Spring 2025
Why Do Movies Move Us? The Psychology and Philosophy of Filmgoing
Nathan Roberts PhD
If films are fictional, why do they elicit emotional reactions in viewers? Why do movies make us laugh, cry, and scream? This course considers thirteen possible answers to these fascinating and challenging questions by closely and critically analyzing the emotional power of various fiction films, from Hollywood classics like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window; to contemporary films by the renowned directors Steve McQueen and Greta Gerwig; to masterpieces of art cinema like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Daughters of the Dust. These films are considered by recourse to classical and contemporary film theory, alongside primary texts from the field of psychology. Students grasp how canonical and contemporary psychological concepts from psychoanalysis to contemporary neuroscience can help us consider our central inquiry. Moreover, by situating these concepts within relevant philosophical frameworks, students understand these theories derive from diverse, and continually contestable, worldviews regarding how humans relate to their cinematic environments. Assigned films and written texts help students develop the skills needed to write a final paper regarding a film of their choosing, so they may offer their own critical argument regarding why movies move us.
Spring 2025
American Nightmares: Horror Cinema and Television
Charlotte Szilagyi PhD
Why do we go, again and again, to movies that make us scream with terror? Why do we seek out overwhelming fear? Is slaughter really the best medicine? In this course, our mission is threefold. First, we identify the iconography and the visual rhetoric of fear, and of hope, in horror cinema and television, and examine this versatile genre with its multiple subdivisions that make horror film both exciting and popular, including horror-comedy, creature features, zombies, monsters, demonic possession, witchcraft, paranormal, slasher, psychological, found footage, action, folk horror, vampire horror, animal horror, eco-horror, analog horror, slasher-horror, and political horror. Second, we outline the screen potential of the occult, and the capacity of the horror genre to imagine an alternative future, in the pursuit of an oppositional and politically progressive cinema. Third, we investigate the ways this genre is so uniquely positioned to both dive deep into the complex terrain of the human psyche, with all its crevices, and concurrently explore a whole nation and its collective fears and nightmares. Why is this seemingly unrealistic genre the best mirror into our personal and social existential despair? Why, for all its disturbing depiction of the supernatural, do we regard horror cinema and television the best vehicle to highlight a fundamentally human experience? We examine classic and contemporary horror films and series including The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948),The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Hellstrom Chronicles (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Jaws (1976), The Omen (1976), The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), They Live (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Blair Witch Project (1999), American Psycho (2000), Hellbent (2004), Paranormal Activity (2007), Teeth (2007), Jennifer's Body (2009), The Final Girls (2015), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (2007), Get Out (2017), Us (2019), Midsommar (2019), Them (2021), American Horror Story (2022), and Pearl (2022).
Fall 2024
Blockbuster, Mythbuster: American Superhero Cinema and Television
Charlotte Szilagyi PhD
This course examines the complex ways in which Hollywood has responded to, and reflected on, the social, cultural, and political need for superheroes. The concept of the superhero functions as a structuring idea in American self-understanding and cultural iconography. Originally the stuff of comic books, the superhero has now become associated with the Hollywood blockbuster, a genre in its own right. And yet, much-deserved scholarly and academic interest has only recently caught up with this popular phenomenon in American cinema and television. How might we make sense of blockbuster superheroes? Are they agents of change, or upholders of the status quo? Are they virtuous or flawed? Are they patriots of the nation, or rather vigilantes distrusting government authority? Are they promoters of the common good, or rather prime exemplars of American individualism? Do they save us from our enemies, or from ourselves? Are they motivated by utopian dreams of a better world, or by collective fears and anxieties? Is the supervillain a foreign entity, an Other antithetical to US values, or a repressed, undesired trait in the American self? And to what extent are race, gender, religion, and ethnicity factors in the development of superhero cinema? What is the relationship between superheroes and real-life heroes? And, above all, what is the place of heroes in American history? At a time when superhero cinema has established itself as a staple of Hollywood blockbuster productions, reaching ever-broader audiences and becoming part of the popular cultural lexicon, the mission of this course is threefold. First, we examine the iconography of the superhero as a timeless mainstay of American mythology. Second, we investigate specific ways in which superhero cinema has mirrored, and intervened in, American political, social, and cultural history, especially when certain ideals, dreams and liberties have become tenuous whether it is fascism, the Holocaust, the cold war, totalitarian governments, 9/11 terrorism, warrantless wiretapping, conspiracy, international espionage, police brutality, suspicious data collection, or fake news. Third, we probe to what extent the Hollywood superhero a barometer of domestic social history and a fundamental part of Americana is actually a product of foreign influence, in surprising, and sometimes even problematic, ways. We examine films and television shows ranging from Superman: The Movie (1978), X-Men (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Spider-Man (2002), V For Vendetta (2005), Iron Man (2008), The Dark Knight (2008), Watchmen (2009), Captain America (2011), Wonder Woman (2017), Black Panther (2018), Joker (2019), The Boys (2019), The Umbrella Academy (2020), and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021).