Earlier this week I blogged about “emotional pornography,” the movies, books, and TV shows that seek to replace normal emotions with unrealistic, stylized forms of emotions that create unrealistic expectations. While I thought the idea and the linked article were interesting, I wrestled for a while with my post as I tried to figure out what exactly to say. It didn’t quite seem right. Thanks in part to comments from my mom and grandfather, I think I figured out why: both my article and the one from Relevant are trying to lump two distinct but related issues into a single catchphrase, and it doesn’t quite work. The two issues are:
- Do the romance and romantic comedy genres create inappropriate expectations for real relationships, setting us all up for failure?
- Is it appropriate for the creators of media in general to intentionally craft their stories to elicit a particular emotional response?
Expectations in Relationships – Sorry, but I don’t see any way to dispute this one. Fire away if I’m wrong. Whether it’s good or bad is a separate question, but to me it’s very clear that romances and rom-coms intentionally create larger-than-life relationships in order to entertain us. They provide enough conflict to make the storyline interesting, but in the end, there’s generally a happy wedding between the two people we’ve been rooting for throughout the movie. They filter out the messy details of relationships unless those details can generate a good laugh.
We (well, some of us!) LOVE this stuff, right? We cheer for the Man in Black and Princess Buttercup, Jack and Rose, Prince Eric and Ariel the mermaid, and Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in every movie they do together. We imagine how much fun life would be if our lives could be like theirs. And maybe that’s not all bad. Real life is hard. Escaping it for a bit is fun.
I’m just concerned, based on my own experience and what I’ve read and heard from others, that people can be disappointed when their relationships don’t look like the ones they see in the movies. If you’re a woman who thinks she’s married Sir Lancelot, you might be horrified when he doesn’t bring home flowers every night, he gets scared if you assign him to diaper detail, and he occasionally pees in the shower because it’s more convenient. If you’re a man who thinks he married Charlie from Top Gun, you might be really confused when sometimes she isn’t in the mood because she’s PMSing, she gets mad when you get drunk and embarrass her in public, and she occasionally has to do decidedly unladylike things like taking a dump.
Emotional “Manipulation”?
This, I think, is the more interesting question. As you might have seen in the comments, my grandfather astutely points out that many of our greatest films and books have a huge emotional impact, which is one of the features that make them so great. I’ve seen hundreds of movies, if not thousands, and many of the most memorable got me involved on an emotional level. I cared about the characters, celebrating their triumphs and mourning their losses.
Rudy comes to mind. The cynic might dismiss Rudy as manipulative and even silly. Sure, Rudy’s obsession with playing football for the Irish could be considered foolish and immature. But tell me you didn’t tear up when the crowd started chanting his name in that final game or when he sacked the quarterback on his final play. The filmmakers intentionally changed some historical details, found a perfect actor for the role, and designed the film to make you care about Rudy’s quest as much as possible. You ache for him every time he gets rejected. You cheer for him when he finally gets to suit up and get on the field.
Is it manipulative to craft a story to elicit the maximum emotional response? I’m not sure.
An artist can tell the same story in many, many different ways. I don’t really write much that’s creative anymore, but when I did, I had to make countless decisions about what to include and what to exclude. Every word and every detail in a story, poem, or screenplay needs to contribute somehow – by developing a character, advancing the plot, expressing a theme, or preferably some combination thereof. I definitely tried to involve my readers emotionally as I told my story. I wanted to move them in some way, whether to laughter, fury, or tears.
If you don’t get emotionally involved with a piece of art, and it’s not making you laugh or entertaining you in some other way, then what’s the point? Why bother watching or reading until the end? I hear some critics call certain works “emotionally manipulative” in a negative sense. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I’m not sure how to make an engaging movie that doesn’t manipulate the viewer’s/reader’s emotions somehow. I suppose a lowbrow comedy could probably succeed, but most other genres need to engage our emotions. Otherwise, we just won’t care.