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MOVIES AND CONDUCT
One of the most obvious influences is in the field of dress, hair style and personal mannerisms. One nineteen-year-old college girl appears to have based her whole wardrobe on ideas taken from films, and there are numerous instances of the appropriation of details such as jewellery, new ways of using perfume and accessories in general.
In fact, out of 458 papers by high school students, 62 per cent admitted imitations of this or a similar kind. The witnessing of films dealing with society life creates a desire to emulate conduct of the actors in such settings. Thus one girl of fifteen would watch intently the behaviour of the women at table — how they sat and talked, what gestures they used, and so on. Men, too, show this trait, as for instance the college boy of twenty who learned from the cinema the right way to touch his hat, and take a lady's arm.
Much 'trying out' of screen manners in private before the mirror occurs before some of the imitators employ the new effect in public. This is particularly true of girls who wish to acquire some facial expression of a favourite star, but it extends to ways of sitting, walking, and even of crying!
There is, of course, a good deal of the method of 'trial and error' in this kind of imitation. If a trick or mannerism does not produce the desired effect or, even worse, is ridiculed, it will be quickly abandoned. In some cases, too, the opposition of parents will necessitate its rejection, as when one girl startled her family by adorning herself with an ankle bracelet. Sometimes, however, the lesson learnt from the screen is a valuable one, and may lead to a girl's acquiring better deportment, an easier social manner, and a general savoirfaire which, though it may not be based on an ideal way of living, is yet useful in helping the beginner in life to accommodate himself or herself to the accepted behaviour patterns of the group.
Perhaps the most striking way in which young people use motion pictures as a guide to living is in their relations with the opposite sex. We prefer to use in this context the term 'guide' rather than imitation, because it seems to us that in the sphere of instinctreaction it is participation mystique which may be interpreted as the mechanism of the guiding function. (To what extent participation also underlies the imitation of fashion, hair style, mannerism, is difficult to say. We are inclined to see in all forms of 'imitation' an element of participation.) Love in all its aspects is of supreme interest to the adolescent, and it is at the same time an unexplored territory of which they have so far had little experience. They are thus
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