Mr. Magoo as Public Dream

Abstract

thirties, the psychoanalytic approach to the study of mass entertainments has steadily won adherents and sometimes transformed them into partisans. Its root proposition is now very well known: the contents of popular entertainments may be symbolically reduced and translated so as to provide a picture of the unconscious needs and fears of their audiences. Production workers, critics, and social scientists have, in the main, been willing to accept this proposition; to grant that entertainments are public and saleable dreams. But, in recent years, they have come to suspect that the contentanalysis techniques that flow from this proposition are sometimes methodologically deficient. At least two such failings have become sharply evident. One of these objections is based upon the fact that all the members of the national public do not consume mass entertainments with equal frequency or equal pleasure. If, for example, the moviegoing audience is drawn largely from the ranks of adolescents and unmarried adults, must not the major themes of our films, if they reflect anybody's unconscious needs and fears, be more diagnostic of the immature rather than the mature members of our