By Jim Fisher.
In a country where obesity is epidemic, research out of Cornell University reveals that movies are fattening, which implies that it’s our fault. After all, we write this stuff.
Cornell’s research clearly shows that sad movies are fattening.
“This study shows that movie-goers watching tearjerkers ate between 28 and 55 percent more popcorn both in the lab and in a mall theater watching the tragedy Love Story than when watching the comedy Sweet Home Alabama.
“Dumpster diving analyses of discarded mall movie popcorn in seven cities across the US, showed similar results over a Thanksgiving weekend. After weighing discarded popcorn and counting popcorn boxes, Cornell Food and Brand Lab researchers found that moviegoers who bought popcorn and watched a sad movie, Solaris, ate an average of 55% more popcorn (127 versus 82 grams) than those watching the more upbeat movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”
(Can’t you just see a Professor Frink wanna-be up to the collar of his or her lab jacket in garbage digging through detritus in a dumpster, pen and clipboard in hand?)
George Clooney as Chris Kelvin in Solaris
Action Movies Cause Obesity, Too.
There is research that shows watching action programming on the tube contributes to the country’s rapidly expanding waistlines. Incredibly, research published last year in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal reveals that watching television at all adds to one’s girth. And causes diabetes. Which leads to erectile dysfunction (a story for another time.)
Research shows that one hour of television viewing daily increases the viewer’s odds of developing Type II Diabetes by 4.3%. That’s right. Watch TV one hour per day every day and your legs will eventually develop diabetic gangrene and fall off, making it hard to make it to the bathroom or refrigerator during a commercial break. Fortunately, even when your legs do fall off, you’ve a remote and can change channels at will.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and Michelle Monaghan as Julia in Mission Impossible III
Watching Television Makes People Fat
I’m not making this up: it’s been established that watching television is the second leading cause of obesity in the country. (First is eating.) This report states:
“Television (TV) has generally been blamed for helping make Americans overweight owing to both its distracting influence and its encouragement of a sedentary lifestyle. Indeed, a recent correlational analysis of dinner patterns illustrated that the frequency of TV viewing during dinner was one of the two largest correlates of adult and child body mass index.”
And it gets worse from here. Much worse.
Even the pacing of our scripts are shown to cause obesity. And, no, I didn’t make this one up either.
“(Test subjects assigned) to watch a fast-paced action movie (The Island) ate 65% more calories than those assigned to watch a relatively slow-paced interview show (The Charlie Rose Show) (354 vs 215 calories) The study contended that the pacing of shows—operationalized by camera cuts and sound fluctuations—helped drive food intake.”
I’m not at all sure that this was a fair test of calorie consumption, after all, how much can you eat when you’re fast asleep?
The Charlie Rose Show
Political Correctness Also Causes Obesity
Do you know that research reported in 2013 states quite clearly that being politically correct also causes people to gain weight? Really, it does. You go to dinner at a friend’s house, and because you don’t want to offend them when the meal turns out to be foods only a starving carnivore would touch, you eat. Including that indulgent German chocolate cake with raspberry jam filling and double cream cheese frosting. One mustn’t hurt one’s friend’s feelings, mustn’t one?
All in all, this is not good for our profession as screenwriters. Not good at all.
A Modest Proposal
Obviously, we can no longer afford to be politically correct in our scripts. Correctness is out the window. It’s the least we as responsible professionals can do. It’s now our duty to slip in inappropriate comments about minorities and women or to take weird political stands in our dialogue. Get the viewer’s heart rate up. Make them stir in their loungers. Enough to provoke people to waddle over to their computer and sit for an hour or two carefully composing emails so vile and noxious that the wires of the internet will melt and fuse into an unusable strand of copper, plastic and fiber optic cable so that we’ll be back to walking to the library for entertainment, not that reading takes all that many calories.
In addition to eschewing correctness, we could sneak subtle exercise breaks into our stories. You know, five minutes of Richard Simmons leading group exercise in a CSI lab while examining evidence crucial to the denouement of your story. Or cast Richard Simmons as the judge in a courtroom drama. Or as a doctor delivering bad news in a soap opera. That sort of thing.
Richard Simmons
Speaking of Laughter
We all agree that laughter is healthy and is a form exercise, right? So a possible solution to the nation’s accumulated fat might be to add a laugh track to your final production. It’s accepted in the industry that the only difference between tragedy and comedy is the sound of pre-recorded laughter edited into a soundtrack at inappropriate or meaningless times, so why not give it a shot? Turn your sad or action movie into a comedy with a well-placed guffaw or chortle. I mean, it worked on Friends and Seinfeld, didn’t it?
Finally, and I’m not making this up either, is research showing the sound of people munching popcorn causes the audience to miss commercials and product-placements. (I agree, they should find a better use of their time.) However, don’t be surprised if researchers and product development people at the big food labs work to create a non-crunchy popcorn.
The cast of Friends
Story sources
- Action-Related Television Content Increases Food Intake, Aner Tal, PhD; Scott Zuckerman, MD; Brian Wansink, PhD, JAMA Internal Medicine. 2014JAMA Intern Med. 2014
- Matching choices to avoid offending stigmatized group members, Peggy J. Liu, Troy H. Campbell, Gavan J. Fitzsimons, Gráinne M. Fitzsimons. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2013
- Popcorn in the cinema: Oral interference sabotages advertising effects. Sascha Topolinski, Sandy Lindner, Anna-Lena Freudenberg. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2013
- “Sad movies are fattening.” Cornell Food & Brand Laboratory, ScienceDaily, 2 March 2015.
- Television Watching and Effects on Food Intake, Brian Wansink, PhD; Aner Tal, PhD , JAMA Internal Medicine. 2015
