Moral and Cognitive Dissonance in Cinema
Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound. This chapter looks at the ways in which filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity, or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship is presented as a primary case study in the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence; however, it is contended that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of cinematic modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism in American revenge and “social cleansing” films, Ken Loach’s social realism, and John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) permits an exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension, as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The chapter concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from theories of cognitive dissonance.