5 Ways You Don't Realize Movies Are Controlling Your Brain

[Brian G Turner]

It's a melodramatic title, but the heart of the argument made is that we are primed to understand the world in terms of a story and our role in it, and that films actively try and influence this perception. Quite clever, once you get past the ramble:

5 Ways You Don't Realize Movies Are Controlling Your Brain | Cracked.com

 

[Parson]

Brian,

This is one well thought out piece of journalism. (Did I really say that about Cracked?!) It is one of the reasons why being a Pastor is so hard, and also so scarey. In a sense we are in the business of establishing the narrative of the world. Which is why we have so often been opposed to theater, books, and movies. They write a story often with an illegitimate morality.

 

[Brev]

Interesting piece, and entertaining too. Thanks for sharing.

 

[J Riff]

\and the subliminal stuff is even worser. \the music biz is just as bad

 

[Alexa]

The editor made a point there. I cannot say I do not agree with him.

Unfortunately some people really believe that what they see in a movie must be the true. I had a girl at work a while ago who was one of them. We looked at her like she was not in her mind. I wonder, how many are like her ? After all, the guy who called himself *the Joker* is not the only one who killed innocent people and children under the influence of movies and war games.

We all need something to dream about and movies can help us do it. What I really don't like is that not all those who make movies are good. There are too many copy cats and bad ones. Money can be used for better purposes.

 

[JunkMonkey]

While I agree with the basic thrust of the argument: 'People like stories'. I really have to argue with the daft assertion that:

Michael Bay feels a certain way about women, and about the role of women in the world, and you will leave his movie agreeing with him just a little bit more than when you came in.

This would imply that we are all so stupid and easily lead that we have no critical faculties at all. If we are told a story, it says, we must believe it at some level, or at least come away with sympathy for the story teller's perspective.

This is cobblers.

To take an extreme example (and I have no wish to belittle anyone's belief structures here) I am 54 years old and I have been subjected to the Christian 'narrative' for over half a century. (Not constantly, obviously, though sometimes it has felt like it.) I'm still as much an atheist as I ever was. It's a myth. It's fiction. It's a story that doesn't interest me.

I really don't want what I'm saying to be construed as an attack on religion. If it makes you happy....

I think the author of the piece has the whole argument on its head. Stories weren't invented as a method of imposing order on others. (Bizarrely he seems to think that story-telling starts with the formation of 'civilizations' - and then waffles about 'the tribe across the river' which makes me think he doesn't understand what the word 'civilization' means either.)

Story telling is far older than the onset of civilization; that was just when they started writing them down. People like stories because they make patterns. People are people because we have the ability to extrapolate. It's what makes us humans. We can join the dots. Our ancestors didn't just chase antelope till they dropped from exhaustion and ate them. Our ancestors worked out where their prey would be; trapped them; threw pointy sticks in elegant curves at them. We have an innate ability to do maths, make patterns. People like patterns. We like resolution. Stories are an expression of that need to impose a pattern on the greater chaotic universe. Stories come from within us. They're not imposed on us.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

To take an extreme example (and I have no wish to belittle anyone's belief structures here) I am 54 years old and I have been subjected to the Christian 'narrative' for over half a century. (Not constantly, obviously, though sometimes it has felt like it.) I'm still as much an atheist as I ever was.

I'd suggest that that's because you're not constantly receiving the Christian narrative subliminally, in the guise of entertainment.

Stories come from within us. They're not imposed on us.

I don't agree with that at all.

They come from within the storytellers and other people -- their audiences, or readers -- soak them up. Not everyone creates their own stories. I've heard countless people say they haven't the imagination and I think those are the ones most vulnerable to being influenced by the stories of those who do, because they don't understand how the author or movie maker manipulates their emotions and perceptions either for artistic reasons or to get a message across. (Those of us who write stories are more likely to recognize what is happening.) Some narratives are consciously constructed to get an idea or a message across -- and that's not always a bad thing -- but even when the person or persons who create the story don't intend it, something of their world view will naturally seep into the story. It's inevitable. And the better the author or the movie maker is at manipulating the readers' or the audience's emotions and perceptions, the more that story and the world view it represents is going to be "imposed from without" on a significant number of people. Of course those most susceptible to the ideas contained in a particular story -- that is, those who are already half-convinced, or who haven't thought about them much before, or who find those ideas encouraging or comforting -- are the most likely to be influenced.

 

[farntfar]

You're right, JunkMonkey, that we apply our own judgement to the story but we can still be affected by them emotionally even when we disagree intellectually.

The suggestion is that we are predisposed to take lessons and ideas from the stories that are given to us. Not that we beleive every word of avery story that we hear.

Stories have been used to teach us ethics, morals and life lessons both now and in the past, and from a very early age.

Think of children's fairy tales and the tortoise and the hare type story.
Think of parables.
"The play's the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

And surely the argument is that the less analytical of us may be persuaded to accept the story without thinking about it, especially if the story is well told or well filmed.

A good storyteller can be very persuasive, and make people believe almost anything.

 

[Brian G Turner]

This would imply that we are all so stupid and easily lead that we have no critical faculties at all. If we are told a story, it says, we must believe it at some level, or at least come away with sympathy for the story teller's perspective.

Michael Bay treats Megan Fox's first appearance as like a soft-porn shoot in the making. That defines her character and our response to her.

When women are continually objectified in film making, women in real life become (continue to be) objectified.

Most female support roles exist to merely reward the male hero with sex for 'winning' and Michael Bay emphasises that. And people are influenced by the media they consume.

Someone who has had time to mature may be less susceptible, but Transformers is marketed squarely at young developing males.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I can't argue with the way Bay portrays his female characters I have only seen one of his films, The Island, which was so laughably dreadful I've avoided the rest.

I'm not denying story telling has an effect on people but they were not a human invention like the wheel or the knapped flint. They are a human need. We need to tell stories. It's our way of making sense of the chaos.

They come from within the storytellers and other people -- their audiences, or readers -- soak them up. Not everyone creates their own stories. I've heard countless people say they haven't the imagination

Yes they do. We all do. We do it every night. We dream. We spend a third of our lives asleep and a great chunk of that time is spent dreaming. When we wake we try to make sense of the dreams; try to make them coherent. I'll bet you that every person who has told you they have 'no imagination' has bored their loved ones over the breakfast table telling them about "This crazy dream I had last night...."

It's the people who can and take the effort to make that process more interesting that we call story-tellers.

I've watched and played with all three of my kids since they were babies (I'm lucky enough to be a stay at home dad) and, almost as soon as they could talk, they were investing their toys with attributes and telling me about what they were doing, and where they had been, and what was happening in this weird imaginary world that only they could see. Even my eldest daughter who is autistic has this imaginative urge. Were all born story-tellers. It's just that some of us are good at it. Most of us are crap.

 

[jastius]

Michael Bay treats Megan Fox's first appearance as like a soft-porn shoot in the making. That defines her character and our response to her.

When women are continually objectified in film making, women in real life become (continue to be) objectified.

Most female support roles exist to merely reward the male hero with sex for 'winning' and Michael Bay emphasises that. And people are influenced by the media they consume.

Someone who has had time to mature may be less susceptible, but Transformers is marketed squarely at young developing males.

actually i thought he filmed megan in exactly the same way way that they filmed linda carter as wonderwoman, farrah fawcett as jill on charlies angels, or suzanne summers as christie on three's company..
megan fox was idealized as a stereotypical female role as per the original transformers characterizations. in all ways this movie was a idealization of seventies culture.. for example? the agent wearing underoos, the taco bell dog, the camaro, the CB radios, the secretary? who has a steno pool anymore? but in this movie they did...
all these were style touches not brain braiding efforts to circumvent disco and women's lib.
if you want to talk about filmmakers attempting to propagandize a film, may i direct this thread to the neo-fascist redirection of Robert Heinlien's Starship-Troopers? and put there deliberately and purposefully by the filmmakers and the book starship troopers was chosen expressly for the purpose of showcasing their statement. this was revealed in an interview of the filmmakers where they stated this objective recently and itemized the parts of the film they had twisted to reflect their mission statement.

like, brian, when megan fox goes around with a marilyn monroe tattoo upon her arm and states in interviews that she wishes to be a sex goddess like marilyn, i don't think it was entirely the producers that sexed up this girl..
that it seems an aberration now is more likely to be the effect of her husband, brian green's jealously vetoing any more glam roles for her, then any actual indication of her stance upon the matter... (who else here thinks that megan would make a kick-butt wonderwoman if brian green didn't get his panties in a wad about her roles?)

 

[tinkerdan]

I'm not going to argue that this is all wrong because it has elements of some reality but it contains its own element of fiction which each person needs to examine before they accept it as some truth of sagacious value.

In other words this article is a perfect example of the very thing that it's trying to expose. He has an agenda and he's assuming his audience will take his word that everything he says it truth. Or maybe he's just trying to make people think; either way in a small or maybe a large way he's become a part of the problem. Unless we examine it before we accept it and in this venue there is a slight more insidiousness happening than in something that we already should know is fiction like tv and movies and books of fiction.

Not withstanding the notion that some people might go away confused because they often do and the whole point is that afterwards it should motivate them to look things up and find out which is fact and which is fiction or just assume it is all fiction. The writer of this article assumes that everyone fails to do this or is doomed to fail even when they try and that we are all mindlessly allowing ourselves to be driven by psuedo-facts based on his own personal experience with either himself or people he has around him.

This becomes dangerous thinking because it's too easy to step from here to blaming all the movies, myths, tv, books, and other works for all psychological aberration in people despite any number of times one claims they are not being paranoid conspiracy driven when pointing this out.

Make no mistake he has his finger on the pulse of a symptom of a greater problem but putting the blame in this one place is like treating a person only for a headache when they have a concussion.

I would venture a guess that more people are subject to this problem with conversations with their friends and neighbors who they have less reason to disbelieve than they are from the fiction they actively engage in. But that's only a guess based on my own experiences.

 

[Parson]

I think we're mostly missing the point. His argument isn't that everyone buys the story, just that almost all of us accept some of what is said to be true, because we haven't taken the time or lack the resources to do the fact checking work. I thought his point about making a call after being arrested was well taken.

It is essentially the same argument that Hitler made in Mein Kamph. Paraphrasing here: "If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one because people are always going to discount part of what you say. If your lie is big enough you will still make some of your point."


Also, I don't think I'd equate dreaming with imaginative story telling. I would place it more as the human response of trying to make sense of what are sometime disparate stimuli that go rolling through the sub-conscious.

 

[jastius]

there was a nice program on the history channel whose host, ann medina, would go over the films shown and expose any historical inaccuracy within it.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Also, I don't think I'd equate dreaming with imaginative story telling. I would place it more as the human response of trying to make sense of what are sometime disparate stimuli that go rolling through the sub-conscious.

Yes. The human response disparate stimuli, confusion, unrelated incidents is to try and make a narrative out of it. Our dreams are confusing; we impose narrative on to them to make sense of them. We tell ourselves stories all the time. 'If I go here and do that then this will happen.', 'If Y is happening to me right now (or something that appears to be similar to Y) then Z (or similar) must have happened before it and X (or similar) must come afterwards...'

I think the best argument for my case is the fact that we find things funny. All of us. From birth humans find incongruity funny. (Well as soon as we have gathered enough data to be able to tell when something is incongruous. I'm sure near full term foetuses could find things funny but, given the amount of data they have to extrapolate with is limited I'm not sure how you could - ethically - go about testing this. Even if you could find the funding.)

Humour isn't an invention. It is a universal human attribute. Without the innate ability to understand and create 'story' then humour can't exist.

 

[Parson]

I hesitate to answer a post numbered 666 --

I would agree with what you have said. I hadn't really considered humor before, but I would say that it is part and parcel of the same kind of connection making that is there trying to make sense of our dreams.

I fail to see how this undercuts any of the argument that the article was making about the power of stories in our lives. I think it would be more likely to underline the power of narrative to shape our thinking and thereby our lives.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't undercut any of the arguments. I agree with most of the arguments (in general, though I'm pretty sure he's sure what he's saying applies to 'other people' more than it does to him).

I was taking issue with this:

#4. Stories Were Invented to Control You

This isn't some paranoid conspiracy theory -- it's a fundamental part of how human culture came about. Ask yourself: Why do we go watch superhero movies? After all, variations of these stories about brave, superhuman heroes predate recorded history. We used to tell them around campfires before written language even existed.

They were created as a way to teach you how to behave.

This maybe bad phrasing; he might have meant that individual stories were constructed to instruct and mould opinions - but the way it is at the moment, he's saying that the whole idea of stories is a human construct. To my mind it's the other way round; we are human because we tell stories.

 

[Parson]

Okay, I'm with you now. I would agree that if we didn't tell stories we wouldn't be human (or at least not fully human). But I would also agree that stories were told not only to entertain, but also to train, to recruit, and to socialize humans into human society.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I can't really add on to what has been an eloquent and enjoyable discussion to follow on here, but I wanted to say this.

Cracked.com is one of my guilty procrastination pleasures. It helps me relax in my breaks at work, or even when the kids are in exams and I have to invigilate some interminably long maths exam (maths: yuk! Dance teachers only need to be able to count up to 8 ) and laugh at the irreverent captions to their pictures.

However, they're often like the Daily Mail of the internet in terms of scaremongering sometimes. A few days prior to IBrian posting this, I had read an equally emotive article on their site about how videogames and movies DO NOT have an quantitive effect on us.

<sigh>

pH

 

[Parson]

However, they're often like the Daily Mail of the internet in terms of scaremongering sometimes. A few days prior to IBrian posting this, I had read an equally emotive article on their site about how videogames and movies DO NOT have an quantitive effect on us.

<sigh>

pH

That idea is just stupid! If there were no quantitative effect from exposure to media advertising would be useless. But clearly that is not true. The effect that it has on us can quite easily be overstated. But there is a demonstrable effect to exposure to anything over a period of time.