Abstract
In this collected volume we argue that films and television series are a privileged means for taking The Pulse of Our Times, because they reveal the shifts in our emotional preferences, conventions, and ‘emotional regimes’. Films allow us to discern what is time honored about emotions and what is historically contingent. By their thematic choices, their preferences for specific genres and their decisions about editing and actors, films convey information about tastes and preoccupations at a given period in time. In this respect the shift in genres from the comedies of the 1950s–1970s to the crime fiction of the 2000s, and the movies on zombies, wars, and snipers are telling. The emotional climate shifted from utopian to dystopian scenarios, from forward looking to disillusioned views, from self-enjoying, happy, and youthful comedies to ‘breaking bad’, and struggle for survival. There is a remarkable discrepancy between the factual living conditions of people, which improved since the 1950s, and the general dystopia portrayed in fiction. While movies on the vacation topic from the 1960s to the 1980s depicted a world that people desired and could aspire to, the ever more realistic and violent crime fiction, which is favored in the 2000s, depicts part of the reality that people cannot escape. The hyper-realistic crime fiction serials cater to the need to spice up reality. For instance, The Wire is said to be addictive, ‘absorbing’, ‘challenging and gratifying’ (Williams, 2011: 208). This fiction provides an outlet or a safety valve for all those negative emotions that daily life generates and that are banned from being expressed (Ross, 2014).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, M. (2007). Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope. London: I. B. Tauris.
Álvarez, R. (2004). The Wire. Truth be told. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Anderson, S. W., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. (1999). ‘Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in the human prefrontal cortex’, Nature Neuroscience, 2 (11), 1032–7.
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. (1997). ‘Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy’, Science, 275 (5304), 1293–5.
Beilenson, P. L. & McGuire, P. A. (2012). Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bernhardt, B. C. & Singer, T. (2012). ‘The neural basis of empathy’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 35, 1–23.
Biess, F. & Gross, D. M. (2014). Science and Emotions After 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Biressi, A. (2001). Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave.
Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (1st edition). New York: W. W. Norton.
Bradley, M. M., Codispoti, M., Cuthbert, B. N., & Lang, P. J. (2001). ‘Emotion and motivation I: Defensive and appetitive reactions in picture processing’, Emotion, 1 (3), 276.
Brandt, G. W. (1993). British Television Drama in the 1980s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, D., Lauricella, S., Douai, A., & Zaidi, A. (2012). ‘Consuming television crime drama: A uses and gratifications approach’, American Communication Journal, 14 (1), 47–60.
Brown, J. (2013). ‘Introduction to TV’s The Wire’, Labor, 10 (1), 9–10.
Burston, P., Nfa, P. B., & Richardson, C. (2005). A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Cacioppo, J. T. & Gardner, W. L. (1999). ‘Emotion’, Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 191–214.
Chaddha, A. & Wilson, W. J. (2011). ‘“Way Down in the Hole”: Systemic urban inequality and The Wire’, Critical Inquiry, 38 (1), 1–23.
Chang, Y.-K. (2005). ‘Through queers’ eyes: Critical educational ethnography in queer studies’, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27 (2), 171–208.
Craig, P. & Cadogan, M. (1981). The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. Michigan: Victor Gollancz.
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.
Damasio, A. R. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.
Decety, J. (2010). The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans. Developmental Neuroscience, 32 (4), 257–267.
de Gelder, B., Böcker, K. B., Tuomainen, J., Hensen, M., & Vroomen, J. (1999). ‘The combined perception of emotion from voice and face: Early interaction revealed by human electric brain responses’, Neuroscience Letters, 260 (2), 133–6.
De Vignemont, F. & Singer, T. (2006). ‘The empathic brain: how, when and why?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (10), 435–41.
Dillon, K. & Crummey, N. (2015). The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.
Dixon, T. (2003). From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunleavy, T. (2009). Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fassin, D. (2014). ‘True life, real lives: Revisiting the boundaries between ethnography and fiction’, American Ethnologist, 41 (1), 40–55. doi: 10.2307/24027562
Ferguson, C. J. (2014). Does Media Violence Predict Societal Violence? It Depends on What you Look at and When. Journal of Communication.
Fishman, M. & Cavender, G. (1998). Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Fox, E. (2008). Emotion Science: Cognitive and Neuroscientific Approaches to Understanding Human Emotions. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freedman, J. L. (2002). Media violence and its effect on aggression: assessing the scientific evidence. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
Frevert, U., Scheer, M., Schmidt, A., Eitler, P., Hitzer, B., Verheyen, N., Gammerl, B., Bailey, C., & Pernau, M. (2014). Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 (1st edition). Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Gallese, V., Keysers, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2004). ‘A unifying view of the basis of social cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8 (9), 396–403.
Gammerl, B. (2012). ‘Emotional styles — concepts and challenges’, Rethinking History, 16 (2), 161–75.
Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. New York: Viking.
Golby, A. J., Gabrieli, J. D., Chiao, J. Y., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2001). ‘Differential responses in the fusiform region to same-race and other-race faces’, Nature Neuroscience, 4 (8), 845–50.
González, A. M. (2012). The Emotions and Cultural Analysis. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Greene, J. & Haidt, J. (2003). ‘How (and where) does moral judgement work?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 517–23.
Grodal, T. K. (1997). Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press.
Grodal, T. K. (2009). Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Haidt, J. (2001). ‘The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment’, Psychological Review, 108 (4), 814–34.
Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (20th anniversary edition). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-help. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, N. K., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1998). ‘Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (4), 887.
Jeannerod, M. & Decety, J. (1995). ‘Mental motor imagery: A window into the representational stages of action’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 5 (6), 727–32.
Kestner, J. A. (2003). Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Kruse, C. (2010). ‘Producing absolute truth: CSI science as wishful thinking’, American Anthropologist, 112 (1), 79–91. doi: 10.1111/j.1548–1433.2009.01198
Lamm, C., Decety, J., & Singer, T. (2011). ‘Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain’, Neuroimage, 54 (3), 2492–502.
Lawrence, J. S., & Jewett, R. (2002). The myth of the American superhero. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Erdmans.
Leishman, F. & Mason, P. (2003). Policing and the Media: Facts, Fictions and Factions. Cullompton, Devon, Portland, OR: Willan.
Lieberman, M. D., Hariri, A., Jarcho, J. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2005). ‘An fMRI investigation of race-related amygdala activity in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals’, Nature Neuroscience, 8 (6), 720–2.
Lutz, C. & Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matt, S. J. (2011). ‘Current emotion research in history: Or, doing history from the inside out’, Emotion Review, 3 (1), 117–24.
Mayes, T. (2002). Restraint Or Revelation? Free Speech and Privacy in a Confessional Age. London: Spiked.
Mittell, J. (2009). All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic in N. Wardrip-Fruin & P. Harrigan (Eds), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 429–38 ). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Pearl, S. (2010). About Faces. Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Potter, T. & Marshall, C. W. (2009). The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. New York: Continuum.
Reddy, W. M. (2001). The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Reddy, W. M. (2009). ‘Historical research on the self and emotions’, Emotion Review, 1 (4), 302–15.
Rosenwein, B. (2002). ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, 107 (3), 821–45.
Ross, J. (2014). ‘Teaching scholarship through a seminar on The Wire’, Journal of Legal Education, 64 (1), 123–5.
Schaub, J. C. (2010). ‘The Wire: Big brother is not watching you in body-more, murdaland’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38 (3), 122–32.
Shuker-Haines, T. & Umphrey, M. M. (1998). ‘Gender (de) mystified: Resistance and recuperation in hard-boiled female detective fiction’, Contributions To The Study Of Popular Culture, chapter 7, p. 71–82 in Delamater, J., & Prigozy, R. (Eds), The detective in American fiction, film, and television. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Stearns, C. Z. & Stearns, P. N. (1988). Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory. New York: Holmes & Meier.
Stearns, P. N. (1994). American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-century Emotional Style. New York: New York University Press.
Tyler, T. R. (2006). ‘Viewing CSI and the threshold of guilt: Managing truth and justice in reality and fiction’, The Yale Law Journal, 1050–85.
Van den Stock, J., Righart, R., & De Gelder, B. (2007). ‘Body expressions influence recognition of emotions in the face and voice’, Emotion, 7 (3), 487–94.
Vrticka, P., Lordier, L., Bediou, B., & Sander, D. (2014). ‘Human Amygdala response to dynamic facial expressions of positive and negative surprise’, Emotion, 14 (1), 161–9.
Wassmann, C. (2014). ‘“Picturesque incisiveness”: Explaining the celebrity of James’s Theory of Emotion’, Journal of History of Behavioural Sciences, 50 (2), 166–88. doi: 10.1002/jhbs.21651
Williams, L. (2011). ‘Ethnographic imaginary: The genesis and genius of The Wire’, Critical Inquiry, 38 (1), 208–26.
Wundt, W. (1863). Vorlesungen über die Menschen — und Thierseele (Vol. 2 ). Leipzig: L. Voss.
Wundt, W. (1891). Zur Lehre von den Gemüthsbewegungen. Philosophische Studien, 6, 335–393.
Wundt, W. (1902). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie ( 5th edition ). Leipzig: W. Engelmann.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Claudia Wassmann
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wassmann, C. (2015). A Tentative Conclusion: The Pulse of Our Times. In: Wassmann, C. (eds) Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137546821_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137546821_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54681-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54682-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)