Tag Archives: movies

When will more romantic comedies reflect living alone, cohabitation, and women getting more education than men?

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The world of romantic relationships is changing: more people are living alone, cohabitating (maybe or maybe not marrying in the long run), and more women are obtaining college and graduate degrees than men. So when will romantic comedies reflect this?

I bring this up because I recently saw The Five-Year Engagement. This movie tackles the latter two issues I mentioned above: the couple lives together roughly 3-4 years before they get married (there is a clear period when they live separately). Also, the woman is working on a post-doc in social psychology at the University of Michigan while the man is a chef who has taken some classes as a culinary school. They end up having to try to compromise between their two jobs but little is mentioned about the relative status of the two professions. (A side note: how many people seeing this movie even know what a post-doc is? Is this mainstream? Also, I am undecided whether the film makes the field of social psychology look good or bad.) Yet, in the end, the couple still gets married. In fact, much of the plot of the movie is driven by the idea that the couple wants to get married but circumstances keep getting in the way. Additionally, the other main couple in the movie gets married quickly after they find out the woman is pregnant.

In the future, can the genre of romantic comedies survive without marriage at the end? Marriage is a nice plot device to end the film: they invariably show happy couples finally going through a marriage ceremony. It wraps up the story nicely. However, fewer American adults are married (51%) so are these films now more aspirational than ever and/or do they reflect the interests of a shrinking subset of the population? This also reminds me of the film (500) Days of Summer where marriage is not in the cards for the couple involved but movie viewers probably don’t get the same happy feeling at the end. I suspect romantic comedies will subtly or not so subtly change in the coming years to reflect these new realities and still try to provoke happy feelings even if marriage is not seen as much as the end goal.

The exterior vs. the interior of the Brady Bunch house and architecture in TV and movies

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The managing editor of Entertainment Weekly makes an interesting point regarding a famous house in American television: the exterior shots of the Brady Bunch house don’t match the interior shots.

And I grew up obsessing over a particularly brazen TV blunder: The exterior and interior of the Brady Bunch house do not match. At all. Not one bit. In case you never noticed: The interior set depicts a soaring two-story home with the second story over the structure’s right side; the outside is a low-slung split-level with a second story over the left side. (In fact, the second-floor window was fake.) How could they let this happen? Sherwood Schwartz once explained to the Los Angeles Times that the San Fernando Valley house used for the exterior shots was chosen because “we didn’t want it to be too affluent, we didn’t want it to be too blue-collar. We wanted it to look like it would fit a place an architect would live.” In other words, the exterior struck the right emotional note for audiences, and logic be damned. I can live with that. In fact, audiences will forgive almost any lapse in logic if the story does its primary job well – and that is to move us, scare us, tickle us, and give us characters worth knowing. The Brady house made no sense, but I still wanted to live there. And while it may not be necessary to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the San Francisco Airport (unless you’re coming from Sausalito), it makes for a nice aerial shot loaded with symbolism. The best purveyors of pop culture know that poetic truth trumps literal truth every time.

Six thoughts about this:

1. I’m not someone who looks for or particularly cares about inconsistencies in movies and television shows. And yet, this still seems pretty egregious: the sides of the house don’t even line up?

2. Is this house really befitting of an architect? Would any architect worth his salt really want to admit that he lived in a stereotypical split-level? While some might defend the ranch as an exemplar of post-World War II American life, are there people who defend the split-level?

3. The explanation from Sherwood Schwartz is very interesting: the home is supposed to invoke a certain American middle-classness. Another way to think about it is the home is supposed to invoke a particular emotion and then fade into the background.

4. I bet there would be a fascinating study in looking at TV and movie depictions of American homes. As Juliet Schor suggested in The Overspent American, the “middle-class house” on TV has really gotten big and more luxurious over the years.

5. The exterior of the house is interesting but what about the astro-turf lawn?

6. It can be a little bit strange to visit these television homes on the set. Two years ago, we toured the Warner Brothers studio and saw a number of sets. Here are three shots: the emergency room exterior for ER, Lorelai Gilmore’s house on Gilmore Girls, and their oft-used street scene.

After seeing these in person, I imagine there is some room for commentary about the reproducibility of more modern architecture, the impermanence of place, and how it can easily transition from one film to another TV show to a miniseries and so on…

Movie line: “Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.”

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A review of the new movie Detention includes an interesting  bit of dialogue spoken to a character who has just survived an encounter with a horror movie villain:

Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.

Since I don’t watch horror films or a lot of ultra-violent movies, I wasn’t aware that victims are often McMansion dwellers. If this is true: is this simply tied to the idea that the privileged/wealthy/popular/snobby types tend to live in such houses (meaning the setting is not the main point of the scene) or is it a larger commentary about consumption and poor-quality yet large tract housing?

The sociologist director of the Natural Hazards Center discusses how sociology helps us understand responses to disasters

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While disasters seem to be a growing area of interest across academic disciplines, a sociologist who is the director of the Natural Hazards Center talks about how sociology approaches the topic:

What’s sociology’s role in emergency management?

Sociology is a broad area, and sociologists are interested in a variety of things related to disasters and emergency management. They certainly do research and know a lot about individual, group and organizational behavior in disasters; a good deal about warning processes and warning systems; risk perception; the social factors that are associated with preparing for disasters, disaster recovery and some of the social factors that contribute to differences or disparities in the recovery process and outcomes; the politics and economics of disaster mitigation. These are some topics sociologists are interested in.

Have you done any research on what motivates people to prepare for disasters?

There’s been a lot of research on preparedness, especially household preparedness, and the research has [found] that being better prepared is associated with having higher levels of income, homeownership, to some extent with previous disaster experience, and having children in the home. These are all sociological factors that help to explain preparedness…

During your research, has there been a finding that most surprised you?

I found a lot of things that are contrary to common sense or the way most people might think about disaster behavior. One is the overwhelming altruistic pro-social response that most people engage in during disasters. It’s not like the disaster movies. I also think there are many important findings about the importance of volunteer groups and emergent groups in disasters. Ordinary community citizens can be very resourceful and can engage extensively in self-help and mutual aid when disasters happen. They don’t need to be told what to do by others. I’m seeing growing recognition that while we need experts in emergency management — we need well trained, well educated people — that the whole community is involved in mitigating, preparing for and responding to and recovering from disasters. That whole community approach was a big focus last year and will be this year from FEMA and other agencies. But it’s what sociologists have been saying all along.

I like the reference to how disaster movies tend to play up the atomistic responses to disasters. Movies, books, and TV shows tend to play up the image of the lone wanderer (typically a male?) or a few people trying to pick their way through issues with other people and the natural environment. Some of this seems to underlie recommendations about disaster preparedness: you can’t count on others to help and indeed, you might need to protect what you have from others. Granted, a large enough disaster will disrupt the response of organized government but ordinary citizens can still help each other.

This reminds of a humorous scenario I’ve discussed with several family members. In this hypothetical situation, family members would live on some sort of large piece of property where everyone could have a house yet still have some space. On this “compound,” different people could carry out different tasks that could serve the group in the event of some large disaster in the larger world. For example, being a nurse would be really useful here. However, when the conversation turns to what I could contribute to the larger group as a sociologist, I’m left suggesting something like I could help “enhance critical thinking skills.” Now I know I can contribute something else: I can help everyone work together and can helpfully point out the social factors that will aid or hinder our efforts.

Also, perhaps sociology majors would be uniquely suited to work in the area of emergency management?

Quick Review: Hunger Games movie

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Lots of action and some story and less commentary about oppressive regimes. As I noted in my review of the book series in September 2010, these books were ready-made to be movies. Here area  few thoughts about the movie itself and the experience of seeing it in a full theater.

1. I thought the movie was engaging. At the same time, the movie takes a book that is relatively sparse in terms of character development and explicit commentary and is even thinner in these areas. But there is a lot of action and some of the key relationships, Katniss and Prim, Katniss and Rue, and Katniss and Peeta, are given more time.

2. I thought the best actor in the movie was Stanley Tucci who was perfect as Caessr Flickerman.

3. With not as much time to work with in the movie, the opening parts of the first book are really compressed. What we miss in the movie then is a more complete understanding of the despair and desolation in District 12. I felt like the movie wanted us to think that the Capitol and President Snow were bad people but we didn’t have enough of the backstory to really feel it.

4. I wonder how many of the people in the theater tonight recognized any of the social commentary that is lurking in the books. The books could be taken in a couple of different directions. First, we could think about reality TV – how far away are we from a situation where people are killing each other for prizes on television? Second, the Capitol is supposed to represent tyranny and oppression and trying to stave off rebellion with a futuristic “bread and circuses.” But the movie seems to be more about the action itself and the audience members responded to this. I wonder how much the next two movies take up the social commentary and how they represent the growing rebellion against the Capitol.

4a. There were a couple of points during the Hunger Games themselves when a character was killed and people watching the movie laughed. This is an interesting reaction that sounded like it came from some teenagers or younger kids. While the action was violent (though a number of reviews said it was understated), I wonder how different it really was from what these kids have seen before. How many murders have they already seen in movies, on TV, and in video games? Plus, the kissing got a lot of reactions. Do both murders and kissing make teenagers nervous, thus the laughter?

5. I’m often amused by what “the future” looks like in movies. I was not impressed by the Capitol. Parts of the CGI were impressive (the people modeled in the large crowd scenes, for example) but it was clearly fake. The residents are shown in lively colors and interesting hair and makeup. The buildings are a little different but if you have seen a futuristic movie before, they look familiar. The special computer setup to control the Hunger Games is interesting but we’ve seen things like this before. They have 200 mph trains…which other parts of the world have now. So we’re supposed to be believe that the future includes some more avant garde style, a little better technology, and people are still glued to television screens? Not terribly futuristic.

6. The music during the closing credits was good. I’ve read some positive comments about the soundtrack and it may be worth checking out further.

7. I haven’t been in a full movie theater in quite a while. On one hand, there is a kind of buzz in the air and if the movie is good (and it apparently was tonight), people clap at the hand. On the other hand, you have lots of people going in and out and talking (and revealing key points of the plot to people next to them).

8. I was thinking earlier today that I have hopped on certain cultural bandwagons and not others. Why read all of the Hunger Games books and see the first movie or be an early adopter of Adele’s bestselling album from last year while waiting years to read Harry Potter and see all the movies? I don’t know. But if I do want to join the crowd, I can always say that I am engaging in cultural research…

Sociologist: Oscars are “insiders rewarding insiders”

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As people watching the Oscars last night might have wondered what some some of the winning films were about (Best Picture winner, The Artist, has taken in just over $31 million at the box office), a sociologist argues that the Oscars represent “insiders rewarding insiders”:

“The annual Oscars are a vital component of our cultural machinery, not only reflecting taste but producing it – and thereby creating profit for moviemakers,” says Ben Agger, director of the Center for Theory in the University of Texas at Arlington’s sociology department, in an e-mail. “The voters are insiders rewarding insiders.”…

A Los Angeles Times report found that 94 percent of Academy members are white and 77 percent are male, with blacks making up only 2 percent and Latinos less than that. The median age of Oscar voters is 62, with just 14 percent under 50 years old.

This has led to accusations of gender and race bias. But Charles Bernstein, who for 10 years was chairman of the Academy Award rules committee, is a bit tired of the yearly accusations that come AMPAS’s way.

“The Academy is not a democracy but a meritocracy,” he says.

The job of the Academy is not to reflect but to lead, he adds. These are great professionals who have achieved distinction in motion picture-making, and they are merely saying, “Here is what we most respect.’”

This is a classic culture question: does culture reflect society (perhaps the organizations and social conditions or the demands of consumers)? Or put another way, should cultural products be rewarded for being popular or being the best or outside of the box?

This could be viewed as a gatekeeper issue: who gets to decide the merits of a cultural product? I suspect the battle between “mass culture” and “high culture” will not be settled anytime soon. At this point, what would Hollywood gain by changing the current system? The Oscars are popular television and there still are enough blockbusters for Hollywood to keep moving forward. At the Oscar gathering I attended, another attendee and I were thinking through an award titled “the movie American movie-goers loved the most,” perhaps marked by the box office winner or some votes from people who actually attended the movies (perhaps like the older system of doing all-star balloting at sporting events). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Oscars found a way to include some voting input from the public, even if it was more symbolic than anything else. Perhaps their solution right now is to include enough popular films (like Bridesmaids) and celebrities (like Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez) in the show to keep people happy even though the popular people aren’t going to win.

If we truly are headed toward a more individualistic, more culturally diffuse world, we might expect that the Oscars and Grammys and all sorts of cultural gatekeepers (officials reviewers, critics, etc.) will face more trouble. This would not only be an issue of whether a majority of a culture actually experiences significant works (an interesting question in itself) but whether the public actually cares about what the gatekeepers think (why watch the Oscars if they don’t even talk about movies that most people see?). I don’t think we are close to the end of the gatekeepers but this is going to continue to be a fault line to watch.

TMQ takes apart “police procedurals” (otherwise known as crime shows)

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After some analysis of the Super Bowl, Tuesday Morning Quarterback gets down to his real business of dissecting “police procedurals.” Here are some points I appreciated:

Television is swamped in police dramas. During a recent week, 14 of the 45 Big Three prime-time hours were crime shows. Except they no longer are called that — the genre is now “procedurals.” In theory this means the shows depict police procedure. In practice, being a procedural means a formula. Here it is…[a 15 point formula follows]

On TV, cops exist in constant jeopardy of life and limb. This, though “most police officers retire at the end of a 20- or 25-year career without ever having fired a weapon other than at the practice range.” Despite the bullets ricocheting around them, TV detectives are NEVER frightened. Most are spoiling to charge headlong into obvious danger…

But isn’t the violence realism? In the world of TV, murder and mayhem are an epidemic. Actually crime is in generation-long cycle of decline. Today, strollers are safer in Central Park after dark than in the 1950s. Last year, Central Park averaged slightly more than one robbery a month, versus two robberies a day a generation ago. Yet on procedurals, crime is getting worse. This plays to preconceived notions about the nation falling apart, especially such notions held by senior citizens, who watch a lot of television.And on procedurals, the police always catch the bad guy. Actually a significant number of homicides are never solved, while most burglaries never even lead to an arrest. Of course, procedurals are just Hollywood nonsense. But procedurals get it wrong both ways: making crime seem more common than it is, but also making crime seem never to pay.

Lots of good material here.

One might say that this doesn’t matter, people clearly know what is entertainment on television and they don’t mistake police shows for what actually happens. But I would argue that this is not the case: most people’s knowledge about police work and crime likely comes from the mass media, particularly depictions on television and in movies. Crime rates are going down yet one wouldn’t know it from its rising popularity on TV. Serial killers are uncommon except on television. Children are rarely abducted except on television. These shows and movies aim to trigger emotional reactions (as TMQ notes, the grisliness of the crimes is often shocking) and fearful responses.

A silly and yet illustrative example from my own life: where I hear news that someone was killed during the day, I have a hard time reconciling this with media images I’ve seen for years that murders tend to take place in stormy situations. While the storms in shows and movies might be more metaphorical than anything else, I have this idea in my head that this is when killing happens. I would guess there is not much data to back this up but this is an idea that has stuck with me even though it was never clearly expressed to me. Violent crime = bad weather.

If we expect citizens to be able to discuss and vote intelligently about important topics like crime and punishment (and have no doubt, we like to punish people), how can this happen if television is painting a heavily slanted story? I wouldn’t suggest that television needs to be completely realistic but at the same time, common images have a cultural power that is difficult to counteract.

Researchers develop an equation to help predict the next hit song

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A team of researchers says they have developed an equation that helps predict which songs will become hit singles. Here is how the equation works:

We represent each song using a set of 23 different features that characterize the audio. Some are very simple features — such as how fast it is, how long the song is — and some are more complex features, such as how energetic the song is, how loud it is, how danceable and how stable the beat is throughout the song. We also took into account the highest rank that songs ever achieved on the chart.

The computer can combine a song’s features in an equation that can be used to score any given song.

We can then evaluate how accurately the computer scored it by seeing how well the song actually did.

Every single week now we’re updating our equation based on how recent releases have done on the chart. So the equation will continue to evolve, because music tastes will evolve as well.

As the researchers note, this equation is based mainly on the musical content and doesn’t factor in the content of the lyrics or budgeting for the song and music group. The equation seems mainly to be based on whatever musical styles and changes are already popular so I wonder how they account for changes in musical periods.

If this equation works well (and the interview doesn’t really say how accurate this formula is for new songs), this could be a big boon for the culture industries. The movie, music, and book industry all struggle with this: it is very difficult to predict which works will become popular. There are ways in which companies try to hedge their bets either by working with established stars/performers/authors, working with established stories and characters (more sequels, anyone?), and trying to read the cultural zeitgeist (more vampires!). But, in the end, the industries can survive because enough of the works become blockbusters and help subsidize the rest.

At the same time, haven’t people claimed they have cracked this code before? For example, you can quickly find people (like this and this) who claim they have it figured out. And yet, revenues and ticket sales were down in 2011. There is a disconnect here…

Part of the appeal of “It’s a Wonderful Life”: geographic stability

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In a number of ways, It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic American holiday tale: George Bailey fights the big banker, the importance of family is stressed, and people pursue single-family homes in new subdivisions. But one scholar suggests another dimension is appealing to people today: the geographic stability of characters in the movie.

Part of the appeal today of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” story may be the geographic stability that the film depicts.

Sparks pointed to research reported in 1943 in the Journal of Sociology that 75 percent of the couples to be married in New Haven, Conn., and Philadelphia lived within 20 blocks of each other while growing up.

He said that’s essentially the lifestyle reflected in the movie’s setting, Bedford Falls — a fictionalized town where people were born, grew up, raised families and lived out their lives.

“The relationships you formed in Bedford Falls were for life,” Sparks said. “This is in stark contrast to the way we live today, and I think that most of us sense that as we have become more mobile, we’ve lost something.”

There is an intimacy among the characters of the film that is appealing to some viewers, and George Bailey is even brought back from the pit of despair after seeing how his absence would negatively affect both his family and his friends. The interesting suggestion here is that these relationships are embedded in a particular geographic context that matters. George is known around the town and he fights for a better community, not just for the people he knows. This is most tangibly demonstrated by the conflict George has with Mr. Potter, the banker. George simply wants to offer residents of Bedford Falls a taste of the American Dream (which looks much like the post-war suburbs) with cheap rent. To state it in a slightly different way, it’s not just the relationships that are important but the space they help make and are shaped by.

Another way to think about this would be to imagine trying to make a movie with these themes today. Movies about relationships are not unusual. However, is it plausible to put George Bailey within a 2011 community that has such tight relationships? Without focusing on some small group or subculture, how many movies present truly interconnected relationships within communities? Most movies about the suburbs or small towns tend to focus on dysfunction. I have little doubt that academics have contributed to this image by decrying the blandness, striving, and hidden lives of suburbanites.

While It’s a Wonderful Life may seem like it is from a very different era, Americans have expressed a desire to live in small towns. A 2009 Pew survey found that while suburban Americans were most satisfied with their communities, 30% said they would prefer to live in small towns versus 25% in suburbs, 21% in cities, and 21% in rural areas. Of course, the boundaries between these different types may be very different in the minds of Americans, and within the Census boundaries, one might be able to find all four types within a metropolitan region.

Study: people tend to make friends on Facebook with people of similar tastes

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A recently published study of college students argues that people become Facebook friends with people of similar tastes:

“The more tastes that you and I share in common, the more likely we are to become friends,” said study author Kevin Lewis, a graduate student in sociology at Harvard University.

The findings seem to contradict the conventional wisdom that people are easily influenced by those around them. Instead, “we’re seeking out people we already resemble rather than learning new perspectives and liking new things,” Lewis said…

The goal of the study was to understand how people choose friendships, Lewis said. The researchers started with 1,640 students at an unnamed U.S. college in 2006 and tracked their Facebook friendships and tastes — in popular music, movies and books — until they were seniors in 2009…

The study found that “students who share some tastes in movies and music are more likely to become friends,” Lewis said. Shared tastes in books were less influential.

Sounds like an interesting study. I haven’t read the full study but there are two other things I would want to know:

1. The study is restricted to college students. Might this influence the results? Of course, these college students will become the adults of the next few decades.

2. How does this fit with existing research that shows that people tend to be Facebook friends with people they already know? Things are a little different in college where students are more willing to friend people in these classes (actual academic courses and year in school). But, most Facebook users are not going online to find new friends with whom they don’t previously have a connection.

3. The last paragraph I cited above makes me think of branding. Younger people in particular define themselves by some of their tastes and it doesn’t shock me that this is done more through music and movies than books. So are books more private tastes or are very few people in college reading?