Child Development – Hollywood Style
Abstract:
Many psychologists and theorists strongly advocate a growth and character model of a child’s development rather than a simple idea of parental influence (Freud 1900/Berne 1960) and social modeling by imitation (Bandura 1980). However, in this article I would like to explore the influence of cinema in how the main actors of the cinema can have a great influence not only on how society sees itself, but also on how individuals can shape certain aspects of personality. of the screen to guide and influence their own lives.
Introduction:
If you ask most Americans what a man looks like, they’ll tell you it’s John Wayne. (LA Times – survey). Why would a generation of Americans identify with a movie actor as their ideal, someone actually playing a role in a movie that isn’t real, a fantasy character portraying a fictional historical moment or a contemporary moment? Also, if you identify with this actor and his screen persona, how has that influenced your attitudes towards life and a way of behaving that means not a role model of a father/mother, but a representation of a character from Movie stars? They often cite that the reason John Wayne never won many acting awards was because he was just being himself in all parts of it. This is because certain actors become bigger than the movies they star in. So, in this sense, the public said that it is a John Wayne movie instead of identifying with the story line (plot) of the movie. Today we can think of the recent 2012 film about the end of the world through a solar disaster. Like all disaster movies, the star is the special effects in which the actors intervene as hapless victims of a catastrophe. Moviegoers talk about the great visual scenes and not the performance of the actors. This leads to the conclusion also that modern film actors are less influential as role models than perhaps in the past. Today, fans are more interested in celebrities than what they actually see on screen. Actors have become the focus of teen idols instead of serious entertainers.
In terms of child development, as we grow up on a diet of movies from the past, from a Hollywood in which we see and hear our screen hero talk tough, like men of action, with key morality, handsome (in the most cases) and rigidly romantic. . If you grew up as a post WWII baby, television was in its infancy and therefore most kids who had the means went to the movies. Here they would see the heroes on the big screen doing all those things they wish they could do, except those times are long gone. The way of the West is bygone (and mostly fictional), the Gangsters and molls of the thirties have gone along with damnation. So as a kid you want to recreate that movie on the playground, in your bedroom, with your toy soldiers, teddy bears, and your friends. A cardboard box in the garden was turned into a fort, a car, a castle and anything else your mind could imagine. Today, sadly, that’s what’s missing from modern youth, a diet of violent movies, depicting high-tech adversaries and special effects that have left no room for the gaming imagination. Instead, we have a generation of lonely kids pampered in rooms fixed to computer screens who have their every need fulfilled by someone else’s imagination through games and short videos. You don’t have to imagine yourself being a part of something, you’re a part of it, like the hero who shoots straight and finds his way through the levels of a computer game. Don’t think, he just reacts!
child moral development
Movies of the past often had censorship rules to apply when content that was harmful (in the eyes of the government) was strictly enforced to prevent harmful language or content from being absorbed by those who avidly watched movies. Over time, most of the censorship has disappeared and been replaced by a rating system that pretty much allows any content at the discretion of the audience, who can choose to watch a movie or not. Older movies often featured heroes who through some trial would overcome everything to do “the right thing.” Good defeated evil and people walked out of the theater knowing that the world is always safe when heroes can be counted on. So, for the watching boy, doing the right thing was social learning housing in a society that saw the power of the Church decline after World War II among the young. Movies were almost the new tool for understanding the moral stories that the New Testament and other religious ideologies were trying to teach readers. Now we could not only read about morality, but see it on the screen, with flawed characters overcoming their difficulties to win and fix things. When you were a kid watching these movies, you would walk out of the theater with a heightened idea of right and wrong, good and evil, for those who grew up in the 70s however things changed. Actors like Clint Eastwood produced Westerns with an antihero; the Dollar Westerns had an unnamed man who, as a gunslinger, was interested in collecting money for dead outlaws, the bounty hunter. In these movies, the anti-hero (Eastwood) would steal, kill and have easy sex with no moral thought other than to take what he wants by whatever means he can. For young people born in the 1960s, this era of cinema represented confusing values. It was the age of the new teenager, young people with money to spend, better education than previous youth, and a more rebellious stance toward authority than previous generations. Clint Eastwood later produced the anti-hero Dirty Harry, a cop who got the job done despite his anti-authoritative attitude shown in the movies. Once again, the youth of the ’80s saw that even within the legal system it was okay to kill the bad guy, torture suspects, and criticize the establishment all the time, while the Dirty Harry character is actually part of that order. established. Now, children in the game can be both heroes and villains, but can be morally confused about that role in real life. Could the filmmakers argue that they are in fact reflecting real life on film rather than the black and white tales of the ’40s and ’50s when the good guy wins and the bad guy dies? So this new realism is teaching kids that sometimes the good guy loses, that bad things can happen to good people, and that bad people can be victorious? In psychology we call this the. “Just World Hypothesis” that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. However, that teaches children that life is fair and just. However, the message for modern youth is that life is not fair, that many movies show terrible things that happen to ordinary people. How does this then affect the attitude of young people towards the society in which they have to live and work? Do modern movie-going youth have a more realistic view of life, or do they just have a new fantasy as distorted by movies as the John Wayne man movies of the past? However, movies are a mixed viewing category and the popularity of movie types also goes through phases. Like the sci-fi movies of the 70s and the disaster movies of the 80s and 90s with the special effects of the 3D era after 2005 in movies like Avatar.
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I began this article by stating that movies can have an effect on attitudes, character growth, and the development of morality just like the influence of parents, society, and peers on a child’s development. Those kids in the past received positive role models from movies that highlighted justice, kindness, and despite all the odds, the hero can defeat his enemies. I have also tried to show that generations of moviegoers have had several new influences that shed light on a changing moral climate in society along with a more anti-authoritarian youth with a more realistic outlook on whether or not life is fair.
Our parents told us to be good, to be honest, and to do “the right thing,” but our movies have been speaking to us at the same time that our big screen heroes have been giving us mixed messages from generation to generation for modern youth. it shows less imagination than earlier times, that modern youth has taken materialism as the goal of life and not doing good. I myself have been a fan of movies my whole life and have seen the rise of cinema as a big part of growing up. Also that Hollywood outshines all other cultures in movie making (at least in the past), even as a kid growing up in England and Australia where I saw the more sober movies made in England as examples of what it’s like to be British, stalwart. , stiff upper lip, unflappable, and most of all, a decent guy! We still wanted the Hollywood features, since their movie stars always seemed bigger, more real, and more heroic. Is part of the modern American character an imitation of each generation of movies and that other cultures have changed to deal with that influence by becoming materialistic and selfish in nature? Most of the psychological research on television and movies has concentrated on the negative effects of violence and the numbing of emotions, but I believe that movies also have a really positive role to play in a child’s development and Parents need to choose what their kids watch carefully because it’s the childish imitation you’ll have to deal with when you ask yourself as a parent, “Where did they get that notion?”
Epilogue:
I should point out that my influences during my own youth were westerns and war movies. John Wayne, Kirk Douglas and many others were my first heroes that shaped my fantasy adventure and play, as I grew up the Hammer Horror movies from England changed my imagination to things you couldn’t see in the dark but at the same time same time movies like . Tom Brown’s School Days and Goodbye Mr. Chips created deep emotional content, later Hitchcock’s English period before he went to Hollywood, like Foreign Correspondent and other classics. When the ’70s came around, the biggest influence was probably Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen. I realize now that I am in my mid-50s and often rewatch the movies that influenced me as a kid, like Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu movies (which got me into Karate) and all the movies from the years 30 and 40. where the acting was what carried a film and not the special effects. I recently went to the cinema to see Avatar in 3D (sci-fi) and was very disappointed because the plot was incredibly thin and the 3D was interesting, but it didn’t really add much to a shoddy script. However, the modern audience of young people seemed to like it. So in that I have to go through this generation.
END….
