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TEDxConejo 2012- Lindsay Doran - Saving the World Vs Kissing the Girl – Transcript
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Summary
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- Lindsay Doran explores whether popular movies emphasize positive accomplishments like saving the world or positive relationships like kissing the girl.
- Audiences care more about the moment a victory is shared with a loved one than the accomplishment itself.
- In the original Rocky movie, the protagonist actually loses the fight while the story focuses heavily on relationship and human connection.
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right I have this start with a question how many of you know what a spoiler alert is okay well let me let me explain it for people who don't know if you're reading a review of a movie or a book or something and you see the word spoiler alert it means that the review is about to give away the ending or give away some important plot to us and if you keep reading it could ruin it okay so here's my spoiler alert I'm about to give away the ending of pretty much every movie ever
made um and so if you haven't seen pretty much every movie ever made um I apologize now because I'm about to ruin them for you uh last summer I was asked to speak at the second World Congress of the international positive psychology Association which makes no sense because I'm not a psychologist I'm a movie producer um and as recently as two years ago I'd never even heard of positive psychology but one year ago I read a
book called flourish by Dr Martin Cel and in that book he named what he calls the five elements of well-being so I'd like to give those to you now you can write them down if you'd like it's only eight words I'm not a big slide person so if you write them down and then later you look at them that's as close to a slide as you're going to get out of the so here they are the five elements of wellbeing number one the first three you just heard Marty s talk about number one
positive emotions number two engagement number three meaning and then since then that that talk was from 2008 he's added two more positive relationships and positive accomplishments so to Marty Selman and his colleagues in positive psychology these are the five elements of well-being the more of these things you have in your lives the more likely you
are to be happy and optimistic and resilient but when I first saw this list not knowing what it was I I didn't know it was the five elements of well-being I thought it was the five qualities of a good movie I think that positive emotions engagement meaning positive relationships and positive accomplishments and I got interested in the idea is there a correlation between the five things that make life worth living and the five things that make
movies worth watching and since our topic today is together the word together I thought I would focus just on those last two positive relationships and positive accomplishments because I think when you look at those two elements of well-being through the lens of popular movies you begin to get some sense of how we feel about them and how much we value them and whether we value one over the other so the question becomes this which matters more saving the world or kissing the
girl so let's start with positive accomplishments because that's the easy one everybody can see that there's a relationship between movie and movies and accomplishments we're Americans We Love winners we love people who are on top the image of somebody jumping up and down at the end of a film celebrating some victory I think is a fairly standard and I thought I would write down um three examples of movies that end in positive accomplishments there were thousands to choose from but the
three I happened to write down when I was first thinking about this were when Jennifer Gray makes the scary dance leap into Patrick se's arms at the end of Dirty Dancing when the Karate Kid makes the impossible kick that wipes out his opponent and when King George V 6 finally gets through his wartime speech without stammering to me these accomplishments are among the great pleasures of the cinema but then I sat
down with a man who runs an audience research film firm one of those companies that oversees movie previews because I wanted to know you know I wanted to show him that list and to see if he thought there was correlation between the list and movies that previewed really well and he looked at the list and in about two seconds he said I can tell you one thing right now audiences don't care about accomplishments and I said what what and he said audiences don't care about
accomplishments what they care about is the moment afterwards when the accomplishment is shared with the person the hero loves so I I went back to my list and I looked at them and I went wow Dirty Dancing doesn't end with the leap it ends with a scene in which Jennifer Gray reconciles with her father who's the most important person in her life when he says how beautiful she looked while she was dancing and the CATE kid doesn't end with a kick if you've seen the more
recent version it you see it over and over again on multiple screens but after that he reconciles with his opponent and then he shares his victory with his mother and his trainer uh the last thing you see in The King's Speech is not the speech it's a card white letters on a black background that says Lionel and birdie remain friends for the rest of their lives Lionel being the speech therapist and Bernie being the nickname for the king
and the movie didn't always end that way it turns out you can forgive them for thinking they were making a movie about a speech it's called The King's Speech after all and that speech is one of the most important moments in British wartime history but but they wanted more than that um and they have those scenes um in which he reconciles with his I mean he not reconciles but he shares his victory with the speech therapist with his
family but the audience wanted even more than that they wanted to make sure that that friendship that they've been watching develop over the course of that movie was a real friendship it wasn't just a powerful man using another man for his own devices that it was a real friendship and it went on forever so what I began to realize was that in movie terms over and over again positive relationships trumped positive accomplishments almost every time and
there's some interesting Coral are to this for example we forget how these movies end a lot of the time and the perfect example is a woman I know whose favorite movie in the whole world is Dirty Dancing she's probably seen it 150 times and she's a studio executive and we can set our watches when we were in meetings with her how long goes by before she'll say you know what this scene reminds me of it reminds me of scene in Dirty Dancing where Patrick SS and then we start to laugh and then she starts to laugh and says what am I
supposed to do it's my favorite movie ever so I called her up and I said tell me something what's the last thing that happens in Dirty Dancing and she said the leap and I said really acting all Superior is okay um and she said yeah well you know this Jennifer Gray runs down the aisle and she leaps into Patrick s's arms and he holds her up in the air like an airplane and then he puts her down and then they start to dance and then the movie's over and I
said when did she reconcile with her father she said well before then I said I'm coming over so I came over I went over to her office and I brought the film with me and I showed her the last 10 minutes of the movie and she couldn't believe it and what we realized was all this emotion that comes from the end of that movie that we were associating with that leap the leap she was afraid to make and the beginning of the movie and now has the courage to make it the end of the movie it wasn't coming from the accomplishment it was coming coming from
the relationship and the other thing that's interesting is that when we make movies for men and boys um when we make movies for General audiences which a lot of the time is men and boys there there's a structure that occurs again and again and again not in every movie but in a lot of those movies and here's here's how it goes there is the hero who's usually a man there's um the accomplishment the goal that he has
set himself to accomplish and then there's the Rel relationship you get the accomplishment and the relationship because there's a primary relationship with a woman or his father or a child or with a best friend so here's how it goes He sets himself towards this relationship I mean towards this accomplishment and he works really hard to get there and there's all kinds of obstacles that he has to overcome and then there's a terrible setback just before the end and then he gets there and achieves his achievement and then he realizes it doesn't mean anything without the relationship and then
there's a scene about the relationship okay when we make movies for women not all the time much of the time the accomplishment is the relationship the the goal is love and everything that's going on in the movie is about whether those two people that the movie is about are going to get together at the end or not and it doesn't matter if it's the notbook or nodding Hill or bridesmaids or The Vow that's what's going on now some people
say that's patronizing to women and some people say that's condescending to women and some people say that's Hollywood's way of keeping women in their place but maybe what it really means is that women have figured it out women don't need a whole movie to teach them that relationships are more important than accomplishments they know
that when they buy their ticket so you can just dispense with all that saving the world stuff cuz they want to get right to the good stuff and the good stuff is the relationship now by this point I got to know Marty Selman and I called him up and I said tell me something if you put that list of five elements of well-being in front of men and women did they react to it differently and he said yeah in general men will tell you that accomplishments are the most important thing and women will tell you its
relationships okay but think about this we try really hard in the movie business to end our movies at the moment of peak audience satisfaction so if men really value accomplishments more than relationships sh wouldn't we end their movies in a different place wouldn't we end Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol at the moment when a disarmed nuclear missile bounces off the Trans America building instead
of with a scene of four people at a table wouldn't we end Transformers Dark of the Moon when the Autobots defeat the Decepticons instead of a scene where the guy says to the girl you're the only in this world that I need wouldn't we end the final Harry Potter movie when Harry kills Voldemort he's been trying to kill Voldemort for seven books and eight movies and if you look at the trailer for that last Harry Potter movie you'd swear that's the only thing going on in
the movie is whether or not he's going to kill Voldemort but do we end the movie where he kills Voldemort no we end it years later when he's grown up at a train station with his wife and his children and his friends so maybe what's going on here when we make movies for men and boys is a giant bait and switch we we say here's a movie about saving the world here's a movie about giant alien robots here's a movie about
killing the evil wizard but what we deliver is a movie about relationships yeah so you know for men and women the accomplishment is the relationship so you can't really talk about accomplishments and relationships in movies without talking about Rocky uh when I give this talk in smaller groups inevitably by this point some some will have interrupted me and said what about Rocky what about Rocky everything you're talking about is Rocky there's the
accomplishment and there's the relationship he there's the accomplishment then he shares it with somebody he loves he wins the fight and then he says yo Adrian I did it so let's talk about Rocky um when I was in Philadelphia last summer I had the chance to visit the famous Rocky steps the ones that he runs up in the movie and keep in mind this was during that terrible Heat Wave they were having last summer uh the heat index that particular day in Philadelphia was 15
15° and there were doctors on Radio and on television begging people not to go outside saying literally if if you go outside and exercise today you will die so I took a taxi to the top of the Rocky Steps and I walked out on you this is the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I walked out onto the top of them and every five minutes there was somebody running the stamps all 72 of them bottom
to top getting to the top turning around jumping up and down ping their fist in the air and having their picture taken and and I began to realize that there was more going on there than just tourism because I would see people with tears pouring down their faces as they were running those steps and it turns out there's a wonderful book called Rocky stories in which a journalist interviewed people who ran those steps he spent a year interviewing those
people and there's wonderful photographs in and um what he found was that people were coming from from all over the world to celebrate some personal Victory by imitating Rockies so for example if you look at the book you'll see there's two women who've been friends for 45 years who are jumping up and down at the top of the Rocky Steps to celebrate that long friendship and there's a man who's had a heart transplant who's come all
the way to Philadelphia to run the steps to celebrate his recovery and there'll be a boy who'll say if I could just get that girl to marry me I'd marry her On Top of the Rock steps the day I was there three different weddings were waiting to go on at the same time hot tuxedos hot bridal gowns hot bridesmaids dresses and the thing is that movie came out 36 years ago and none of those