The Power of The Right Stuff: A Quasi-Experimental Field Test of the Docudrama Hypothesis

Abstract

HOLLYWOOD produced a major film lionizing the heroics of a presidential candidate at the start of the 1984 campaign. The implications were unprecedented, and as a result, this motion picture-The Right Stuffgenerated great interest among political analysts. The key question was, as the cover of Newsweek put it, Can a Movie Help Make a President? For students of political communications, The Right Stuff raised a more enduring issue that went beyond the immediate campaign consequences of the movie. That issue may be referred to as the docudrama hypothesis, which stipulates that the docudrama, as a hybrid of melodramatic fiction and news documentary, powerfully influences viewers' conceptions of social and political reality. Public images of both distant and recent history are said to be molded by these film and video dramas. Dan Nimmo and James Combs (1983), in a valuable discussion of the genre, maintain that our political knowledge of the and present is partially formed by the dramatic fantasies of popular media. They suggest that fictional interpretations of history effectively yield the illusion that viewers are participating in a recreation of the real event and in turn shape much of what we 'know' about the past (p. 71).