On Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:44:07 -080, Michael Britt wrote: >The latest Planet of the Apes movie is pretty good in my >opinion and I think there's an interesting tie-in with >social psych. > >Our hero, Caesar, was raised with humans without ever having >seen another ape. There's an interesting scene where his >owners let take him outdoors for a run and afterwards they >put his collar back on to take him home. On the way to >the car they run into a couple who are walking their dog who >is also on a collar. The dog barks and their owners pull on >his chain and tell the dog to "come!". Ceasar's owner then >pull on his chain and tell him to "come" as well. > >Ceasar is clearly upset and later asks (with sign language), >"Am I a pet?" His human owners tell him that he's not a pet >and then take him to the laboratory to show him what other >apes are like. Eventually he winds up in a facility for >primates. The rest of the movie is about how Ceasar helps the >other lowly primates to rise up. > >Caesar knows he's not human, doesn't want to be a "pet", yet >his inescapable social identity - that of being an ape - also >isn't very appealing. Apes are treated poorly and are clearly >second-class citizens. All of this leads to you feeling badly >about yourself.
>So what do you do? You have to raise the status of your social >group by, of course, stealing a drug that makes them all smart, >take over leadership of the group, and then lead your group to >rise up and be free. [snip] First, tell yourself that this is fiction, which means that it has an infinite number of degrees of freedom. That is, the plot and story are not subject to the same constraints that reality is subject too. Also, the knowledge of the writer of the screenplay, the director, and the actors all factor in; how accurate do you think their knowledge about this situation? Consider how much we know about human and animal behavior, or should I say how little we know? Second, if one is just engaging in a game, namely, what would you do as a character in a play, novel, film, or whatever, then this kind of speculation is similar to undergrad BS session or, heaven help us, "brainstorming" sessions. In this situation one is not arguing about reality but beliefs, biases, speculations, and "commonsense" expectations about behavior -- y'know, the myths and heuristics that guide everyday behavior (do we really need to go over Milgram to distinguish between predictions of one's behavior and how one actually behave?. In this case, the speculation is more like a "story conference" (what works or doesn't work in a story; stop and consider why scenes are deleted and that there may be multiple alternate endings to stories -- for an extreme case see the movie "I Am Legend", there are two versions and the theatrical release is very significantly different from the original version). Story conferences can be interesting but, unless one is actually working on a story, kind of pointless (e.g., should Stanley Kubrick have changed or added additional scenes to "A Clockwork Orange" when he realized that he had missed the last chapter in the novel because it wasn't printed in U.S. editions; it doesn't really matter since Kubrick is now dead though he said that after he learned about the missing chapter, he felt bad about how the movie ended). Well, given that is winter break, I guess we can engage in some tomfoolery. But one should remember that it is tomfoolery. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=15097 or send a blank email to leave-15097-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
