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THE MATING GAME IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA

2004; Routledge; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1740030042000276626

1740-7923

Mette Kramer,

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

The Darwinian framework, based on evolutionary cognitive adaptation, has a natural place in film theory. By utilizing adaptationist theory, we gain a better understanding of why images of sumptuous heroines and muscular action heroes can be aesthetically rewarding and emotionally engaging, despite their predictability. These images address the reproductive motivation system developed over the long hunter–gatherer phase of human evolutionary history, which optimizes our fitness for procreation. Films emphasizing the quest for finding a partner have a particularly strong effect on the average female spectator's cognitive and affective make‐up, because they rely on, illuminate, and exploit relevant issues of mate choices that were relevant to our ancestral grandmothers. Because the nature of sexual reproduction poses systematically different challenges for the two sexes, the mating preferences of men and women differ predictably with regards to several dimensions in film. Based on our different reproductive challenges, we can expect the relevance of a film to be dependent on the sex of the spectator and—from a reproductive perspective—what the protagonist, the theme and style of the film afford the spectator. I will expand my argument by using—from the perspective of a female spectator—the cognitive film theorists' work on mental simulation, especially their concept of central imagining.