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MOVIES AND CONDUCT production is likely to make an individual less likely to be profoundly affected by the pictures he sees.
Among children, too, it is quite common to find one age group ostentatiously despising what it revelled in a few years before. This does not necessarily mean that the original response has really ceased to operate, for the attitude of scorn has probably been adopted for social reasons, but it does mean that the emotional effects will be less pronounced.
It should not, however, be forgotten that however emotionally detached people become, they may still use the material of motion pictures for the purposes of imitation, and may even be better equipped to do this by virtue of their freedom from absorption in the action itself.
It does, nevertheless, seem possible that the more intense forms of emotional possession induced by films could to a great extent be avoided if a more detached attitude could be developed in the mass of the people who go to the cinema. The creation of such an attitude is helped by open discussions of films between children and adolescents and their instructors, as opposed to unqualified condemnation by the latter, and would if successful prove to be a more positive method of dealing with film influence than the negative method of censorship on which we have to rely now.
Schemes of Life
In addition to having a significant influence on the emotions and personal behaviour of many children and adolescents, the cinema may also be a determining factor in the creation of the individual's general outlook on life — his plans for the future, his ideas as to what kind of life is best, and his conception of the ways in which people of different backgrounds from his own conduct themselves. In many cases the films portray a kind of society with which the spectator is himself unfamiliar, and about which he has often no other source of information. Thus whatever views he may have on these alien modes of existence will be based on what he has seen in the cinema. It may happen, moreover, that he is led to compare the life depicted on the screen with his own life, to the disadvantage of the latter, and the result may be dissatisfaction, unrest, aspirations, ambition, and so on. Some individuals work out the desires thus created in day-dreams and do not seek to transform their own lives in any way, whereas others may be inspired to try to alter their way of living to something more akin to the ideal which they have built up from film material. Where there is a tendency to
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