Rx Hollywood: Cinema and Therapy in the 1960s
- ISBN-10
- 1438468539
- ISBN-13
- 9781438468532
- Category
- Performing Arts
- Pages
- 236
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-01-01
- Publisher
- SUNY Press
- Author
- Michael DeAngelis
Description
How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones. Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquirytherapist/patient dynamics, female frigidity and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confessionMichael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community. Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the there and then of past feelings and experiences and embraced the here and now of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging. Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie, The Boston Strangler, The Chapman Report, Carnal Knowledge, Divorce American Style, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, and Five Easy Pieces, DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors
By James Morrison... Agee's ; see Agee on Film , 36 . 10. For a treatment of the relation of U.S. foreign policy to Vichy France , providing analysis of how this topic is represented in the war film and Casablanca in particular , see Raskin , 153-64 .
-
Robin Hood, M.D.
By Neil Shulman, M.D.Patients wait for approval of studies, medications, and procedures while the insurance companies accrue interest on the premiums. Robin Hood, M.D. takes the fight to the source of the problem.
-
Doc Hollywood
By Neil ShulmanDoc Hollywood
-
Hollywood's Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and American Independent Cinema
By Yannis TzioumakisSee Steven Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 (Berkeley: University of California ... Hollywood Reporter (20 September 1983), 59. 28. ... Grover, 'Film Duds'; Hinson, 'The Rx for “Cutter's Way”?
-
Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire
By Kathleen SharpBased on some four hundred interviews, this book features Janet Leigh, Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, John Belushi, Jean Stein, and Steven Spielberg along with the Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Reagans, and the Clintons.
-
Mind Reeling: Psychopathology on Film
By Homer B. PetteyMichael DeAngelis, Rx Hollywood Ricardo E. Zulueta, Queer Art Camp Superstar John Caruana and Mark Cauchi, editors, Immanent Frames Nathan Holmes, Welcome to Fear City Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer, editors, Rule, Britannia!
-
Was It Yesterday?: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television
By Matthew LeggattMichael DeAngelis, Rx Hollywood Ricardo E. Zulueta, Queer Art Camp Superstar John Caruana and Mark Cauchi, editors, Immanent Frames Nathan Holmes, Welcome to Fear City Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer, editors, Rule, Britannia!
-
Giallo!: Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema
By Alexia KannasTraces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon. Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure.
-
Race and the Suburbs in American Film
By Merrill SchleierCatherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ... Other books include Stephen Rowley, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); David ...
-
Perpetual Movement: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope
By Neil BadmingtonTransatlantic) and, representing the PCA, Geoffrey Shurlock, Milton Hodenfield, and Jackson himself.38 The event had been a “pleasant conference,” Jackson recalled, but he went on to outline the censors' reservations about the script.