Books by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Oxford University Press, 2021
Cognitive Film and Media Ethics provides a grounding in the use of cognitive science to address k... more Cognitive Film and Media Ethics provides a grounding in the use of cognitive science to address key questions in film, television and screen media ethics. This book extends past works in cognitive media studies to answer normative and ethically prescriptive questions: what could make media morally good or bad, and what, then, are the respective responsibilities of media producers and consumers? Moss-Wellington makes a primary claim that normative propositions are a kind of rigour, in that they force media theorists to draw more active "ought" conclusions from descriptive "is" arguments. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics presents the rigours of normative reasoning, cognitive science and consequentialist ethics as complementary, arguing that each seeks progressive elaboration on their own models of causality, and causal projections are crucial for any reflection on our moral responsibilities in the world.
A hermeneutics of "ethical cognitivism" is applied in the latter half of the book, with essays each addressing a different case study in film, television, news and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the "television renaissance," and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesises current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.
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Edinburgh University Press, 2019
What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and referen... more What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction.
After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, Narrative Humanism develops humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provides examples of such readings. Literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology are integrated into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility.
From this groundwork, Narrative Humanism then turns to look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, the influential yet highly problematic American Beauty. The book provides examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood.
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Edinburgh University Press, 2019
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Journal Articles by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Projections, 2024
This special issue is dedicated to research on cognition, stigma, and inclusion in film and media... more This special issue is dedicated to research on cognition, stigma, and inclusion in film and media studies. We aim to highlight existing research in cognitive media theory and social justice, and also to bring in diverse perspectives from adjacent fields to foster interdisciplinary research into the future. In bringing these voices together, we hope to demonstrate the diverse nature of current research in cognitive film and media theory, and to disentangle cognitive traditions from their place in a historic binary opposition of cognitive and cultural approaches in screen studies.
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JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2024
Transnational metacinema describes a range of films that depict film production across borders. T... more Transnational metacinema describes a range of films that depict film production across borders. The diverse corpus includes fictional works explicitly addressing the ethics of film crews working between nations, hybrid nonfictions that reflexively consider their own use of archival footage and re-enactments, cannibal horror films featuring documentarian protagonists, and Hollywood satires. This article considers themes of colonization and exploitation that traverse these examples. Each case complicates the sustaining, modernist notion that reflexivity disrupts viewing pleasure, inviting more politically aware spectatorship. Many examples promote self-awareness in the filmmaker-audience relationship at the expense of concern for the Indigenous and marginalized populations represented.
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Film Criticism, 2024
This article explores director Warwick Thornton’s activistic use of filmic emotions in the featur... more This article explores director Warwick Thornton’s activistic use of filmic emotions in the features Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017). Thornton’s films portray coloniser-colonised relations at two moments in Australian history, and that affective history-telling is motivated toward a more deliberative case for a future of self-determined cultural autonomy. I analyse emotive resources that cross between both films, including periods of silence and landscape aesthetics that depict subjective experience of country. I also address the place of empathy in Thornton’s character studies as foundational to later political reasoning. Thornton’s films call attention to the positionality of different audience members, challenging the spectator to interrogate foundational emotional responses, conflicts between their emotional responses, and subsequent prompts to think through the politics of those experiences. These provocations are united into an explicitly argumentative appeal for Indigenous cultural autonomy.
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International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2023
Virtual reality cinemas offer computer-generated screening environments that resemble physical-wo... more Virtual reality cinemas offer computer-generated screening environments that resemble physical-world movie theaters for avatar-based viewers. Reflecting on virtual spectatorship in the context of social isolation, the present study investigates whether VR cinemas could provide an alternative for collective movie watching and whether they could facilitate an engaging experience similar to other, physical-world co-viewing environments. To measure these effects, we designed a behavioral experiment in which participants watched a feature film sequence either in VR or a physical screening room in the presence or absence of viewing companions. After viewing, participants' experiences-including emotional engagement, narrative empathy, presence, social experiences, and physical and mental well-being-were recorded using survey methods. We observed that VR viewing can produce an equally enjoyable film experience, as well as similar levels of emotional engagement and narrative empathy, while it leads to increased comprehension of characters' feelings and sense of narrative engagement. In addition, social viewing may mean less engagement and more distractions depending on the screening environment. We also found that even though previous virtual reality exposure negatively correlates with comfort and well-being during viewing, early adopters of technology and VR supporters are more likely to have an enjoyable and engaging film experience.
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Genre, 2022
This article contrasts a range of films from around the world that take place within port cities.... more This article contrasts a range of films from around the world that take place within port cities. It presents the port city film as a case of transnational “geographic imaginary” that dramatizes spaces of contact across lifeworlds. The authors find that there are two primary narrative modes in the port city film: a dominant mode in which gender, ethnic, class, and other identities bestowed by the geographic imaginary become inescapable, and a resistant or transformative mode in which characters are offered the opportunity to locate a new identity within a world of ephemeral relationships. Themes of criminality, poverty, and urban constituents struggling for personal agency, however, run counter to many city-branding narratives. The article concludes by comparing these fictional representations to a number of promotional and nonfictive examples of Chinese and British port city representations offering a very different vision of transnational contact—one that emphasizes a nation-building and growth “cleaned” of the human struggles for hybrid identity so vividly dramatized across port city fictions.
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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2022
This special issue addresses notions of fakery in our contemporary media environment, from fake n... more This special issue addresses notions of fakery in our contemporary media environment, from fake news to the deepfake. While all media contains elements of creative fabrication, we define ‘media fakery’ as an attempt to conceal the origins of information that must contain a degree of human intentionality to be considered ‘fake’. Fakery is no longer limited to news media or any particular mode of communication; as tools for manipulating digital content are more readily available to all, the reach of fakery in media is increasingly broad. The essays in the special issue address varying definitions of ‘fakery’ in different forms of media production and consumption. They interrogate both the authentic and the fake and expand dichotomous understandings of media fakery as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
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Film-Philosophy, 2021
Inside Out (Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015) develops novel cinematic means for representin... more Inside Out (Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015) develops novel cinematic means for representing memory, emotion and imagination, their interior relationships and their social expression. Its unique animated language both playfully represents pre-teenage metacognition, and is itself a manner of metacognitive interrogation. Inside Out motivates this language to ask two questions: an explicit question regarding the social function of sadness, and a more implicit question regarding how one can identify agency, and thereby a sense of developing selfhood, between one's memories, emotions, facets of personality, and future-thinking imagination. Both the complexity of the language Inside Out develops to ask these questions, and the complicated answers the film provides, ultimately serve as a manner of recognition of the effortfulness of finding one's place in the world. This article talks sequentially through the complex representative systems Inside Out advances in order to pay homage to the ways in which metacognitive cinemaas well as discussions and hermeneutic readings around that cinemacan make viewers feel recognised for invisible, internal labour that is existentially difficult to share due to its very interiority; an interiority that is reconstructed in imaginative processes such as autobiographical reminiscence, and filmic animation.
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Comedy Studies, 2021
Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory (BVT) argues that humour is produced when... more Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory (BVT) argues that humour is produced when three conditions are met: we perceive a situation as potentially violating, we perceive it also as benign, and the two perceptions occur simultaneously. This model is applied as a means to analyse comedy in screen media. BVT is motivated to describe the cognitive dissonances inherent to comedy spectatorship, and to perform hermeneutic readings of screen humour using a particular case study in dramedy cinema: the suburban ensemble film, including works such as The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine and American Beauty. After surveying some of the key humorous stimuli recurrent across the genre, I then turn to other comedic texts that deal with family and domestic studies with a striking lack of pathos – in particular the cartoon series Family Guy. This comparison underscores an analysis of the ethics of benign violations in narrative media that is centred on the resolution of its fundamental affective dissonance, and the way this resolution might guide later critical thought. The article ultimately demonstrates the uses of BVT as a hermeneutic tool, and one that might help us isolate an ethics of comedy in media.
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Culture, Theory and Critique, 2021
This article investigates three storytelling arts as spaces of narrative play: theatre, film and ... more This article investigates three storytelling arts as spaces of narrative play: theatre, film and narrative-based gaming. It traces the lineage from Oedipus Rex and early tragic theatre to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, followed by The Walking Dead Telltale Games series, relating how each text presents protagonists who are marked as criminal from the opening of the narrative. Rope and The Walking Dead both work from the prophetic prototype developed in the Oedipus myth and use reflexive engagement with their own storytelling practices to ask open questions of stigma, sexuality, ethnicity and problems in the ongoing negotiation of play as both a coping strategy for social and legal marginalisation, and a safe space for interrogating our precognitive moral intuitions and biases. All play is fragile, and serious consequence always threatens the boundaries of Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ of play; this means that play statuses must be consistently negotiated and updated by those participating, a concept I refer to as ‘the invitation to play’. This article explores how storytellers navigate such distinctions in asking participants to reflexively consider the boundaries of consequence in the narrative arts and in their lives.
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Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020
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NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 2019
‘Limerence’ describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a rom... more ‘Limerence’ describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This article asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and political selfhood. These ‘political romcoms’ reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fibre, personality and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalised positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection.
https://necsus-ejms.org/the-emotional-politics-of-limerence-in-romantic-comedy-films
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Style, 2018
Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989) is a landmark ensemble film that would influence later domestic dra... more Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989) is a landmark ensemble film that would influence later domestic dramedies across the millennium. This article revisits the film to exhume some of its unique insights into affective contagions across family units and within residential spaces. It makes a case for the way creative contagions in filmmaking collaborative labor and ensemble acting might translate to the screen. Working from a foundational close analysis of the shot structure, sound design, and performances in one pivotal scene between Dianne Wiest and Leaf (Joaquin) Phoenix, the reading demonstrates social psychology’s use in evaluative hermeneutics, and likewise the way narrative film productively elaborates worlds from the phenomena psychological sciences describe. Throughout the close reading, an argument emerges for further appreciation of the affectively transactive nature of on-screen domestic studies, and their capacity to encourage close listening to proximate others in propinquitous environments.
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Sydney Studies in English, 2018
In Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton disparaged humanism as “a suburban moral ideology.” Humanist h... more In Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton disparaged humanism as “a suburban moral ideology.” Humanist hermeneutics have often been criticised as politically impotent or lightweight owing to an emphasis on human kindness rather than systems of power and exploitation, yet close scrutiny of films labeled as humanistic or human drama reveals deep concern with antisocial behaviours, group politics, and the political consequences of our attempts to identify and ostracise transgressors. This paper uses adaptations of Tom Perrotta’s novels Election and Little Children to articulate a concept of abject humanism, asking how we can acknowledge negative affect and maleficence without becoming convinced that they are representative of all human experience. In turn, Perrotta’s works depict the problems we encounter when we do not admit darkness in our lives; they take us to the brink of human cruelty in American suburbia, and then see what is salvageable.
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Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2017
Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound.... more Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound. This article looks at the ways in which filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity, or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship provides a primary case study in the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence, however it is contended that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of different cinematic modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism in American revenge and “social cleansing” films, Ken Loach’s social realism, Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011), and John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) permits an exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension, as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The article concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from cognitive film theory.
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Film International, Mar 2015
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Lauren Berlant has famously problematised the sense of communal belonging wrought by sentimental ... more Lauren Berlant has famously problematised the sense of communal belonging wrought by sentimental humanism, yet in so doing has presumed a binary between optimism and realism, and tendered new strictures on acceptable affect. In suburban ensemble cinema we find an alternate view: sentimentality as a place of transition, and a more complex taxonomy of human relationality.
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Book Chapters by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Screen Stories and Moral Understanding: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2023
This chapter argues that film and media scholarship, including teaching, conferences, and mentori... more This chapter argues that film and media scholarship, including teaching, conferences, and mentoring, remove barriers to moral reflection on screen stories, facilitating both socially situated and individual reflection over long periods of time. After a discussion of moral intuitionism (or moral foundations theory), the chapter argues that scholarly work can expand reflection by eliciting a questioning, elaboration, and/or revision of our initial intuitions. Its longitudinally transformative capacities distinguish this manner of close attention to screen stories from the evaluative work of movie reviews and the discourses of fandom. The chapter further argues that screen media scholarship acts as a transactive memory system that updates and reorients moral understandings of our world as it changes, and that its ability to extend “reflection upon reflections” is key to its radical potential; this makes it a system worth defending.
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Books by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
A hermeneutics of "ethical cognitivism" is applied in the latter half of the book, with essays each addressing a different case study in film, television, news and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the "television renaissance," and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesises current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.
After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, Narrative Humanism develops humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provides examples of such readings. Literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology are integrated into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility.
From this groundwork, Narrative Humanism then turns to look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, the influential yet highly problematic American Beauty. The book provides examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood.
Journal Articles by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
https://necsus-ejms.org/the-emotional-politics-of-limerence-in-romantic-comedy-films
Book Chapters by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
A hermeneutics of "ethical cognitivism" is applied in the latter half of the book, with essays each addressing a different case study in film, television, news and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the "television renaissance," and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesises current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.
After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, Narrative Humanism develops humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provides examples of such readings. Literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology are integrated into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility.
From this groundwork, Narrative Humanism then turns to look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, the influential yet highly problematic American Beauty. The book provides examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood.
https://necsus-ejms.org/the-emotional-politics-of-limerence-in-romantic-comedy-films
Benign violation theory (BVT) claims that humour arises when a situation is interpreted as both benign and as a violation at the same time. The theory has been employed primarily in social psychology and not as a method for textual analysis. This chapter argues that BVT is valuable in the textual analysis of games as it specifies the playful conflicts that are unique to machine-mediated forms of humour, and the ways in which humour is central to deriving communicative meaning from puzzle-based games. The chapter introduces BVT, discusses its relevance to puzzles in games, and analyses Limbo and Braid, two games that, while not explicitly marketed as comedy games, can be read as a series of benign violations that produce dark comedy.