Movies as a register of social change (also known as the cigarette post)

There are worse ways of getting an inkling of how certain aspects of daily life in the U.S. have changed in the last 60-odd years than to watch a "serious" movie from the 1940s. (Of course, another way is to have been alive yourself in the 1940s, but some of us weren't born yet.) In this case the movie happened to be "Mildred Pierce" (1945), for which Joan Crawford won an Oscar for best actress. First off, in this movie everyone smokes constantly. Second, the language has that kind of clipped, slightly stilted inflection that you also hear in, for example, Bogart movies of the period, and the actors seem to be boxed into a fairly narrow emotional range, even when the script calls for them to really emote. (Bogart and Bergman managed to break out of the box in "Casablanca," but if you've seen the movie and its famous last scene several times -- and who hasn't? -- you may well agree with me that that's mostly due to Bergman.)

Anyway, back to "Mildred Pierce": 1) as I said, everyone smokes all the time (and drinks); 2) the police don't read suspects their rights (because the Miranda decision was twenty years in the future); 3) the only African-American character given any substantial camera time (and not much at that) is a female servant with an artificially high voice; 4) the themes are pretty much timeless ones (love and money, basically) but they are handled in a way that shows, among other things, Hollywood's timidity at the time about depicting sex.

Interestingly, the war (I mean World War II of course) is only a very oblique presence in this movie: in one scene there are a few men in sailors' uniforms; in another there is a passing reference to manpower shortages; and that's about it. By Hollywood standards of the time, and notwithstanding Crawford's performance, I think this is probably no better than an average movie. A film like "Double Indemnity," for example, from I think roughly the same period, is quite a bit better.

But the most obvious thing, and the one to which I keep returning, is the cigarettes, because they are ubiquitous in the movie and because I happen to hate cigarette smoke. Even within my own lifetime, this is one aspect of daily life that has changed quite dramatically. When my parents had company over when I was a child, there were at least a couple of ashtrays in the living room; not only did my father smoke, but it was assumed that at least a couple (maybe more) of the guests would be smoking. Nowadays one can still see people smoking in bars, on the street, or occasionally in their cars -- and soldiers in the field often smoke, or so media images suggest -- but when was the last time you were in someone's house for a social occasion and saw someone smoking? It really has become, to a large extent, unusual and frowned-upon behavior (to which I say: thank goodness).

Well, I seem to have diverged somewhat from my original intentions in this post, but hey, this a blog, man. Deal with it. Oh, and put out that cigarette, do you mind? Thanks.

Hoarding and panicking

Watching coverage of the financial crisis some hours ago, I heard one or two commentators say that people are "hoarding cash." The verb "to hoard" has a somewhat old-fashioned ring to my ears, conjuring up images of misers in Victorian novels mooning over their gold and silver. Presumably what it means in this context is that people are withdrawing cash from their banks and storing it (or secreting it) in their homes. If this is indeed occurring, it suggests that "panic" (from the Greek panikos: of sudden fear, as supposedly inspired by the god Pan [to quote my dictionary]) may be the right word to apply to the current situation. (Alternatively, "people are hoarding cash" could just be a dramatic way of saying "people are not spending as freely as they ordinarily do.")

On a somewhat although not totally unrelated note, the PBS news program 'Worldfocus' made its debut in this area today. The idea -- a half-hour program drawing on the reporting of various news organizations -- is a sound one, though I thought the first show's execution and content were uneven. It did include a good report on the impact of rising food prices on the poor (and the not-so-poor) in Kenya.

The price-placebo effect

Earlier this year, when Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York after it was revealed that he had had a series of $1000-an-hour meetings with a prostitute in D.C., the Wash. Post's Shankar Vedantam took the occasion to report on research involving the price-placebo effect ("Eliot Spitzer and the Price-Placebo Effect" (Dept. of Human Behavior), WP, 3/17/08).

A bunch of behavioral economists in California gave two groups of experimental subjects two bottles of wine, one priced at $10, the other at $90. The wine in all the bottles was the same, but the subjects did not know that. Brain imaging showed that people drinking the wine they thought was more expensive had a "larger activation in their medial orbitofrontal cortex," a part of the brain that "makes judgments about pleasure." Those drinking the $90 wine actually experienced more pleasure than those drinking the $10 wine, even though they were drinking the identical substance. An earlier related study found that people given an energy drink supposed to boost mental performance solved more word puzzles when they bought the drink at full price as opposed to at a discount. The explanation apparently has partly to do with increased psychological investment when one's monetary outlay is higher.

But what about the pleasure some people derive from finding bargains? Has any study measured whether medial orbitofrontal cortex activity increases when X gets an unusually good deal on an item that she/he then proceeds to consume or to use? In other words, is there also a "reverse price placebo" effect in some cases, whereby X would experience more pleasure reading a book bought on sale, say, than Y would in reading the same book for which Y had paid full price?

I think I'd better stop here and have some coffee, otherwise the medial orbitofrontal cortex, along with everything else, may be in danger of shutting down.