It would be no gain
for intellectual culture if all the reasoning were confined to the
so-called instructive pictures and the photoplays were served without
any intellectual salt. On the contrary, the appeal of those strictly
educational lessons may be less deep than the producers hope, because
the untrained minds, especially of youth and of the uneducated
audiences, have considerable difficulty in following the rapid flight of
events when they occur in unfamiliar surroundings. The child grasps very
little in seeing the happenings in a factory. The psychological and
economic lesson may be rather wasted because the power of observation
is not sufficiently developed and the assimilation proceeds too slowly.
But it is quite different when a human interest stands behind it and
connects the events in the photoplay.
The difficulties in the way of the right moral influence are still
greater than in the intellectual field. Certainly it is not enough to
have the villain punished in the last few pictures of the reel. If
scenes of vice or crime are shown with all their lure and glamour the
moral devastation of such a suggestive show is not undone by the
appended social reaction. The misguided boys or girls feel sure that
they would be successful enough not to be trapped. The mind through a
mechanism which has been understood better and better by the
psychologists in recent years suppresses the ideas which are contrary to
the secret wishes and makes those ideas flourish by which those
"subconscious" impulses are fulfilled.
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