Cognitive Media Ethics

This chapter surveys a breadth of approaches to the ethics of film and other narrative media, both contemporary and historic, and positions them in relation to developments in cognitive media ethics. These include cine-ethics and film philosophy, phenomenological approaches, literary ethics and hermeneutics, notions of aesthetic autonomy, and ethics in narratology. The contributions and challenges of each approach are summarized, as are their uses in the development of a normative ethics for cognitive media studies. Throughout this chapter, a case emerges for the complementary, elaborative rigors of cognitive science, normative ethics, and consequentialism. The chapter concludes by indicating how methods for analysis developed at the center of these areas of study will inform the remainder of the book.

Problems in Cognitive Media Ethics

This chapter surveys key problems emerging at the intersection of cognitive science and media ethics, and further refines a hermeneutic approach that will account for each dilemma. Problems discussed include the moral policing of fictive thought experiments rather than actions taken in the world, the confounding heteronomies of cultural and personality variation, issues of selfhood and determinism, and confusions between the ethical and the political. This chapter explains how each problem will be navigated over ensuing chapters, presenting a union of theories in autobiographical memory, social cognition, and textual hermeneutics as a model for unearthing the lived impact—and therefore the ethics—of narrative media and storytelling.

The Emotional Politics of Limerence in Romantic Comedy Films

“Limerence” describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This chapter asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and a political selfhood. These “political romcoms” reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fiber, personality, and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalized positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection.

Benign Violations in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory (BVT) argues that humor is produced when three conditions are met: we perceive a situation as potentially violating, we perceive it also as benign, and the two perceptions occur simultaneously. This chapter mobilizes BVT in describing the cognitive dissonances inherent in comedy spectatorship, using a particular case study in dramedy cinema: the suburban ensemble film, including such works as The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, and American Beauty. After surveying some of the key humorous stimuli recurrent across the genre, I turn to other comedic texts that deal with family and domestic studies with a striking lack of pathos—in particular the television series Family Guy. This comparison underscores an analysis of the ethics of benign violations in narrative media that is centered on the resolution of its fundamental affective incoherence and the way this resolution might guide later critical thought. The chapter ultimately demonstrates the uses of BVT as a hermeneutic tool, and one that might help us isolate an ethics of comedy in media.

TV as Bully

This chapter pushes back against notions of meritorious complexity, moral ambiguity, and cognitive “richness” in recent, high-profile American television series. It questions the heralding of television’s artistic transcendence above that of other narrative media and the use of cognitive theory to make such a case. I turn instead to literature on social psychology and bullying to make sense of our relationship to longform TV serials and investigate the ways in which a kind of bullying in the content and form of both serial and reality television has been normalized in an era popularly dubbed the “TV renaissance.” It concludes with a look at the relationship between a rising endorsement of aggressive populist leadership styles and the prevalence of bullying as causal logic on TV.

Introduction

This introduction lays out the book’s foundational philosophies and scope. It makes a case for the ways in which current metaethical trends in cognitive media theory could be extended to more normative and prescriptive goals, and explains how our inherent acts of moral evaluation in media engagement could be refined using the resources of cognitive science. Normativity, in the pressure it puts on theorists to ask “so what?” and to explain the practical applications of their knowledge, is positioned as a rigor that can be brought to current theories of film and screen media. The chapter considers foundational problems in drawing prescriptive ethics from scientific descriptions of the world, addresses the political and cultural challenges to a normative approach, and establishes key themes that will be explored throughout the book.

A Humanistic Consequentialism for Film and Media Studies

This chapter outlines the framework for ethical analysis that will be carried through readings in the latter half of the book. It interrogates the reasons behind a dominant virtue ethics approach in film and media studies, and describes an alternative humanistic consequentialist approach. Consequentialism displaces the evaluation of others and their moral being, including the heroic or villainous qualities of fictive characters, in favor of a future-thinking concern that is more self-implicating, while humanist ethics integrates care and understanding of moral failures and the vagaries of moral luck. Humanistic consequentialism emerges as a pressure we can put on one another to be aware of the results of our behavior rather than a strict requirement to maximize the hedonic results of our actions; implications for the “thought experiments” of media are discussed.

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.

Enthymemes Online

The final chapter addresses current issues in news and social media, as well as the tandem problems of public trust in journalism, democratic institutions, and everyday personal communications inaugurated by digital media’s proliferating resources for fabrication and obfuscation. After introducing a cognitive-rhetorical model for identifying promotional enthymemes online, this chapter carefully considers the ways in which media criticism is taught in higher education; it questions traditional methods of interrogation and deconstruction that individualize the ethics of media engagement and have the potential to breed further mistrust within already trust-poor cultures. Alternative modes of analysis are considered for their pedagogical merits, including the uses of postcritique and surface readings of media texts. Ultimately, I make the case that there is an imperative to guide a hopeful, forward-looking, normative search for solutions in our classrooms, in addition to describing the political problems we currently confront. The alternative is to prescribe a disempowering culture of suspicion for the next generation, who will be the inheritors of a fraught media ecology that scholars continue to document as it unfolds.