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Mom, and Pop Psychology: The Moving Picture Cure

University Of Californla, Santa Cruz

Sometimes we can learn from a bad book as well as from a good one, if its `badness' is exemplary of normative practices rather than an isolated instance of incompetence. Such is the case with the book under scrutiny here. Although uniquely flawed in many ways, James B. Twitchell's Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modem Horror (1985) is also typical of the perversions of scholarship that can be tolerated in the humanities by those who invoke the authority of `Psychology' as if it were a universal scientific discipline. This essay shows that while presuming to analyze the function of horror movies as an agency for teaching adolescents the imperatives of `healthy' sex and `proper' gender identifications, Twitchell is himself performing the same ideological function. As a book that advocates fear as a necessary method to force teenagers to conform to stereotyped norms of heterosexual behavior, it becomes part of the AIDS discourse even though it fails to address the topic.

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 243-261 (1993)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354393032009


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