Introduction
The introduction to Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement traces the main argument of the book and previews the book’s structure. The argument is that stories on screens—films, television, the Internet, and so on—contribute to the cultural ecology of a place and time and are thus subject to ethical evaluation. Screen stories are rhetorically powerful in large part because they engage and elicit human emotion. Academic film studies respond to this power by embracing “estrangement theory,” which largely rejects mainstream screen stories, immersion, and emotion. The personal story told in the Introduction relates the author’s experiences with screen stories and how he came to believe that ethics as practiced by academic film and media studies, at least in the form of estrangement theory, is unable to usefully address the experiences of most contemporary viewers and thus introduces the reader instead to an ethics of engagement.