Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television The Pulse of Our Times (Claudia Wassmann (eds.)) (z-lib.org)

Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television

Also by Claudia Wassman: Die Macht der Emotionen: Wie Gefühle unser Denken und Handeln beeinflussen The Brain as Icon – Reflections on the Representation of Brain Imaging on American Television, 1984–2002. In R. Heil, A. Kaminski, M. Stippak, & A. Unger (Eds.), Tensions and Convergences: Technological and Aesthetic Transformations of Society (pp. 153–162) Evaluating Threat, Solving Mazes, and Having the Blues. In J. A. Fisher (Ed.), Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine (pp. 67–87)

Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television The Pulse of Our Times Edited by Claudia Wassmann Universidad de Navarra, Spain

Selection and editorial matter © Claudia Wassmann 2015 Chapters © Contributors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57889-4 ISBN 978-1-137-54682-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137546821 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Therapy and emotions in film and television : the pulse of our times / [edited by] Claudia Wassmann, Universidad de Navarra, Spain. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychoanalysis and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures – Psychological aspects. 3. Television programs – Psychological aspects. 4. Emotions in motion pictures. 5. Emotions on television. I. Wassmann, Claudia, 1959– editor. PN1995.9.P783T63 2015 2015020304 791.430199—dc23

Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments viii Notes on Contributors ix 1 An Introduction: Therapy and Emotions in Film and 1 Television Claudia Wassmann 17 34 2 The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family, 1930 –Present 52 Sandra Trudgen Dawson 72 3 American Anger Control and the Role of Popular Culture 89 Peter N. Stearns 99 4 Beyond Emotional Intelligence: Anger, Emotional 115 Stupidity, and Lifestyle Issues Ursula Oberst 134 153 5 Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour Sally Chivers 6 Re-enacting Trauma in Film and Television: Restaging History, Revisiting Pain Stella Bruzzi 7 The Relationships between Therapy Culture, Psychology and Cinema: The Case of Woody Allen Miguel Ángel Huerta Floriano 8 Therapy Cultures in Society: A Polycontextual Approach Robin Kurilla 9 The Emotional Framing of Terrorism in Online Media: The Case of Charlie Hebdo Omar V. Rosas 10 A Tentative Conclusion: The Pulse of Our Times Claudia Wassmann v

vi Contents 169 186 References 189 Filmography Index

List of Illustrations Figures 2.1 The Drive Duporth Holiday Camp 18 2.2 Squires Gate Holiday Camp 21 2.3 Pig & Whistle Bar, Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Clacton 22 5.1 Screen capture from Amour (2012) directed by 78 83 Michael Haneke 92 5.2 Screen capture from Amour (2012) directed by 93 94 Michael Haneke 97 6.1 Screen capture from Abaham Bomba, Shoah (1985) 107 directed by Claude Lanzmann 6.2 Screen capture from Abraham Zapruder (1963) frame 312 109 6.3 Screen capture from Abraham Zapruder (1963) frame 313 6.4 Screen capture from The Act of Killing (2012) by Joshua 112 139 Oppenheimer 148 7.1 Screen capture from Spellbound (1945) directed by Alfred Hitchcock is a reference point in the portrayal of therapy in cinema 7.2 Screen capture from the opening sequence of Annie Hall (1977) directed by Woody Allen is a kind of confession 7.3 Woody Allen uses a split screen technique to confront therapy sessions, screen capture from Annie Hall (1977) 9.1 Editorial from Le Monde ‘Libre, debout, ensemble’ (2015) 9.2 ‘Point de vue de Boris Cyrulnik, neuropsychiatre.’ 15 January 2015. Screen capture TV7 Table 118 8.1 Film themes vii

Acknowledgments This collective volume is the result of an international conference titled Taking the Pulse of Our Times: Media, Therapy and Emotions, which I convened at the University of Navarra, Spain, in November 2014. My sincere thanks go to all of the participants of the conference as well as to the members of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at the University of Navarra. In particular, we would like to thank Ana Marta González, head of the research project ‘Emotional Culture and Identity’, for her support of our ideas, and also Estefanía Berjón for her kind and wonderful help in organizing the conference. Our special thanks go to Daniel Moulin, University of Navarra, and Sebastian Greppo, Center of the University of Chicago in Paris, who provided productive feedback and corrections for some of the chapters in this volume. The workshop and this collective volume are part of the research project ‘Scientific Concepts of Emotion and Cultural Identities’ (SCECI), conducted by Claudia Wassmann. The project studies the scientific concepts of emotion that psycho-medical research has produced between 1950 and 2000, and investigates if and how these concepts have informed emotional culture(s) and identity in post- industrial societies in Western Europe, assessed through the lens of cultural productions such as films and television. This research was supported by the European Commission FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships For Career Development [Grant Agreement PIEF-GA-2012–327538 SCECI]. We also wish to thank Chris Penfold at Palgrave Macmillan for seeing promise in this collected volume. viii

Notes on Contributors Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Director of Research at the University of Warwick. From 2006 to 2008 she was Head of Department and from 2008 to 2011 she was Chair of the Faculty of Arts. She did her BA at Manchester University, and her PhD at Bristol, also working for three years as a researcher for the BBC. In 2013 she was made a fellow of the British Academy. Her primary areas of research include documentary film and television; fashion and film; and masculinity and fathers in Hollywood cinema. In 2011 she was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for her study titled ‘Approximation: Documentary, History and Staging Reality’, which she is currently writing up as a monograph (forthcoming 2016–17). She is the author of the following mono- graphs: Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997); New Documentary (2000 and 2006); Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-war Hollywood (2005); Seven Up (2007); Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-Scène in Hollywood (2013). Sally Chivers is Professor of English Literature and Founding Executive Member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. She is the author of From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives and The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema as well as co-editor of The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film. She has also authored journal articles and book chapters on representations of aging and disability in Canada and beyond. She is a member of the international research team ‘Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care’ which seeks promising practices to transform institutional care for seniors. Her current research focuses on the interplay between aging and disability in the public sphere, with a focus on care narra- tives in the context of austerity. Sandra Trudgen Dawson is acting Assistant Director of Programming and Communications in the Honors Program at Northern Illinois University where she also teaches in the History Department and ix

x Notes on Contributors the Women and Sexuality Program. Her first book, Holiday Camps in Twentieth Century Britain: Packaging Pleasure, was published in 2011 as part of the Manchester University Press Popular Culture Series. Dawson has written several articles and chapters on consumption and popular culture, including the circus, the campaign for holidays with pay, women, leisure, and government hostels in World War II, and local campaigns to remove Butlin’s fairground from Hayling Island. She has co-edited, with Erika Rappaport and Mark Crowley, Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, 1880– 1980 (2015). Her chapter in the volume examines consumer desire for postwar home designs and plans sent in letters to the British govern- ment during World War II. Dawson is also working on a co-edited volume, Home Fronts: Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–1945 with Mark Crowley. Dawson’s second monograph project is a cultural history of midwifery in Britain and the Empire. Her chapter ‘Babies and the Blitz: Calling the Midwife in World War Two’ will be part of the edited volume on World War II. Miguel Ángel Huerta Floriano is an associate professor at the School of Communication, Pontifical University of Salamanca, where he also served as Vice-Dean of Postgraduate Studies and Academic Extension. He holds a BA in Law and Journalism and a doctorate in Communication. His research concerns fiction genres in audiovisual media and film production and aesthetics. He published four mono- graphs in Spanish on ‘Film Genres: Uses in the Spanish Cinema (1994–1999)’; ‘Analysis of Spanish Cinema: Sixty Films for the End of the Century’; ‘Celluloid in Flames: American Cinema after 9–11’ and Paul Schrader. He has co-authored monographs on characters in films, and on fiction scriptwriting, and directed a research project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, on ‘Ideology, Values and Beliefs in the Neighbourhood Cinema of Late-Francoism (1966–1975)’. Robin Kurilla is a lecturer at the Institute for Communication Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He studied commu- nication sciences, psychology, and marketing at Essen, San Sebastián, and Denpasar and worked as trilingual freelance writer before joining the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2007. In 2012, his PhD thesis in Communication Sciences won an award by the University of Duisburg-Essen for being the most outstanding of its kind in the

Notes on Contributors xi Faculty of Humanities. It was published in two volumes, Emotion, Kommunikation, Konflikt (2013). Kurilla’s work examined the rela- tions among conflict, emotion, and communication historiographi- cally, theoretically, and cross-culturally. His current research focuses on communicative and pre-communicative processes involved in the constitution of groups and group identities in a variety of cultural and historical settings. Ursula Oberst is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ramon Llull University, Barcelona (Blanquerna Faculty of Psychology, Educational Sciences and Sports). Her main research is into identity, gender, and emotions in relation to the new technologies (ICT). Having been trained as an Adlerian counseling psychologist, she also works as a counselor and clinical psychologist in a private medical practice. Apart from her scientific papers, she has co-authored a monograph titled Adlerian Psychotherapy: An Advanced Approach in Individual Psychology. Omar V. Rosas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at the University of Navarra. He is also an asso- ciate researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. His research interests include online media, philosophy and psychology of emotions, and the philos- ophy of technology. His recent publications include Compulsive Use of Social Networking Sites in Belgium: Prevalence, Profile, and the Role of Attitude Toward Work and School (CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking); Public Engagement with, and Trust in, Online News Media in French-Speaking Belgium (Recherches en Communication), and the co-authored book Compulsive Computer Use and Knowledge Needs in Belgium: A Multimethod Approach. He is currently working on a project about affective storytelling in Spanish online news media at the ICS. Peter N. Stearns is a professor at George Mason University, where he was Provost from January 2000 to July 2014. During his tenure as Provost, he tripled the univesity’s level of funded research and number of doctoral programs. He was responsible for expanding global partnerships by setting up a number of dual degree programs and tie-ups with universities in countries such as Brazil, China, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. Stearns left the Provostship on July 1, 2014,

xii Notes on Contributors returning to fulltime faculty with the additional title of Provost Emeritus. He continues his teaching and writing in world history and social history, including the history of emotions. He also continues writing, participating in conferences and teaching in the field of academic administration. Claudia Wassmann is Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at the University of Navarra, working on emotion, medicine and media. From 2010 to 2013 she conducted postdoc- toral work at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She holds a Doctorate in Human Medicine (MD, Free University of Berlin 1989, doctorate University of Düsseldorf, 1991), and a PhD in History (University of Chicago, 2005). She completed her post-doctoral work as a Dewitt Stetten, Jr., Memorial Fellow in the History of Biomedical Sciences and Technology at the NIH (2005). She is the author of Die Macht der Emotionen (1st edition, 2002; 2nd revised edition and e-book, 2010). From 1991 to 1998 she was a science journalist for German Public Television where she authored and produced numerous TV documen- taries for the science unit of (now) Südwest Rundfunk (SWR), several of which won international awards. Among others she produced a mini-series on emotions that also aired on Arte.

1 An Introduction: Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television Claudia Wassmann Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television: The Pulse of Our Times probes the emotional climate of contemporary Western societies through the lens of movies and TV productions. From our vacation culture to the ban on anger in contemporary American society, to emotional management, fear, and psychotherapy in the movies, and to the emotionally charged debate on the aging population and issues of care, leading scholars attempt a genuinely transdis- ciplinary exploration of emotions, film, and therapy as cultural forces that shape and create our emotional and cultural identities. Contextualizing what movies put on screen for entertainment, histo- rians contribute to our understanding of emotions, for instance, how positive emotions, such as happiness emotions and self-enjoyment, and negative emotions, such as anger and emotional management that anger called for, created norms of behavior and patterns of social interaction over the course of the twentieth century. These developments were intertwined with audio-visual representations in complex ways. Scholars in film and TV studies and communication sciences supplement this picture by investigating the therapeutic potential of movies and their relationship with psychotherapy. Linking the perspectives of scholars from humanities and social sciences working in Europe, Canada, and the United States, this collected volume explores on both an individual and a societal level how emotions shaped broad outlooks of our contemporary culture, social norms, and emotional identities. Why movies, therapy, and emotions? Emotions, audio-visual media, and psychotherapy 1

2 Claudia Wassmann represent three pivotal elements of contemporary culture through which cultural concerns of contemporary societies can be articu- lated – taken together, they constitute a privileged venue for transdis- ciplinary debate. Emotions determine and indicate how we relate to ourselves and to the society we live in, and understanding their complex nature and functions has been the central aim of many academic disciplines since the turn of the twenty-first century. Additionally, movies and psychotherapy are two cultural techniques, which have informed our emotional identities since the begin- ning of the twentieth century. Movies are a good starting point for analysis, because they both shape and reflect the emotional concerns of our present world. As Robin Kurilla reminds us in this volume, the producers of mass media are themselves subjected to the mass media discourse. Movies and television films give an almost phys- ically palpable texture to emotions and since emotions play such a crucial role both in psychotherapy and in the audio-visual media, movies and therapy naturally share a special relationship. As Miguel Huerta put it, ‘the importance of psychoanalysis in the film praxis goes beyond its explicit use in storylines’ (Chapter 7). Finally, over the course of the twentieth century, therapy became the dominant trope by which we make sense of ourselves and deal with our anxie- ties in social relations. Movies can be used not only as a kind of cultural thermometer to probe the emotional climate of our times, but also as a historical source. Movies are a medium by which we reflect our culture and personal feelings, as well as creating, transgressing, and reviewing social norms. They may even create our identities. They are also a repository for historians: like literature, they conserve and create forms of expressions and norms of feeling, both through the themes they choose to address and through the ways in which they represent emotions, and they generate emotions in the viewers at different moments in time. Indeed, movies and TV-film narratives are understood as potentially transmitting ‘shared positive values’ and ‘disciplinary models of social control (including hierarchies, norms, and discriminating standards) on the societies that share them’ (Keen, 2011: 2). Proceeding from a general historical perspec- tive on emotions as cultural forces and a look at how this is reflected in audio-visual media productions to a more intimate analysis of emotions (such as anger, fear, anxieties, and love) on an individual

An Introduction 3 level by a psychologist and by a pioneering scholar in aging studies, the volume aims to offer a new perspective on film, emotions, and society. After looking at broader societal implications from a histor- ical and a personal perspective, the book turns to the intricate rela- tionship of emotion, movies, and psychotherapy. The moving image represents emotions, elicits emotions, and works through emotions in a unique way. As Stella Bruzzi points out, moving images are more powerful than still images; they are ‘moving’ indeed. Past emotions are brought into our present, and trauma, which we have not expe- rienced first hand, is part of our lived present in the moment when we watch a film. Past and present, historical events and personal memories come together in time in audio-visual productions. Audio- visual media productions can have a therapeutic and a cathartic effect on the viewer. Emotions have been a key concern in many academic discip- lines since the turn of the twenty-first century (Scheer et al., 2014; Bainbridge, 2014; Dixon, 2003). Scholars in the social sciences even speak of an ‘emotional turn’ to describe the shifting framework of analysis (Plamper, 2010) and historians study the ways emotions shaped the outlook of our societies. There is debate as to what can be considered an emotion at a given time in history, as well as what in fact constituted emotions such as anger (Frevert, 2011; P. N. Stearns, 1994). Film studies also took an emotional turn (Clough & Halley, 2007; Pribram, 2011; Gorton, 2009). However, while emotions are commonly addressed within each of these disciplines respectively, the explicit aim of this collected volume is to shatter those boundaries. Emotions can only be under- stood from a transdisciplinary perspective. For transdisciplinarity to be more than a word, it is important to actually bring scholars from the different disciplines together in discussion. This kind of intel- lectual exchange is the basis of the present collective volume, the fruit of an international workshop that brought together historians, psychologists, and scholars from literature, communication sciences, and film and media studies at the University of Navarra in November 2014. This distinguished group of scholars opened up the dialog not only with regard to their respective methodologies but also to a broad range of sources, in particular, movies and TV productions, as the starting point for analysis. While it is important to raise awareness of the fact that terms such as emotion, feeling and ‘affect’ are used

4 Claudia Wassmann in different ways in the different academic disciplines such as physi- ology, cognitive psychology, or the social sciences, our goal here is to keep those existing differences in terminological conventions in mind, all the while opening up to the respective methodologies and arguments (Russell et al., 2012; Wassmann, 2012). Therefore, here we propose a new form of transdisciplinary scholarship, by factually bringing the respective perspectives of scholars from different discip- lines together in one volume. Furthermore, we urge readers to engage with the audio-visual materials that various authors have selected to augment the printed text. Rather than spending our time in debate as to how ‘emotion’ shall be defined and what counts as an emotion, we invite readers to open themselves up to the perspectives of the different disciplines and engage with emotions in multi-disciplinary contexts. The remainder of this chapter gives a detailed introduction to the structure of this collective volume. The book begins with two chap- ters by historians who show how happiness and positive emotions and anger and negative emotions have shaped contemporary culture in Western societies and informed cultural norms, conventions, and concepts. Then the analysis turns to more intimate views on emotions provided by a psychologist’s perspective on anger and emotional management, followed by a wonderful contribution by a pioneering scholar in aging studies who points out our conflicting relationship to old age and care as reflected in cinematic productions. The three following chapters investigate the therapeutic potential of movies, the relationship of movies and psychotherapy through the cinematic lens of Woody Allen, and more broadly in audio-visual productions in multiple contexts. The volume closes with a chapter on affective storytelling in the new media. Let me introduce the contributions of this collected volume in more detail. Starting with a historical analysis, Sandra Trudgen Dawson of Northern Illinois University first shows how happiness and self-enjoyment once conceptualized as a right, rather than a luxury, have shaped our vacation culture (Dawson, 2011). Here a major shift occurred in the outlook of what was considered recre- ational in the mid-twentieth century and today. Then we look at how negative emotions, such as anger, came to be considered as undesirable in American society. Peter N. Stearns shows how our relationship to anger shifted over time and asks if the ban on anger

An Introduction 5 in American society is altogether beneficial (see also, C. Z. Stearns & Stearns, 1986). Anger and emotional management are also addressed from the perspective of cognitive psychology. We begin with positive emotions. In Chapter 2, ‘The Big Holiday, Work and the British Family, 1930– Present’, Dawson traces the ‘transformation of holiday ideology’ and assesses the ‘emotional impact of holidays on family life and social groups as well as considering the significance of the increasing reli- ance on technology as an essential component of leisure.’ The ‘Big Summer Holiday’, which developed over the course of the twentieth century, is an important aspect of contemporary culture in Western societies. Coming into its own right before the World War II in Britain, the vacation industry joined forces with the military in the use of infrastructures shaping large aspects of popular culture and self-understanding in Western societies during the war and postwar years. Dawson traces the origins of paid holi- days and holiday camps for British workers back to the 1930s. In her previous work, Holiday Camps in Twentieth Century Britain Dawson nicely showed how emotions of happiness, relaxation and feelings of wellbeing were once considered a right, a necessity, a need for the health of the individual and for the wellbeing of the Nation. Beginning with a charismatic individual, Bill Butlins, who created the first vacation colonies for the working class in Britain in the 1930s with the explicit goal of making people feel happy and relaxed for a week, the vacation culture abounds with emotions. The British vacation camps gave rise to several movies and TV-film productions, which became cultural icons. Many movies were made in the 1970s when the culture of ‘all-inclusive’ vacation camps was coming to an end. Movies also made the vacation locations and the vacation culture and the holiday spirit well known through the satirical rock opera Tommy performed by The Who. Here, Dawson treats in particular Summer Holiday (1963), which tells the story of four friends who transform a double-decker bus into a trav- eling hotel and travel to Athens, picking up three girls in France along the way. The movie starred Cliff Richard, who expressed the holiday spirit in a song, ‘We’re going where the sun shines brightly, We’re going where the sea is blue, We’ve seen it in the movies, now let’s see if it’s true ... ’ (as cited in Chapter 2). Not coinciden- tally, vacation culture and the movies also gave expression to and

6 Claudia Wassmann shaped the ‘youth culture’ of the 1960s and 1970s (Dawson, 2011, 220–3). We should also mention the classic French–Italian movie Les Grandes Vacances (1967) starring Louis de Funès, a tumultuous comedy, which told the story of a French teenager sent on summer vacation to a British host family to improve his English. The movie, a great success that also aired many times on French and German television, was still being broadcast as recently as 2014. While in the 1960s young people went on travel tours to unknown locations to make their ‘dreams come true’ for a week or two, the nature of vacations changed radically over time from the ‘all inclusive holiday’ tradition of the 1930s, to the 1970s’ ‘youth culture’, and the ‘exotic travel destinations’ of the 1990s. Holidays in the early twentieth century were a working-class pleasure: by the late twentieth century they became a luxury again, accessible only to the happy few, and with ever more exotic destina- tions. Not only did the locations for vacation shift, but also what people sought on holidays underwent a radical change. The desire to disconnect from one’s daily routine gave way to the desire to main- tain one’s daily routine and stay connected by means of social media on computers and mobile phones, even while on holiday. And while the culture of tourism was once shaped by the need and right to relax, holidays, health, and happiness, blue skies, sun and the right to relaxation and free time are no longer considered necessary for the health of the individual, let alone ‘the Nation’. The shift in the nature of our work, and of our relation to work and free time is reflected in the recent decisions on vacation time. What has happened to our vacation culture? Dawson asks. She questions whether the huge shift in attitudes to paid time off work heralds the end of the big annual summer holiday so celebrated in the press and on film and so much a part of the 1960s and 1970s, as the recent economic recession altered worker perceptions of the meaning of work and leisure. Has technology effectively severed the relationship between private life and work? The recent BBC TV series, The Big Vacation reflects the shift in both holiday culture and in our relation- ship with privacy since the advent of ‘social media’ and the Internet. In particular, Dawson brings the troubling violation of privacy to our attention, questioning what the increase in reality shows that reveal the intimate details of teenagers on holiday suggest about the relationships within families.

An Introduction 7 Emotions make history, and emotions have a history (Frevert, 2011). Historians study the ways emotions have shaped the outlook of our societies. They debate what constitutes emotions, such as anger, at a given time. In Chapter 3, ‘American Anger Control and the Role of Popular Culture’, Peter N. Stearns, historian and Provost Emeritus at George Mason University, Washington DC, examines the complex culture toward anger that began to emerge in the United States from the 1920s onward. While expressions of anger were previously not sanctioned but were rather regarded as a means of getting ahead in competition, the new culture, Stearns holds, which first developed as part of workplace controls, quite generally disapproved of anger and sought more systematic control. Anger now meets with disapproval in both the family and in the workplace. The United States’ uneasy relationship with anger finds expression in movies such as Anger Management (2003) with Jack Nicholson, which was taken up in the successful TV series Anger Management (2012). As Stearns argues, the new anger culture raised interesting challenges for entertainment media, caught between seeking to provide symbolic outlets for anger and reinforcing the basic new standards. Movies like Anger Management testify to the great unease American society has with this explosive emotion. Stearns concluded that the film fundamentally if somewhat circuitously illustrates the core standards (Chapter 3). Earlier standards are reflected in the audio-visual genre of the Western; in the United States there exists ‘a long popular cultural tradition, going back to the classic Western, of valuing heroes who keep careful control over their emotion, who respond firmly but rationally to any provocation.’ The historically contingent shift in attitudes to an emotion like anger deeply influ- enced the way in which people relate to each other, in particular, creating double standards of behavior and social rules in contem- porary America. As Stearns showed, the new approach spread widely, in recommended family life but also in politics. However, this culture created standards of emotional regimes and codes of expres- sion, which allow people on the higher echelons of the hierarchy to freely express their anger towards their subordinates, who, in turn, are required to suppress their emotions, and apply ‘emotional management’. Anger can be analyzed as a historically contingent phenomenon, a historical force shaping our personal behavioral standards and social

8 Claudia Wassmann norms, but also on a personal level from the perspective of cognitive psychology. This is what Ursula Oberst, Professor of Psychology at the University of Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain does in Chapter 4, ‘Beyond Emotional Intelligence: Anger, Emotional Stupidity and Lifestyle Issues’. Like Stearns, she addresses the ambiguous atti- tude towards so-called negative emotions in contemporary society. Reviewing briefly how emotions are conceptualized from a psycho- logical point of view and presenting some findings on emotional regulation, Oberst looks closely into emotional intelligence and emotional management and discusses the merits and pitfalls of these concepts. From a psychological point of view, emotions can be helpful because they provide ‘crucial information about the state of one’s interactions with the world’ and because they ‘speed up our responses’ in life-threatening situations. Thus, emotions have an ‘adaptive value’. However, in many situations strong emotions have to be managed if people want to get along with others or keep their careers. Therefore psychologists train people who seemingly have difficulty regulating their emotional reactions in techniques of emotion regulation. Oberst illustrated her arguments with examples taken from the Star Wars movie, the Star Trek series and movies, and the movie Anger Management. For her, as for Stearns, the movie Anger Management reflects ‘the common view in contemporary society’ that anger is an emotion, which is ‘not politically correct’ and there- fore has to be ‘managed’, like a company. As Oberst put it, in Anger Management, friendly and easy-going businessman Dave is supposed to have TAS, toxic anger syndrome, a disease that can be treated by appropriate therapy (Chapter 4). However, Oberst cautions against society’s attitude of countering all negative emotions, and anger in particular, by therapy: This reflects a tendency in contemporary society to consider all kinds of unwanted or uncomfortable behavior and conditions as disorders and to use pharmacological treatment for them. For instance, frequent temper tantrums of spoiled children are now considered a disorder and named disruptive mood dysregu- lation disorder (DMDD) (see Chapter 4: 75). Oberst takes a critical stance towards anger management tech- niques. She questions ‘the common belief’ that our conscious self, our cognitions and therefore also our possible knowledge about emotions are ‘the masters of our feelings’. Even though emotion

An Introduction 9 regulation, such as anger management, is a skill that can be learned and successfully employed, this does not necessarily mean that people do employ adequate anger management in real-life situations or that they become a better person. Rather than being a disease needing treatment, unconscious personal goals might prompt a person to use anger to their advantage to get what they want, even if they may have learned to manage the emotion. If the tenets of emotional intel- ligence models held true, Oberst claims, people who have undergone emotional intelligence training or emotion management therapy should have more ability to regulate their anger. However, while people might have ‘higher emotional knowledge’, they might still be ‘unable’ to regulate these kinds of emotions, because they might not ‘really’ want to manage their emotions (see Chapter 4: 73). Adopting an Adlerian perspective on emotions she argues that unconscious personal goals might be in conflict with anger regulation. Oberst condemns the hypocrisy in contemporary society with respect to anger, because anger is an uncomfortable and ‘politically incorrect’ feeling. Movies reflect back to us what our emotional standards look like in a given society at a given time, and can serve as a test case to reflect upon those standards from transdisciplinary perspectives. Aging, care, and love The emotionally charged themes of old age and infirmity are the subject of important debates in numerous contemporary societies. Several recent movies and TV films have taken up the topic, such as Amour (2012, France, by Michael Haneke) and the Spanish animated film Arrugas (Wrinkels) (2011, Spain), or again the German Austrian TV film Die Auslöschung (2013). Sally Chivers, a scholar of English literature and Founding Executive Member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society at Trent University, Canada used these movies that depict late-life disability, contemplation of suicide, and contrasting care choices to raise questions about how contemporary emotional culture influences debates about the right-to-life and the right-to-die for older adults. The analysis of movie productions that have taken up the topic reveals that we need to engage in a new discourse on aging, disability, and care. The current debates and media coverage of the topic do not get to the core of ‘normal’ aging, she argues. The representation of aging is misleading because representations focus

10 Claudia Wassmann on dementia and extreme cases. The cultural discourse about aging, Chivers writes, evokes its panic by turning to extreme test cases to display the convergence of disability and age, such as elder abuse scandals, right-to-die cases, and, occasionally, innovative approaches to dementia care that, while dramatic, compelling, and promising each in their turn, do not get at the quotidian experience of contemporary aging. Amour is intriguing because it plays into the cultural fears of aging as accompanied by disability and depend- ency pushing to the test case of apparent euthanasia ... (Chapter 5: 106–7) In Chapter 5, ‘Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death and Amour’, Sally Chivers provides an in-depth analysis of the movie Amour. The title of her chapter, she explains, comes from a ‘right-to-die manifesto’ posted online by Gillian Bennett, an 83-year-old with dementia, ‘shortly before she ingested a lethal drug by choice’. Her perspective on life with dementia as equivalent to becoming an ‘empty husk’ emphasizes ‘intellectual ways of knowing the self’. Bennett expressed her belief that she would become an economic burden on the state, which she felt would be irresponsible, once she was unable to know herself. Other case studies stand in stark contrast to this view. Contrasting perspectives on aging and dementia, fear of shame and abandonment, Chivers helds, tap into cultural views of value and of identity at a time when popular media induces panic about the dangers of an aging population due to economic and health-care crises. In Chivers’ discussion of Amour we can see the great potential that movies have for the analysis of topics which are highly invested with emotions in contemporary societies, because a variety of interpret- ations are possible. And we have a wonderful example of how movies and TV films can be used as primary sources in scholarship. Giving full expression to the aims we pursue with the present collected volume, Chivers stresses that: Films are a useful starting point for this discussion because viewers have to negotiate the cultural panic induced by the fear of the so-called grey tsunami, personal disgust and fear at the prospect of aging, guilt about their own care choices, and affective ties associated with death within family contexts, but

An Introduction 11 they can do so at some remove and in the context of the workings of the imagination (personal communication). In this respect, the superiority of film to written text lies in the fact that they are more gripping than text since the human brain is wired to believe what it sees. For instance, scientific experiments with prosthetic ‘rubber hands’ showed that if positioned in a specific way, we take a rubber hand almost as if it were our own, if pain is inflicted upon it. And ‘mirror therapy’, which is used in re-education exercises after injury, clearly shows that the brain takes the image for reality. Seeing the mirror image of the healthy hand moving, while the injured one is occluded by the mirror, improves the movement of the injured side. In a similar fashion, seeing another person on screen is almost like seeing him or her in the street or in the room with us. Amour also demonstrates the limits of conveying an emotional reality to another person. The difficulty we have in understanding how someone else feels, or how something feels to someone else, becomes evident. It might be particularly difficult to step into the shoes of an elderly person, just as we can no longer feel like a child once childhood is past. Old age is not ‘just the same all over again’, only with wrinkles. We cannot imagine how it feels to witness one’s body decay and one’s intellectual and emotional self disintegrate. Indeed, Chivers’ analysis suggests that George, the husband in the movie, made the wrong care decision, one that overtaxed his abil- ities, and that his wife would have been better off had she been cared for in a nursing home. What is wrong in her eyes was the desire to assume full responsibility of the burden of his wife’s care himself rather than turning to social institutions, which allegedly would have done a better job. However, this is not certain, knowing the reality of such places, and her analysis does not leave room for the possibility that there might be no solution possible for the inevitable limit of human life. Chivers’ analysis reveals the great difficulty we have at accepting the loss of control. Indeed, George didn’t kill his wife at the end because he wanted to move on to a new life. He had none. Caring for his loved one was all that remained of his life. Chivers nicely shows how the world closed in on the old couple, and the apart- ment became a sanctuary, but her interpretation did not consider this option: George died with his wife. Even if we do not see him

12 Claudia Wassmann actually dying, he has nothing left to aspire to, no hope for the future to sustain him as he carried on living. Thus, the movie Amour also reveals our great difficulty with losing control, and accepting disability and infirmity in contemporary Western societies. After looking at broader societal perspectives and private emotions, the book turns to the intricate relationship between emotion and media. In Chapter 6, ‘Re-enacting Trauma in Film and Television: Restaging History, Revisiting Pain’, Stella Bruzzi, founder of the Department of Film and Television Studies at Warwick University, Coventry, Great Britain, probes how past and present emotions interact in emotional time in audio-visual productions. Can movies and documentaries be therapeutic, Bruzzi asks, by bringing back into our present past traumatic events that we have not experi- enced first hand? She stresses the coupling of the intellectual with the emotional time-space as a particularly important aspect in the therapeutic effect that movies can have. She calls movies, and in particular the re-enactment in movies, a ‘logical extension’ of the ‘talking cure’. Using examples such as Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1967), Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame (1975), Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), and Christine Cynn and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), her chapter investigates ways in which ‘re-enact- ment’ has been used in a documentary context. In particular, Bruzzi pointed out that ‘re-enactment’, the dramatized restaging of lives and events, is an increasingly common feature of documentary as well as fictional texts. As she sees it, it is also a mode of personal or collective therapy. In a selection of several movies and documentaries from the 1960s to the present day Bruzzi looked at how, to re-enact history is also to remember, re-constitute and maybe even to misremember it. For instance, we are all familiar with the images of Kennedy’s murder or the attack on the World Trade Center, which have been taken up in the movies and played back to us repeatedly. However, The reconfiguration of trauma and pain, even in documentary, is part-fantasy, as Bruzzi explains, as re-enactment frequently exists along the fault-line of what was known of the event or act at the time, the knowledge that has been accumulated since and what we might want the event to symbolize. The most emotionally troubling movie that Bruzzi reviews is The Act of Killing (2012). In this docu- mentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, using both re-enactment as well as fictional elements, a group of killers from a former death squad in

An Introduction 13 Indonesia restage their crimes and go to see survivors and the rela- tives of their victims. Here the value of movies as historical sources comes into play too. Any re-enactment comprises the original ‘act’ or event and subsequent ‘enactments’ of it (for example in archive or interview accounts); it also, inevitably, reflects some of the preoccu- pations of the times in which the ‘re-enactment’ takes place (Bruzzi, 2005: 420–5). The Act of Killing gives ample room to the views of the perpetra- tors and brings us into intimate contact with their personalities and ways of thinking, which we do not usually do at our dinner tables, and which can be very unpleasant while viewing. However, crime is so much a part of our contemporary reality, and crime fiction makes up such a large part of prime-time television, that we need to reflect on what we watch to thrill us. And in the twenty-first century we witness a new quality of crime with individual terrorist attacks and beheadings of innocent people acted out in front of running cameras. Therefore, it is important to analyze the psychological profiles and mindsets of people involved in criminal acts via the devices that audio-visual productions can provide us with. To revisit an original death and trauma is also to change it, Bruzzi claims. While death can’t be undone, sometimes its audio-visual re-enactment and representation can be therapeutic. It might hopefully help bring justice to the victims, or in certain cases, it may change a perpet- rator’s view of their deeds, and even lead to repentance. Viewing this can be very trying for the spectator. Bruzzi describes the process of therapy as ‘a psychically intense, but psychologically satisfying, working through’ past events. Catharsis as one effect of movies, or of emotional engagement with movies, is mentioned by several authors in this collection. Psychotherapy, therapy culture, and movies are also inextricably linked. Psychotherapy, over the course of the twentieth century, became the dominant interpretatory framework by which people make sense of themselves and their relationships with their fellow human beings. Sociologists like Eva Illouz speak of ‘therapy culture’ (Illouz, 2008). How do movies help us grapple with our fears and idiosyncrasies? The next two chapters of this collection first discuss fear and psychotherapy in the cinema of Woody Allen and, secondly, the discourses on psychotherapy and psychiatry in film more gener- ally in polycontextual settings. In Chapter 7, ‘The Relationships

14 Claudia Wassmann Between Therapy Culture, Psychology and Cinema: The Case of Woody Allen’, Miguel Ángel Huerta Floriano, professor at the School of Communication, Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain, probes the intimate, reflexive and reciprocal relationship that film and psychoanalysis share. On the one hand, he maintains that filming arrangements activate participatory and identification psychological mechanisms. These are very interesting points in the study of human emotions. On the other hand, the psychoanalytical trend influenced the study of film theory. Huerta revisits the cinematic production of Woody Allen, exploring the use it makes of psychoanalysis. The relationship between psychology and cinema has traditionally been very close. Both movies and psychoanalysis came into being at the same time, at the turn of the twentieth century. Huerta points out the reciprocal cross-fertilization of movies’ mise-en-scène, narrative, and psychology. As he explains, some noticeable connections exist between the investigation of the unconscious mind and the language that is used in audio-visual representations. Furthermore, movies are an interesting source for the study of our relationship with therapy culture, because many films have represented psychoanalysis inten- sively, offering a very particular representation of the culture of therapy. Huerta looks in particular at the selection of psychoanalysts and their patients that abound Allen’s filmography. This collection constitutes one of the most significant examples of representations of this professional group. While Woody Allen pictures psychoanalysis mostly in a critical or ironic way, making us laugh at the psychiatrist and his patients, (and mediately about our own shortcomings), he uses at the same time ‘formal and narrative resources that are, para- doxically, influenced by psychoanalysis’. Therapy as a dominant trope is not restricted to the cinema of Woody Allen. In Chapter 8, ‘Therapy Cultures in Society: A Polycontextual Approach’, Robin Kurilla, a scholar of communi- cation at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, provides a broader perspective on the representation of psychiatry and psycho- analysis in film. Kurilla highlights the relatedness among mass media and everyday life, before turning to narratives on psychotherapy and psychiatry in the film proper. Consulting 57 movies which thematize psychiatry, psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy, he distills the common themes among the movie narratives, paying close attention to emotions and their relation to the body (see Table 8.1).

An Introduction 15 In order to explore ‘the socio-historical preconditions and repercus- sions’ of the movie narratives from various angles, he follows up this analysis with an exemplary reconstruction of the most salient themes presented in the contexts of scholarly and public discourses, such as social control, stigmatization, and the naturalization of emotions. Questioning whether these themes are able to ‘orientate emotion, cognition, and social practice in everyday life settings’, his analysis rather stresses the importance of face-to-face interaction and strengthens the concept of milieu of the person in psychiatric or psychological difficulty, as a dominant influence over the movie proper. Kurilla argues that While the film themes may offer symbolic resources and orientation in general, micro interactions remain the only sites where these resources can be socially capitalized on. Upon analyzing whether movie narratives provide us with an orientation and represent symbolic resources on ‘Therapy Markets’ for specific subgroups of consumers, Kurilla concludes that the possibility of factually learning about therapies and psychiatry through movies is limited. Ending with a comparison in the context of globalization, he frames psychotherapy in terms of a rite of passage. This definition sheds light on functional equivalents of therapy and, at the same time, serves as the grounds for examining possible translations and transitions among traditional belief systems, institutionalized psychotherapy, and the self-help market on the one hand and everyday life encounters in local and global contexts on the other. (Chapter 8) Would movie-goers recognize each other as ‘emotional communi- ties’ in the sense that Barbara H. Rosenwein (2010) understands the term, referring their personal idiosyncrasies and psychiatric condi- tions to specific films? Widening the scope to credit the rising importance of the new media where audio-visual materials abound, Chapter 9, ‘The Emotional Framing of Terrorism in Online Media: The Case of Charlie Hebdo’, turns to affective storytelling in online journalism. Omar V. Rosas, a scholar of philosophy and sociology at the University of Navarra, Spain, and the University of Twente, Netherlands, examines the ways in which terrorism was affectively framed and communicated from a transnational perspective in the online news in the coverage

16 Claudia Wassmann of the terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, placing it in relation to the recent movie American Sniper (2015) by Clint Eastwood. Filmed with a cellphone by a bystander, the images of the shooting of a policeman at close distance were looped on the websites of the online journals and repeated on television. Here the loop of video to reality and back to video comes full circle. Taking up the theme Bruzzi raised with regard to the images of the attack on the World Trade Center, Rosas questions how fear is perceived and managed through media representations and the therapeutic poten- tial of such representations. The volume closes with Chapter 10 ‘A Tentative Conclusion: The Pulse of Our Times’, by Claudia Wassmann, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, the convener of the conference in which this collected volume originated. Wassmann argues that films and television series are a privileged means for taking The Pulse of Our Times as they allow for sketching out the complexity of emotion(s) and reveal what is time honored about emotions and what is historically contingent. Conclusions Bridging the divide between humanities and social sciences, Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television: The Pulse of Our Times repre- sents a unique collection of transdisciplinary reflections upon the emotional cultures of contemporary societies, taking movies and TV productions as a starting point for analysis. The book contains chap- ters by leading historians of emotions, scholars in film and television studies, and a pioneering scholar in aging research. The collection opens up questions on the characteristic features of our ‘emotional regimes’ and demonstrates possible ways of using films, emotions, and therapy as a tool both to shed new light on our emotional real- ities, identities, and sensitivities in their historically contingent frame and to understand their shifting nature. Thus, the collection offers a fresh, insightful look at emotions and society across discip- lines from the early twentieth century to the present.

2 The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family, 1930–Present Sandra Trudgen Dawson When workers and unions first began to demand paid holidays in the early twentieth century, supporters claimed it as a right. By the 1960s, annual summer holidays were an institution and planning for the excitement of the big holiday a year-round activity. Films, televi- sion, magazines, and newspapers offered ideas for the ‘perfect week’, the clothes to pack and the sights to see (Dawson, 2011: 178). Summer holidays were more than simply time away from work, they were big business as advertisements used images that moved emotions and encouraged consumers to dream and hopefully, purchase. By 1990, John Urry claimed holidays were so much a part of our lives that we were living in what he termed, ‘a culture of tourism’ (Urry, 1990). This chapter traces the transformation of holiday ideology and assesses the emotional impact of holidays on family life and social groups as well as considering the significance of the increasing reli- ance on technology as an essential component of leisure. After World War I, the idea of paid holidays as a right, not a privi- lege took shape in Europe (Dawson, 2007a). In 1936, the International Labour Organization adopted annual paid time off work as a basic right at their convention. By 1938, twenty-four countries worldwide1 granted paid holidays to workers. Britain came late2 to the table but finally legislated one week’s annual paid holiday for full-time workers in 1938 (Jones, 1986: 40–55). Two decades of debates about the psychological health benefits and the potential for increased productivity from workers with paid holiday stimulated the growth of mass entertainment as well as the idea that workers and their 17

18 Sandra Trudgen Dawson Figure 2.1 The Drive Duporth Holiday Camp Source: (author’s personal collection) families deserved an annual holiday together, something that sala- ried workers had experienced for decades. While the upper and middle-classes vacationed in hotels in exotic locales like Egypt, Italy, and the Americas, accompanied by nannies and maids to take care of their children (or leaving children behind with relatives or servants), these holidays were out of reach for the less wealthy. Instead, cheap camping holidays organized by political and union groups expanded to include family participation while entrepreneurs like William Heygate, (Billy) Butlin, and Harry Warner developed mass commer- cial holiday camps and marketed them specifically to working-class families (Dawson, 2011; Ward & Hardy, 1986). Yet the reality was that most working-class families could not afford a holiday away from home, even after 1938, preferring to take day trips or to spend a little cash on amusements like the fairground or cinema. These were cheap, entertaining and a distraction from the realities of daily life. Workers unable to afford to buy a car might well be able to afford a ticket to ride on the new electric fairground cars (O’Connell, 1998; Dawson, 2007b.) Unable to find the money to travel abroad for a holiday, workers could still afford to go to the

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 19 cinema, enjoy the warmth and comfort of the furniture and imagine themselves somewhere else, if only for an hour or two (Richards, 1989, chapter 2). After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, working days were longer and more Britons of all classes were conscripted into full-time war work, but leisure and holidays were also seen as essential to main- taining health and morale (Dawson, 2011, chapter 4). Many theaters, clubs, and other established entertainments closed but alternative pleasure activities emerged, often in the workplace. BBC radio broad- cast ‘Music while you work’ and ‘Workers Playtime’ and factories aired them over loud speakers (Hickman, 1995). The Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) held lunchtime concerts and variety shows in the workplace and Churches and voluntary organiza- tions planned dances so that workers could relax after the long hours of work (Mackay, 2002, chapter 5).3 BBC radio aired less classical music and educational programs and included more popular songs, comedy skits, and variety shows to amuse, distract, and entertain during the war years (Hickman, 1995: 9; Horn, 2009, chapters 1 and 2; Nicholas, 1996). Emotions, strained by the war years, regardless of social class, were thought to regenerate through leisure time and activities. But the war disrupted the family as children were evacuated, fathers and brothers were conscripted into the armed forces and mothers and sisters worked and spent long hours standing in lines for essen- tial rations (Dawson, 2010: 29–49). Those who could afford to send their children to Canada did. Those who could not, sent them to strangers who often reluctantly agreed to billet them (Welshman, 2010: 133–50). The emotional toll on civilians was high although, as Claire Langhamer (2013: 23–40) argues, it was also a time of intense emotional revolution as Britons met, fell in love, married, and were separated during the war years. The government recognized the emotional toll and encouraged families and individuals to spend time away from home to recharge mentally. Full-employment and elevated war wages generated disposable income while rationing and shortages meant that leisure activities were in high demand. By 1942, civilian travel had to be curbed to reduce fuel consumption. A new policy of ‘Holidays-at-Home’ meant that towns and cities organized six weeks of non-stop summer entertainment to encourage civilians to stay at home (Sladen, 2002: 67–89). Holidays-at-Home distracted and entertained and helped create a sense of excitement, especially for children.

20 Sandra Trudgen Dawson After the war, postwar workers enjoyed paid holidays but did not always choose to go away from home. The cinemas, dance halls, fairgrounds, and amusement parks continued to entertain and amuse consumers with discretionary income (Langhamer, 2000: 58–63; Bevan, 2012: 63–83; and Abra, 2012: 41–62 in Bebber). Those who before the war had the means to travel to Europe and beyond, to take luxury cruises or some of the new commercial passenger flights, sought new destinations, often within the British Empire, the United States or South America in the postwar years, as shortages of consumer goods and consumer durables affected domestic tourism. Hotels and guesthouses damaged in the war were unable to reopen because building materials were unavailable and rebuilding homes was a priority of the new welfare state (Malpass, 2003: 589–606). Nevertheless, the mass commercial holiday camps of the interwar years were able to reopen relatively easily by impro- vising repairs and using army-surplus crockery and linens (Dawson, 2011, chapter 5). While postwar workers enjoyed paid holidays, not all Britons chose to spend their time and money on domestic resorts. Nevertheless, newspapers, magazines, and radio programs like the BBC’s ‘Holiday Hour’ imagined that all Britons at least planned to take a holiday somewhere other than their home each summer. Indeed, in 1948, the United Nations declared annual vacations a basic human right.4 By the mid-1950s, more and more Britons chose to take their summer holiday abroad. Foreign destinations held a greater promise of good weather, a better variety of enter- tainment and less restrictive rules5 about alcohol consumption. At the same time, British resorts also saw an increase in foreign visi- tors anxious to experience the ‘forgotten treasures’ of Britain.6 So for many postwar consumers, the choice of holiday destination was predicated on finding somewhere new; somewhere different from everyday experience; somewhere less rigid or where normal rules could be broken. Away from the restrictions of behavior imposed by employers, neighbors, and friends, holidays were often taken among relative strangers and so rules could be broken. The idea of taking a holiday somewhere completely different from home spread to the newly affluent working and lower-middle classes who wanted to enjoy foreign travel like the middle-classes (Smith Wilson, 2006: 206–29; Brooke, 2001: 773–95).

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 21 Figure 2.2 Squires Gate Holiday Camp Source: (author’s personal collection) Recognizing the desire for cheap foreign holidays, Vladimir Gavrilovich Raitz, a Soviet-born immigrant to Britain, established Horizon Holidays in 1950 and pioneered the first mass package holi- days abroad for Britons when he chartered a flight from Gatwick to Camp Franco-Britannique, near Calvi7 in Corsica (Bray & Raitz, 2001, chapter 1). Horizon Holidays offered inexpensive, all-inclusive vacations to a wide range of British tourists.8 The wartime inno- vations of the aeronautical industry and the surplus of aircraft, provided the infrastructure for Raitz’s bold idea.9 Southern European destinations like Calvi in Corsica lengthened the traditional British summer season because sunshine was virtually guaranteed most of the year and guests were provided with the novelty and simplicity of an undeveloped Mediterranean town. The camp was very simple. Guests slept in army-surplus tents and walked to the beach a mile away.10 There was little other entertainment available.11 While Raitz claims the distinction of ‘inventing’ the package holiday business in Britain, he based his idea on the successful holiday camp model developed by men like Harry Warner and Billy Butlin in the interwar years.12 The difference between British holiday camps and the first foreign package holidays, however, lay in the paucity

22 Sandra Trudgen Dawson Figure 2.3 Pig & Whistle Bar, Butlins Holiday Camp, Clacton Source: (author’s personal collection) of entertainment and the lack of facilities for children. The camp at Calvi offered adults a relaxed atmosphere that was unavailable in British hotels where guests were expected to be well dressed and well behaved. The bar at Calvi was open all hours too but there was little else to do. Yet the lack of organized entertainment appealed to guests who were largely single, middle-class professionals – school teachers and nurses – used to a regimented work life.13 Psychologically, this simplicity renewed tired minds and bodies. But Horizon Holidays were not for families with children who required more entertain- ment and emotional investment. In 1950, the same year that Horizon Holidays began, a French entrepreneur, Gérard Blitz, opened the first Club Méditerranée village on the island of Majorca. Like the Calvi camp, guests at Club Med slept in army-surplus tents on Allied army cots. According to histo- rian Ellen Furlough, ‘the cost was modest, activities in the villages often improvised and accommodations and facilities were minimal.’ (Furlough, 1998: 277, 1993: 65–81). Wooden tables provided shelter when it rained and showers consisted of a hose without hot water. Simplicity and makeshift comfort seemed unique and consumers were attracted by the ‘rustic charm’ of the new camps. Guests were

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 23 offered time away from civilization – there were no clocks or tele- phones. Visitors bartered for services with shells and beads and the world of work and civilization was forgotten for a week or two (Furlough, 1998: 278). For Club Med guests, physical and emotional distance from civilization also meant normal rules of behavior could be ignored. The idea spread rapidly and by the mid-1950s Club Med camps opened throughout the Mediterranean. By 1960, two-and-a- half million Britons enjoyed holidays abroad.14 Just five years later, the number had doubled as Britons took advantage of the inexpen- sive, casual arrangements of Club Med and Horizon Holidays (Bray & Raitz, 2001, chapter 5). The idea of a summer holiday away from home and without a schedule was the theme of Summer Holiday (1963) starring Cliff Richard as Don, one of four bus mechanics who transform a double- decker bus into a traveling hotel. The four friends travel through France, picking up a group of three stranded women on their way to a singing job in Athens. A stowaway also joins the teenagers as they sing and dance their way through Europe. Richard15 sings: We’re all going on a summer holiday No more working for a week or two. Fun and laughter on a summer holiday, No more worries for me or you, for a week or two We’re going where the sun shines brightly, We’re going where the sea is blue, We’ve seen it in the movies, now let’s see if it’s true! (‘Summer Holiday Lyrics’, 2015) The song and the film capture the excitement and the emotions of the big summer holiday, traveling into an unknown territory and experiencing what they have all seen on film but what they are almost afraid might be unreal. While mayhem ensues once the travelers reach Greece (they are accused of kidnapping the stowaway but after Don and Barbara – the stowaway – declare their love for each other, all is forgiven). The film ends with all eight travelers on a Greek beach, very much enjoying their well-deserved holiday. It is everything they hoped for – the sunshine, relaxation, and a break from everyday work and chores (Summer Holiday, 1963).

24 Sandra Trudgen Dawson The film portrayed all the emotions expected from a holiday – anticipation, excitement, happiness, contentment, and enjoyment at finding the destination better than expected. This was what Britons wanted when taking their big summer holiday. They wanted sunshine and the space and opportunity to behave differently than at home, to be where schedules could be forgotten and routines abandoned. Yet for those taking a holiday with the family – grandma and the kids – behavior could not always be uninhibited. Work and school schedules might be forgotten but the day-to-day elements of childcare and supervision could not be completely abandoned. Thus the family holiday needed some degree of organization. Holidays for single, young adults, however, needed very little structure and Club Med-style vacations appealed to this section of the population and the age requirement ensured no one under twenty-one could join the Club. By the early 1960s, the political and economic changes in Spain opened the country to tourists and the foreign holiday industry.16 Frames Tours (1961: 2) organized the first overland hotel package holidays to Spain from London in 1961. Destinations included hotels in the Costa Brava, Costa Barcelona, and Palma, and Porto Cristo on the island of Majorca. Tourists, the company promised, could enjoy the beauty of the unspoiled Spanish coasts and a ‘subtle blend of the old and the new’. Nestled in the ‘romantic countryside, rich in forests, vineyards, and semi-tropical flowers and a way of life that has scarcely changed through the centuries’, guests could also find the most elegant and modern bars as well as dance to some of the finest bands in ‘sophisticated surroundings’ (Frames Tours, 1961, p.3). Frames’ package holidays to Spain ranged from ₤31 to ₤41 for ten days, roughly the average monthly wage of a manual worker in Britain in 1961. Consequently, preparation for the big summer holiday entailed a considerable amount of financial planning.17 To assist with this planning, companies began to offer ‘holidays on credit’ and schemes for monthly payments that began after the holiday.18 Holidays on credit allowed families to go to domestic and foreign destinations more freely than ever before although repaying was often depressing as the holiday was over and the memories faded. In an era of full-employment, increasing wages for manual workers and universal unemployment insurance as a safety net, holiday credit companies flourished.

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 25 Yet the foreign tourism industry marketed specifically to unmar- ried young adults, those without responsibilities and those willing to go without luxury service. Hotel-plan targeted ‘young people’ and offered self-service meals and accommodation without cham- ber-maid service at the Riviera Beach Club on the Cote d’Azur, near Hyeres on the Giens peninsular. Guests slept in brick bungalows among pine trees and bathed in communal bathrooms. The Club provided bedding but guests were expected to make their own beds each day. This meant that guests could rise at their convenience. Free from telephones and rigid dress codes, the Riviera Beach Club offered accommodation in two, three or four-bedded chalets that ranged from £31 to £41 per person (Hotel-plan, 1960: 49). The infor- mality of the French camps appealed to single Britons of modest means who wanted to experience a foreign holiday. Yet the cost of this simple holiday for a family of four was out of the reach of many working families who increasingly stayed in Britain at caravan sites and camp sites or in holiday camps, guest houses, and cheap hotels (Walton, 2000, chapter 3). The novelty of the new hotel package holidays in Spain appealed to Britons who could afford the higher prices but there were no reductions for children. Thus families with children were largely excluded by cost from these new hotel packages. However, the inex- pensive camp-style holidays remained extremely popular and new companies in France rapidly expanded to accommodate British visi- tors. Les Restanques, for example, offered guests a vacation in blue tents nestled ‘among pines on a Provence hillside, overlooking the bay of San Tropez’. Facilities included a modern clubhouse where campers dined and drank, as well as open-air swimming pools. Although guests used communal bathrooms, meals included an unlimited consumption of free red wine. Les Restanques did attempt to appeal to families by providing a playground, a games and sports leader, and a swimming pool ‘with bright young attendants on duty all the time’. Indeed, according to camp advertising, guests could leave their children to be entertained, fed, and put to bed. A ten-day holiday at Les Restanques cost ₤33, including travel by rail and boat.19 This was almost three times the cost of a week’s holiday at a British holiday camp. And the experience was different. Holiday camps in France and Italy, according to the Sun, ‘have gone native’ with an emphasis

26 Sandra Trudgen Dawson on informality and fresh air. Holidaymakers were encouraged to forget about work, bills, and formal clothes and just relax away from telephones and daily routines. Guests ‘drift around in bikinis, or swim trunks’ and ‘idle over meals’, and do practically nothing for days on end. By contrast, luxury holiday camps in Britain that attracted over two-and-a-half million Britons each year, provided entertainment and luxury to ‘defeat the British climate’. ‘There are at least three theatres working nightly – revue, variety, and reper- tory’, and guests simply ‘walk in without paying ... walk out to a bar or to [their] own bed’, without the worry of parking, driving or catching a train. The theatres ‘draw top stars but ... also give a break to newcomers’, in fact, ‘Ringo Starr got his start at the Skegness camp as a drummer in 1962,’ and comedian Charlie Drake once organized sports at Filey. Although the mass entertainment did not appeal to everyone, ‘given two or three tiny children and no prospect of an evening out through babysitter shortage’ a British holiday camp vacation was a good place to go. A comfortable chalet, a nursery, playroom, infant feeding, and childcare all for ‘around ₤12–₤14 a week with cuts to ₤7–₤4 a week for children according to age’, and the holiday is ready made, and affordable for the average working man and his family.20 Indeed, two-and-a-half million people, mainly families, spent their summer holidays at the three largest holiday camp chains in Britain – Butlin’s, Pontin’s, and Warner’s in 1965 alone. Consumer taste changed in the mid-1960s. More and more tour- ists looked for luxury when on holiday, even those with limited incomes. The big summer holiday began to take on a more important role in the lives of salaried and waged workers. By the mid-1960s, Club Med and Horizon Holidays altered their vacations to offer ‘luxury’ hotel villages in ‘exotic’ locales. Club Med still targeted single, usually professional adults but now offered locations away from Europe. Like the earlier camps, these ‘hotel villages’ did not contain telephones or televisions or clocks. The idea was to give holidaymakers a complete break from civilization, from work, from worries. Following the example of Club Med, German and Italian operators developed other club holidays throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa (Poon, 1998: 62–77). By the early 1980s, however, Club Med still led the market in catering to the singles travel market (Nudel, 1982: 31–3).

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 27 The oil crisis of the early 1970s had a huge impact on the big summer holiday. The Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) increased the price of oil and controlled the amount exported. Western Europe, hugely dependent on imported oil, looked ready to slide into an economic recession as petrol prices dramatically increased and so did the cost of travel. In 1974, hotels in Europe reported they were 60 percent empty as holidaymakers stayed home and airports stood empty. Spain was particularly hard hit as inflation reached 20 percent. Very few Britons chose to holiday in Spain that year.21 By 1979, attacks by Eta, the Basque Separatist organization, who targeted trains traveling from Paris to Madrid and the head- quarters of the Citroen Company in Bilbao, caused many Britons to cancel their Spanish holidays.22 Despite the downturn, however, tourism became the focus of research and study. Sociologists in particular were interested in how individuals were influenced by social groups in their decisions about where to vacation. A study by John Crompton published in 1980 looked at the influence of social groups on determining holiday experiences (Crompton, 1981: 550–68). The study found that holidays were a popular focus of conversation within social groups and that pressure to travel to specific destinations occurred frequently as individuals acquired both knowledge and stereotypes about destinations from the social group. Single individuals were most likely to take a holiday with members of their social group. Crompton also found that children exerted considerable influence either through persistent demands or by parents making decisions about vacation destinations with their children’s welfare uppermost in their minds. Many respondents noted that family holidays ended when their children were in their mid-teens and no longer wanted to travel with the family as the primary social group. Instead, teen- agers preferred to take holidays with their peers. Other respond- ents expanded the family and allowed children to bring friends on holiday with them. Alternatively, more than one family planned a holiday together at the same destination to share childcare respon- sibilities (Crompton, 1981: 562–3). As in the 1960s, families with children looked for holidays where children were entertained and where there were other children. Parents desired a holiday where they were not the sole entertainment for their children and had a chance to take a break from more formal parenting roles. For

28 Sandra Trudgen Dawson Britons, this often took the form of caravan or camping holidays or even ‘off season’ holiday camp sessions that were cheaper than the high season weeks. By the early 1980s, unemployment, labor strikes, and inflation in Britain altered the relationship between work and paid holi- days. Those who could afford them took holidays but an increasing number of Britons could not afford a vacation away from home. Yet the psychological need for holidays was recognized and enhanced by the increased mechanization of the workplace and the tedium of monotonous work. Writing in 1976, Scitovsky (1976) concluded that the lack of stimulation in the workplace made the need for leisure consumption all the more important to remove the feelings of alien- ation created in the workplace. Others claimed that the conditions of the modern workplace over-stimulated workers and created stress (Iso-Ahola, 1980). ‘Modern life is often characterized as providing either too little stimulation or too much, causing people to search for optimal arousal’ on holiday (Richards, 1999: 191). The non-pro- ductive, relaxing beach holidays of the 1960s and 1970s were never completely replaced but in the 1980s, as work required less skill, holi- daymakers used vacation time to re-skill. Beach holidays required low skill consumption but for those with the means the holidays of the 1980s and 1990s increasingly included high-skill activities such as skiing, skydiving, abseiling or high-skilled cultural consump- tion such as tours of Machu Picchu or walking the Great Wall of China. Richards suggested in 1999 that ‘As tourists become more experienced, they also acquire tourism-specific consumption skills, which they can then use to enhance their own tourism experiences’ (Richards, 1999: 191). At the same time, this highly skilled tourism could also be used as a symbolic consumption that, in the 1980s and 1990s became increasingly important in social distinctions among and between peers. These types of highly skilled holidays were of course, only possible for those with money. In post-industrial Britain, the economic differences between social groups increased. For many unemployed or low-waged individuals, the most skilled aspect of their vacation might be rowing a boat or riding a Ferris wheel at the fair. Cheap camping and beach holidays continued as the most economical way to enjoy a break from work and school for the majority of Britons in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 29 For those with well-paid jobs, by 2000, highly skilled tourism also included new technologies. Cell phones, laptop computers, the internet, and e-mail altered the relationship between home and holiday destinations by providing instant connections across thou- sands of miles. As technology became essential to work and home behaviors, so tourists wanted to take holidays where those behav- iors could continue. According to Currie, while technology has been investigated as a negative aspect of those on holiday, ‘Familiarity, continuity and comfort of routine are often overlooked aspects of tourist behavior’ (Currie, 1997: 884–94). Access to the internet, television, and telephones can provide comfort on holiday because some everyday behaviors do not specifically delineate work/leisure/ family as separate entities but rather as a collective. In what some researchers have deemed the domestication of the internet, access to the internet is deemed essential to everyday behaviors whether at work, at home or on holiday. A study by Kelly MacKay and Christine Vogt published in 2012 looked at the incidence and influence of information technology on everyday life and on vacation. Information technology, the authors claimed, has ‘established new behavior patterns and transformed old ones in our daily environments, including vacations, travel and leisure time’ (MacKay & Vogt, 2012: 1380). The study did not look at the use of information technology by the tourist industry, rather it focused on holidaymakers’ use of information technology while on vacation. The researchers looked at the equipment holidaymakers took with them on vacation and the percentage of tourists who used the technology. The equipment included a digital camera; cell phones with internet; laptops with wireless access; IPODs/MP3/MP4; Global Positioning devices in vehicles; Personal Digital Assistants with internet and pagers. Of these devices, all but pagers and cell phones with internet were used more than 90 percent (pagers were used 40 percent and cell phones with internet 52.2 percent). Those who did not bring equip- ment said that they used computers and the internet in hotels or at friends’/relatives’ homes (MacKay & Vogt, 2012: 1393). Even for those with limited incomes, the cell phone has become an essential aspect of daily life. The current ‘selfie’ craze crosses all social and economic groups and Facebook and Instagram can be accessed in Public Libraries and community centers for those without a personal computer.

30 Sandra Trudgen Dawson Yet what does the use of technology on holiday really mean for holi- days? In an age of increasing dependence on personal technologies, social media and instant communication, even when workers do take holidays, they are never truly away from the workplace. Technology has bridged the division between the workplace and home, the office and the holiday resort and has effectively severed the relationship between private life and work. For a specific social group, the use of technology has taken on a more complex role. Media representa- tions and films from the 1960s on suggest that while families did holiday together, once young adults could, they chose to take their most memorable big summer holiday with peers. Parents could only guess at what happened on these holidays. Today, social media and technologies that can instantly post pictures and comments on the internet and personal technological equipment have been given a new role in the lives of young people and also in their relationship to leisure and consumption. Technology gives the holidaymaker the ability to imagine, construct, and change the presentation of their holiday experience at the touch of the screen. Social media and the pressure to involve social groups in the experience of holidays can motivate many to spend large amounts of vacation time sharing, commenting, and critiquing their holiday reality. One mother put it this way, ‘There’s pressure to look good on vacation because of Instagram. Teens want to post photos on Instagram rather than enjoying the moment. It’s all about showing others what you’re doing, and presenting a picture of yourself as you want to be portrayed.’ For many teens, the vacation is ‘only as good as how many “likes” you got on Instagram or Facebook’. She continues, ‘Our daughter actually took a photo off Instagram after she posted it because it didn’t get enough “likes”. She felt the pres- sure of making a photo look good more than just having fun in the moment.’ This took time away from the family vacation they were trying to enjoy and created a level of frustration that took away the joy of the holiday itself.23 These technologies have also been used to create new reality shows such as ‘Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents’. The show films teenagers on their first holiday without their parents. What the teenagers don’t know is that their suspicious parents are watching them in real time just a few hundred yards away. Thus while the teenagers

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 31 are celebrating ‘adulthood’ and independence from parents, every decision they make is recorded and subject to parental analysis. The series, about to air its fourth season, remains popular, dramatic, and somewhat unsettling in its portrayal of dynamics within social groups on holiday and between family members at the close of the show. What viewers do not see is what happens after the show ends. The viewer is left to wonder what happens to the family dynamics; how does the family function with the level of intimacy that has been portrayed not only to parents but also to an entire nation (and more as the show is available on YouTube). In a way that was only possible through postcards that often arrived after the holiday had finished and photos, which were developed when holidaymakers returned home, now, through new technolo- gies, we are able to share our holiday experiences instantaneously. Is this a loss or a gain? Conclusions Paid holidays were initially conceived of as a way for workers to relax physically and emotionally. The idea of the big family holiday so celebrated in the 1960s may not have been the reality for many. Although the regeneration of the family was part of the rationale for paid holidays, the leisure industry rarely catered for children making total relaxation for parents impossible. Many holiday destinations were developed and marketed specifically to single or heterosexual couples or singles looking for a partner. Resorts rarely had facilities for families with children and when they did, amenities catered to adult couples separately from their children. This attitude of catering to the adult, the one paying for the holiday, continued and continues today. The adult is the one who pays for the holiday and remains, due to their age and experiences, the market that seeks to have a holiday away from work. The adolescent on the other hand, because of technology and their socialization among their peers, are never really on holiday but transfixed in a nether technological world that may be divorced from the reality of the holiday itself. Therefore there needs to be a new paradigm developed by those that create holidays to capture this new market as the adolescent holidaymaker ages and evolves into the adult who will be seeking a new form of leisure.

32 Sandra Trudgen Dawson Notes 1. ‘Paid holidays go round the world’, Daily Express, 13 April, 1938, p. 9. 2. The Holidays with Pay legislation was unsuccessful five times before passage in 1938. 3. Interracial relationships caused considerable anxiety for the British government during WWII (Smith, 1988, chapters 2 and 8). Women’s leisure in wartime was often contested (Rose, 2003, chapters 3 and 4). 4. Article 24 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, accessed 11 January 2014. 5. Pubs, restaurants and hotels stopped serving alcohol after 11pm. Changes to the licensing law that allowed service after 11pm came in 2005. ‘Are British resorts too dull?’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 11 August 1956, p. 33. 6. ‘Dull resorts: Publicity man replies to disgruntled Briton’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 25 August 1956, p. 31. 7. The first chartered plane took off from Gatwick airport to Calvi, Corsica, on 20 May 1950. 8. The Worker’s Travel Association (WTA) also organized inexpensive holi- days for Britons from 1921 on. The WTA did not, however provide an all-inclusive fare. 9. Horizon Holidays chartered DC3s first developed in the 1930s and used extensively in WWII. For a history of the technology see, Borgé and Viasnoff (1982) and Ingells (1966, chapter 20). 10. One of the problems with Raitz’s choice of Calvi as the site of his first camp was the distance of over a mile to the nearest beach. There was also little in the way of available transport for the guests (Bray & Raitz, 2001, chapter 1). 11. In 1945, the incoming Labour Government created two new state-owned airlines – British European Airways (BEA) and British South American Airways that would later merge with British Overseas Airway Company (BOAC) in 1949 (Morgan, 1984: 102). 12. Cook’s Travel also offered ‘package excursions’ as early as 1840 (Dawson, 2011, chapter 1). 13. Raitz claims that the Ministry of Transport only agreed to grant a license to Horizon Holidays if he agreed to advertise only to nurses and teachers. Raitz agreed and advertised in The Teacher’s World, The Nursing Mirror, and the New Statesman (Bray & Raitz, 2001: 9). See also ‘Fly to Corsica Isle of Beauty’, Horizon Holiday ad., New Statesman, 27 May 1950, p. 615. 14. ‘Tourism – from tiny baby to high powered businessman,’ The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 18 March 1961, p. 103. 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbNP5yqg7hc 16. The process of liberalizing the Spanish economy began in 1959 when General Francisco Franco announced the Plan de Estabilización Económica on 22 July 1959. One of the first steps in the liberalization process was the devaluation of the currency. This in turn encouraged

The Big Holiday, Work, and the British Family 33 exports and tourism to Spain. (Viñas, 1999, in Leitz & Dunthorn (Eds.), pp. 300–26). 17. The average manual worker in Britain earned ₤8.7 shillings per week (Mitchell, 1988, chapter 11). 18. Hotel-plan offered credit through another company called Travel Credit Limited (Hotel-plan, 1960: 74). 19. Eperon, A. ‘Holiday Leisure’, The Sun, 2 January 1965, p. 11. 20. Eperon, A. ‘Holiday Leisure’, The Sun, 2 January 1965, p. 11. 21. ‘The year all the tourists stayed at home,’ The Economist, 7 August 1974, Issue 6834, p. 83. 22. ‘Holiday Hit’, The Economist, 7 July 1979, Issue 7088, p. 58. 23. Carol Parsons, E-mail to author, 24 October 2014.

3 American Anger Control and the Role of Popular Culture Peter N. Stearns Americans have a peculiar relationship with the emotion of anger. Many Americans, I’m tempted to say most, and certainly many foreigners believe that our society embraces too much anger. We are frequently reminded of real or imagined occasions in which we let unwarranted anger spill over – the decades-long campaign against ‘road rage’ is a case in point. Yet in point of fact American society has been working hard for several decades on efforts to control the emotion. Workplace anger, once commonplace, is severely proscribed; American politicians, on another front, are carefully instructed to manage anger with great care. Revealingly, in many childrearing manuals the word ‘anger’ has been replaced by ‘aggres- sion’, indicating clearly that official national standards find little if any positive role for the emotion, merely highlighting its destructive potential. Comparative studies – for example, between France and the United States – also emphasize our national distrust of anger, the American preference for avoiding even limited outbursts; the French in contrast enjoy anger somewhat more freely. Anger has a complex role in popular media, as well. There is a long popular cultural tradition, going back to the classic Western, of valuing heroes who keep careful control over their emotions, who respond firmly but rationally to any provocation. The United States also saw, amid the contemporary campaigns against anger, the birth of the emotion-less superhero, who fights through for justice with no passion at all. The valued term ‘cool’, after all, usually suggests an anger-free demeanor, along with other attributes. But Americans 34

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 35 also like to see anger depicted. We cherish displays of anger in sports. And we like to see high emotion represented also in certain movie and television genres. This chapter aims to outline elements of the complex national approach to anger, first in terms of accepted standards, but then in terms of the media relationship to these standards – a relationship that can involve reinforcement but that can also involve deliberate presentation of symbolic alternatives. We need to outline the multi- faceted attacks on anger first, for they have not been given the appre- ciation they deserve in characterizations of contemporary American culture. But the media role is fascinating, clearly a source of some confusion but also a reflection of the complexity of anger norms. Americans have been debating this one too: do popular media provide outlets that help Americans defuse anger in real life, or do they heighten the emotion? Changes in anger standards American standard-setters – the people who wrote about family or work life, for example – in the nineteenth century placed a positive value on anger in certain circumstances, primarily for men (respect- able women were not supposed to be angry). A good middle-class man was to shun anger in the bosom of his family, and new attempts sought to curb the use of anger against children. But the capacity for anger as a spur to business competition or as a motive against injustice was a vital male attribute, and a new word, ‘sissy’, denoted the kind of person who could not muster up appropriate outrage. As in the classic Western drama, the good man was slow to anger but implacable when legitimately roused (Stearns, 1994). This complicated formula began to come undone by the 1920s – the decade that, in many emotional categories, launched trends that we still live with today. Amid rising suspicion of undue emotional inten- sity in general, particular attention began to be paid to new methods of controlling anger. The key motivation here was economic. With growing concerns about labor unrest, personnel experts, drawn increasingly from the ranks of industrial psychologists, sought methods to convince workers that anger was wrong, and that work- place grievances should be avoided if possible and handled calmly if they occurred at all. American managers and personnel offices

36 Peter N. Stearns became adept at manipulating around the emotion. Authorities clearly came to believe that an increasingly managerial and service- oriented economy would function better if people kept their tempers, and with women gradually seeping into the white collar workforce, anger had the additional drawback of making these new recruits likely to cry (the problem of women’s tears was a not-inconsiderable employment topic during these transitional years). Finally, now that more economic activity depended on selling people goods that they might not actually need, it was argued that persuasive salespeople were those who rose above customer complaints and presented a smiling face at all times. Dale Carnegie, who became a tireless advo- cate of salesmanship training, put the point directly: customers might get surly, but salespeople should not reply in kind: I had the satisfaction of controlling my temper, the satisfaction of returning kindness for an insult. I got infinitely more real fun out of making her like me than I ever could have gotten out of letting her go and take a jump ... (Carnegie, 1937: 27) Quite widely in the United States, from the 1920s onward and in various work settings, a host of new devices were introduced to restrain anger on the job. Foremen, once notorious for bullying their charges, were now taught to keep their emotions in check. At the same time, they learned that if they could get a worker to repeat a grievance two or three times, the result would often see anger melt into embarrassment, and the whole situation would be defused. Secretaries, increasingly female, were told that anyone with a quick temper ‘faced the problem of remedying this defect’ (Kilduff, 1916: 50). Department store clerks were schooled in turning a cheerful cheek to customer complaints. Praise now went to those who could keep control: as a 1943 personnel article1 put it, ‘it is of the utmost importance that the foremen remain cool’. A good bit of what Arlie Hochschild has called emotion management focused on the need to avoid, defuse or conceal anger, a sharp contrast from the emotional framework expected on the job in the nineteenth century. By this point – the middle of the twentieth century – the new anger advice was spilling over into family literature. The chrono- logical progression was interesting: work concerns came first, and only after a decade or two did the results begin to be integrated into

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 37 more basic socialization efforts. Several studies showed that, under- standably, it was newer middle-class families – in the professions or middle-management rather than manufacturing for example, that picked up the new signals more readily. This was the juncture, in the 1940s and 1950s, when index listings in the most popular chil- drearing manuals began revealingly to cite ‘aggression’ rather than anger, a clear indication that distinctions between outrage and unacceptable vehemence were eroding. The old advice to boys, about learning when to keep anger in check while not losing the capacity, was replaced by more uniform constraints. Classic ploys to teach boys to channel but utilize anger, like boxing, began to disappear from acceptable middle-class practice. Childish anger was now likened to ‘possession by the devil,’ and a good parent must now actively help the child root it out. The emotion served no useful purpose – again, in contrast to nineteenth-century standards – either at the time or in preparation for adult capacities (Lloyd-Jones & Fedder, 1941: 35; Menninger, 1966: 141). Anger, in fact, now became infantile, a sign of insecurity. ‘For anyone to pout, sulk, rage, or indulge in other displays of violent emotion is to confess frustration and inability to face the actual problem.’ Teenage advice books chimed in: ‘do you try to prevent outbursts of anger and thoughtless remarks?’ Anger, in the new view, inevitably produced resistance and more confrontation; it was never useful, and often quite dangerous. Discussion of degrees of outrage was now irrelevant: the whole emotion was suspect. Anger in chil- dren must be replaced by feelings ‘more socially useful and person- ally comfortable’. Children should be taught to verbalize anger, rather than bottle it up, but then carefully to get rid of it without any behavioral manifestation. The good child was now learning to be a docile adult: rules encountered at any stage of life might not always be pleasant, ‘but we cannot break them or have temper tantrums because they do not suit us personally’ (Black, 1946: 140). Marriage manuals, finally, followed suit, urging that couples learn how to accommodate disagreements without angry conflict. Standards here were not entirely novel: nineteenth-century advice had urged both husbands and wives to avoid marital anger. But the level of attention increased, with accompanying strategic recommen- dations. A whole literature on ‘fair fighting’ emerged in the 1960s, with spouses urged to shout hollowly in the closet when they faced