Scary movies and sexy internets
Sure, I think a lot about movies — probably more than I should, given that movies are rapidly dying as a media form. Hell, even TV is pretty old hat. I should really be spending all my time watching YouTube vids, but the problem is that when I go to YouTube (which is practically every day) all I do is watch clips from movies and TV. Usually old movies and old TV.
Anyway, I was glad to discover that an economics researcher over at UC Berkeley is just as obsessed with movies as I am. In fact, he and a colleague did a very interesting and detailed study about why people get enjoyment out of scary movies. Since they’re economics geeks, of course they phrased it differently: they wanted to know why people spend money on scary shit, a process they describe as “consuming negative feelings.” What was interesting about their research is that they discovered something that literary critics have known for centuries: it’s fun to hear, watch or read a story that arouses conflicting feelings of terror and pleasure. Ambivalence is the stuff of narrative zoom! Read more about their cool study, and how they tortured a bunch of undergraduates with bad movies and questionnaires.
While I was in Minneapolis, some local riff raff exposed me to a great movie about pornography from 1964 — Perversion for Profit. This was an anti-porn movie funded by financier Charles Keating, probably best known for architecting the 1980s savings and loan scandal. What struck me about the movie most was that it used scare tactics straight from today’s anti-internet free expression brigade. The announcer in the movie claims that “new technologies” and “new distribution methods” are putting pornography into the hands of 90% of kids! Sounds like something a nutty Congresscritter would say before proposing a bill about censoring the internet. But of course this flick is about the dangers of printed books, and the “distribution methods” are fast transit systems. So I wrote about how the rhetoric around new technologies doesn’t change.
Unfortunately, I wrote about this in a satirical way, which has resulted in a lot of hate mail. So check it out, and feel the hate!
August 11th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
The Grimm “fairy tales/folk tales” appear to be the 19th Century version of horror stories, and the end of an oral tradition that stretched back before capitalism. The point being, that when people told these stories in their original cultural context, they believed the dangers described literally existed, much as today we believe insane serial killers exist. Unfortunately, the Grimm informants were probably bourgeoise women who got the stories from their lower class nannies and cooks when the bourgeoise women were children. That is, by the time the Grimms recorded the stories, they had already been taken from their original context and began to be reinterpreted as “children’s stories”. Bowdlerization soon followed.
On a different tack, I recently read the book _This is your brain on music_ by Daniel J. Levitin. He points out that the enjoyment of music involves the entire brain working together, in particular as a musical performance meets and violates the brain’s expectations. There’s a parallel with your statement about conflicting feelings of terror and pleasure.