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Study Finds Film Enjoyment Is Contagious
Hugh Pickens writes "A report from Science Daily says that scientists have proven that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences by influencing and gradually synchronizing viewer emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience — the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie. In a series of experiments, researchers found that people watching a film together appeared to evaluate the film within the same broad mood and another study found that synchrony of evaluations can be traced to glances at the other person during the film and adoption of the observed expressions. 'By mimicking expressions, people catch each other's moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie,' said one researcher."
I'm one of those people who would pay extra to have an empty theatre to myself to see a movie. The last thing I want is to hear constant chatter, or see people texting on their cell phones while watching a movie. It totally takes you out of the experience.
For one of our homework assignments in my data mining class, we had to come up with some interesting insights about the netflix database. One of the things I noticed was that movies rated on the weekends were significantly more likely to be rated a 1 or a 5 than during the week. My conjecture was that this is because people are more likely to watch movies with other people on the weekends and the mob mentality takes over, causing good movies to become great and bad movies to become horrible.
Seriously.
Many film critics are given films (even brand new ones) on DVD, rather than having to watch multiple films at a theater, whch is obviously more time consuming. Considering how out of touch some film critics seem to be sometimes, especially when it comes to comedies, it seems to follow that a critic watching a movie alone in his house would have a very different experience than going and seeing it in a crowded theater.
Now film critics are starting to make more sense...
Bill
I saw the midnight showing of Snakes on a Plane with like 10 of my friends the weekend before half of them went off to college last year.
It was fucking awesome. Doubly so because everyone that showed up to the midnight showing knew what the movie was supposed to be (not serious).
Everyone who I've talked to since then about the movie (who wasn't at that showing) says it sucked and was stupid, and they all have in common that they tried to watch it by themselves or with only one or two other people.
But don't you find it annoying when there's a funny moment in a movie and the other person in the room laughs and then looks at you [1]? Some people seem to do that. Eyes on the screen at all times please - are you so shallow you need me to validate your humour?
[1] tends to happen more at home cos it's generally a bit dark in the cinema
I'm reminded of watching a movie years ago when I moved to LA. The neighbourhood I moved to was fairly well-to-do, but still had a certain pre-yuppie bohemian charm to it. These were the days before Starbucks was on every street corner. The local theatre, don't remember whether it was independent or part of a small chain, was fairly large and it was where the locals went.
When the film began, there were the usual previews, of course, but then a lengthy ad appeared for The LA Times. The Friday night crowd burst out in a chorus of hisses and loud booing (in response to the ad, and to the LA Times), and I was only to happy to join in. If I had been in the Westwood area (where the film industry concentrated its attention at the time), the only reaction would be the munching of popcorn. The movie itself I don't remember, but what struck me about that experience was realising that not only had I moved to the "right" neighbourhood, but also that shared public experiences could me more profound and lasting than solitary ones.
My experience was probably little different than what the ordinary folks in east Texas feel when they attend Friday services for the local religeon, high school football. By comparison, the on-line equivalent of posting emotionally-charged comments to a blog, or participating in a Slashdot flame-fest, doesn't really compare. Then again, not all things invite public participation, and not all movies should be watched in public. Local zoning and vice laws notwithstanding, I'd bet this is something that even Pee Wee Herman has learned.
This phenomenon is well-known in the comedy world. If they can afford it, a comedian will oftentimes have a warmer in the crowd, who just laughs at the appropriate moments. I heard a Charlie Murphy interview where he talks about doing this for Eddie when he was starting out.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The thing is, laugh tracks aren't just a cynical way of trying to make a show "more funny" or being told when to laugh; they were meant in response to semi-legitimate fears of people feeling lonely as they watched a show alone...
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