhaps harm from sources that are other than human, which may soften our fear a bit through this separation from reality).

FEAR

It is my impression that the fears that we have currently regarding harm from fellow human beings are greater than they have been in the past, although this is a difficult judgment to prove, since it is quite difficult to know how people felt in times that precede our own existence.  Across the millennia we have always been fearful of harm from others, especially those with whom we are not familiar, but it seems that there are added reasons for fear these days.

(1) We are more anonymous now and have less immediately available help and social support.  911 with strangers is not the same as an extended family that live in the same house with you or next door.  Most people don’t view their neighbors as trustworthy allies, since lives of most of us are intertwined not with our neighbors but with persons at a distance, through work or through the internet.  The Wall Street Journal (11-4-13) reported that in current, large studies approximately 40% of Americans report being lonely, up from 20% in 1980.

(2) Since we all are more mobile now, criminals have more mobility, too, and more opportunity therefore to strike in your neighborhood at any time.  (This may be a major factor in the apparent increase in child sexual molestation outside the home.)

(3) Individuals have more power to harm others these days—more powerful guns, more weapons of various sorts readily available, more knowledge about making bombs, and readily available information on the internet on how to harm others.  This puts us even more on our guard with respect to strangers, including all the people in our immediate environment whom we do not really know and therefore whose dangerousness we cannot assess with confidence.

(4) Governments have more information about us now and more capacity to harm us in other ways than violence than they used to have.

(5) We feel increasingly powerless individually, since so much of our live are determined by the decisions of others at a distance or by social change itself (market crashes, availability of pornography and other potentially harmful information and images on the internet, changes in Social Security benefits, the results of other people’s wasteful use of resources, etc.).  As interdependence inevitably increases (because we always opt for more complex cooperation since this is the way to most quickly enhance our material lives), our sense of our lives being in the hands of others increases.  

(6) As the complexity and consequences of our life decisions increases, along with the greater complexity and interdependence in society, we are increasingly aware of the significant consequences of making “wrong” (or simply “wrong” by chance) decisions, and we are increasingly fearful of making these decisions.  (What jobs can you be sure will still exist and have good pay for more than ten more years?  What market investments can you make that will ensure you a good retirement income?)

WATCHING MOVIES THAT FRIGHTEN

It might at first glance seem that people would generally avoid frightening movies, but there are psychological processes occurring as we watch movies that may be helpful with our fears.  (Of course, those moviegoers who identify with the evil or the criminals are not frightened and do not need help with fear!)

The general psychological assumptions about movie choice would be (for all of the various types and themes of movies, not just movies of harm) that we identify with some aspect of a story or movie (usually a character but sometimes a theme, a setting, or an emotion); we want to bolster our self-esteem through our identification; we want to see the specific problem of the movie worked out or solved; we want to have our beliefs and our assumptions about life affirmed; we want to feel more secure as a result of assuming that our own lives will mirror the movie outcomes; we want to improve our mood (through distraction or through monitoring the process and/or outcome of the movie); and to a more minor degree, of course, we may want to see a movie to gain or maintain status (being the first to see it), to avoid losing status (because all our friends have seen it but we have not), or just to go along with the crowd.

(1) Many people choose movies that are frightening or that involve overcoming bad people or evil because they themselves have been marked or even traumatized by bad people or evil.  These movies, then, offer an opportunity to “work through” some of the remaining difficult emotions without using a therapist.  This “working through” involves basically experiencing a lesser degree of some of the same emotions again but having these lead in the present to a more desirable outcome (bad people are exposed, good people stand against evil, innocent people who are suspected are eventually exonerated, etc.).  Benefiting from this venue for “working through” would take a long time (many, many movies) and might not improve one’s feelings but serve only to keep them from getting worse.

(2) Some people are reassured straightforwardly and gain hope for their daily lives from generalizing, appropriately or not, the standard conclusions of the movies, in which the good guys win and bad guys and evil are overcome.

(3) Some people focus on the hero as proving that there are heroes who will help him or her (the viewer) if danger or evil approach.

(4) Some people are reassured by the process through which mysteries are solved or bad guys are caught, and they gain confidence that they could figure things out if need be or that smart people would be available to help when needed.

(5) Some people are reassured simply by the fact that while they are quite frightened during the movie, that fear subsides and after the movie they are OK.  This feels to them like a form of mastery of the emotion and mastery of the feared events (even though they have done nothing but watch the movie or in some cases seek comfort from a fellow moviegoer).

There is, of course, some minor learning that can take place through watching mystery and crime movies.  We may learn something about court procedures and elements of the law, or we may pick up emotional tricks for dealing with painful feelings from the characters in the movies.  This learning, though, is usually minor compared to the emotion-management processes already described above.

(If the exploration here were broadened to include the more recent but now ubiquitous reality shows, then other major human motives are revealed.  These shows come in two major types—social relations/popularity (The Real Housewives of...., Big Brother) and activity-focused competition (Top Chef, The Amazing Race). Reality shows gain viewers through the simple fact that we do much of our learning and gain much of our knowledge of how to behave from watching other people, first our parents and siblings and later others in our social world.  Most reality show watchers are attracted by the themes of social popularity/acceptance/rejection and competition, since these are fundamental to their own lives, and their internal processes as they watch are the same as those described above for movies relating to harm from others.  They wish to identify with winners, lord it over losers, mourn their own losing, and pick up tips about how to deal with losing and how to win more often.)

SUGGESTIVE DATA

As a very limited check on some of the above, a categorization was made of all movies shown by the standard TV networks plus all HBO and SHOWTIME channels and by most of the channels that specialize in movies (Lifetime, Oxygen, A&E, Hallmark, etc.), on 11-4-13 from 5 PM to 9 PM PDT (all movies overlapping or contained within those hours).  The results are as follows:

         10  family relations
          4  romance
          1  comedy
          1  sex
         21  murder, war, predation, other harm, conspiracy, crime
          9  dark fantasy/horror (aliens, zombies, superheroes, etc.
          1  revenge
          2  adolescence/coming of age
          5  addressing social problems, advancement of society
          1  history
          1  religion

Movies were assigned to only one category, according to what seemed to be “the point” of the movie, so that, for instance, in this sample there were more comedies than just one, but all but one had strong themes, such as “family relations” or “romance.”  In order to interpret this data with confidence, more data would be needed, of course, and an assumption must be made that the movies that are offered to viewers by TV programmers are the movies, out of a much larger potential pool, that viewers will most want to watch.  It must also be assumed that viewers choose movies largely on the basis of emotions and emotional need, as posited above.  (It can be argued that movies watched “for distraction” or “just for entertainment” are chosen at least partly for the purpose of not feeling certain emotions in one’s life, and even movies chosen just to pass the time are perhaps chosen to avoid the feeling of boredom.)   Nevertheless, these results are consistent with my daily observations of the TV schedule and consistent with my observations of changes in the emotional demands made on us by the ways in which our society is organized and the ways in which that is changing over time.

From this admittedly tiny amount of data, it would appear that our big concerns are dealing with fears of harm (30 movies out of 56), making family relations work, solving societal problems, and achieving a loving/romantic relationship with a significant other, in that order.  Since family relations and love relationships are so important to our daily lives, it is fitting that these concerns be represented in our movie choices, and it should be noted that even if they are not “the point” of a movie, it is standard procedure for almost all movies nowadays to include some sub-plot regarding romance and sex.  We like to believe that societal problems can be solved (even if we think that they probably cannot be); hence the five movies on solving societal problems, portraying dedicated people succeeding in improving schools, helping the homeless, or correcting government corruption.

This small experiment with movie themes could be expanded to an entire day or, even better, an entire non-holiday week to get more reliable data.  It could also be tried again every five years, to see if the data support any interpretations of directions of societal change.

POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS

There should be nothing embarrassing for the reader in recognizing his own psychological processes among those described here.  These are normal human coping and learning activities.  If the reader becomes aware through this recognition, however, that fear in general or specific fears (perhaps related to his history) are a larger problem than he has consciously recognized, he might wish to consider whether some other approach is worth trying as well, such as therapy, counseling, talking with a religious adviser, or just talking with a trusted and empathic friend.

Recognizing the degree of fear and insecurity in the general population (regardless of whether it is greater than in previous decades) might cause us to wonder what choices we have made individually and collectively that have lead to this degree of fear.  Some of it is inherent in the existential uncertainties of human life, but how we organize our social and societal relations also contributes.  For instance, our (in my opinion) overemphasis on “the bottom line” (assuming that material wealth automatically represents success and means greater happiness) has lead us to overall greater wealth but at the cost of greater insecurity through less job security and poorer job benefits (so companies can be “nimble” and compete better with overseas firms) and also perhaps through individually recognizing over time that even though we keep getting raises, we are not any happier.  Our emphasis on “taking care of number one” economically (the Great American Dream) has led us to a society in which we know few people well and have almost no one with whom we can share fully our deepest concerns.

These choices are typical of many that we make in life in which we choose immediate pleasures or gains without sufficient consideration of other consequences of our behaviors.  Hence, when we choose for economic benefit, we don’t think about what it will do to our family relations or our neighborhoods or our political processes.  Of course, we often cannot know for certain what these longer-term and more subtle changes will be, but it is possible to predict, if we are willing to recognize it, that emphasizing competition over cooperation will result in social relations that are less trusting and in which we are less concerned about others (and them about us).  This probably translates, then, to greater insecurity and fear of others, since we are less certain that others will refrain from harming us.  We might do better to discipline ourselves to consider all of these potential consequences, as best we can, and to factor them into our decisions in general. 

We are in the midst of a period of discovering that we have much less personal privacy than before, due to digital (and drone?) data being collected about us, so perhaps this is a time when we should pause to consider carefully what we hope to gain against what we may lose.  For instance, how much privacy do we wish to give up for the sake of having a free and unfettered internet, and how much privacy do we wish to give up in order to prevent some small number of terrorist attacks within the U. S.

 

essays\moviechoices