4. Moods and Mental States

In Moving Viewers (2009) Carl Plantinga asks that film scholars should never again ‘use the tired literary metaphor of a “reading” to describe the viewer’s encounter with a film … [because] it implies that film viewing is a cool, intellectual experience’ (2) and he asks for intellectual prejudice against emotion to be stripped away – [F]or the vast majority of film spectators, movie going is first and foremost a pleasurable experience, suffused with affect. Audiences are willing to pay for this experience with money, time and effort, and in return they expect to be fascinated, shocked, titillated, made suspenseful and curious, invited to laugh and cry, and in the end given pleasure. On this foundation of pleasurable affect rests the multibillion dollar international media industries. (2) Plantinga’s ‘pleasurable affect’ is made of emotions, and emotions are a family of powerful instinctive behaviours that contribute to our survival and thriving. They are explosive accelerants to the instincts that have made up the previous three chapters of this book.