Movie Analysis and Its Ability to Help Improve De-escalation Techniques
Advisor: Mr. Rappelfeld
Internship Location: New York Peace Institute
Onsite Mentor: Ayanna Behin, Director of Training & Conflict Consulting
It is well known that movies can change people significantly. It is also known that having strategies to de-escalate a situation is extremely useful in day-to-day life. My senior project will incorporate those by doing a cross-sectional analysis of a cook, teacher, lawyer, and therapist. There will be a pre-survey before watching any movie, and a survey after each movie. There will be six movies in total; The Shining (1989), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Good Will Hunting (1999), CODA (2021), The Way Way Back (2013), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). At my on-site placement I will be shadowing my on-site advisor when she mediates a conflict and I will be making the survey with her to select the best possible questions to understand conflict and conflict perception. I’m hoping that my work can be turned into a template for elementary and middle school courses on understanding others and conflict resolution through movie analysis. I am hoping the course can broaden the views of the kids into a more accepting and understanding outlook on conflict and the members involved.
Project Blog
Week 0: Introduction
Hello reader, my name is Gabriel Hynes. My senior project will be a cross-sectional analysis of four individuals from different professional and life backgrounds. I will have a cook, a teacher, a lawyer, and a therapist, all from different parts of America with different cultural backgrounds. I will analyze their responses to conflict in movies, with the goal of creating a course for elementary schoolers to learn conflict de-escalation skills from a young age. I will have the participants in my study watch 6 movies over 12 weeks, and I will also have them complete a pre-survey before watching any movies, in hopes of identifying biases that could shift their responses to the conflict one way or the other. The movies being: Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Do the Right Thing (1989), The Way Way Back (2013), and CODA (2021). I have chosen these movies specifically because they all resolve around some form of conflict, whether it stems from circumstances only affecting the characters in the movies like The Way Way Back, CODA, and The Shining, or political conflict like in Dr. Strangelove, or systematic conflict like in Do the Right Thing or Full Metal Jacket.
I am interested in researching this because I believe movies can change people fundamentally, and are an amazing way to learn new things. I also want to include de-escalation, given the current state of affairs and the immense amount of conflict spread throughout every corner of the world. With all the conflict and controversy, it is very important that we learn how to de-escalate tense situations or conflicts instead of making a bigger issue of things. I believe my research can lead to a highly effective course on conflict de-escalation that will help the younger generation navigate conflict in the early stages of life and social interaction.
Week 2: Dr. Strangelove
This week, I spent the vast majority of my time creating the post-survey for Dr. Strangelove. I decided that, in order to properly analyze different responses to conflict in movies, I should focus on two “normal” conflicts that could happen on any given day, along with one major, dramatic conflict that significantly shifts the movie, like a turning point. However, there isn’t really one big, direct conflict between characters in the film that I could use for the survey, even though the entire movie revolves around the broader conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the doomsday machine.
To work around this, I used another more typical (as typical as it can be during nuclear war) conflict to analyze. I asked questions like, “Could this character have done anything to defuse the conflict?” and “What can we learn from this character’s handling of conflict between two others?” I also explored the topic of violence and forced compliance in de-escalation, because at one point a commanding officer is threatened with a gun by his own general. Because of this, I asked participants, “How does the added element of a fatal threat influence how these characters acted?”
In addition, I spent time researching de-escalation strategies in situations involving physical threats. I read “De-escalation Techniques to Handle Conflict with Calm and Respect” by the Crisis Prevention Institute, along with several other articles on how to stay calm and help others remain calm during conflict. I also watched The Shining (1980) for the first time and will be creating the survey for that film next week.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15GyfaoEQcXH_KPQKPIqnePlzcuvlEwW1MfaytV_84wI/edit?usp=sharing
Week 3: The Shining
For week three, I watched The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick, which is actually a book by Steven King, and made the post-survey for it. In The Shining (1980), Jack and Wendy Torrance, along with their son Danny, decide to spend the winter watching over a hotel called the Overlook Hotel. It is shut down during the winter because of the snow, and the hotel needs someone to look after it. So Jack, wanting some peace and quiet to do his writing, takes the job. However, this peace and quiet turns into isolation, eventually leading Jack to lose his mind. To do this, I analyzed three different instances of conflict, specifically between Jack and Wendy, as Jack progressively loses his mind more and more. At first, his outbursts would essentially be him being extremely rude or mean to Wendy; they turned into him hallucinating, and then him into becoming very violent with Wendy and Danny. I also got the responses for the Dr. Strangelove survey, which I have been analyzing in tandem with the pre-survey to better understand conflict response.
I also participated in a mock mediation simulation with the Peace Institute. I wrote some of the scenario scripts that the mediators and actors were going off of, and I was able to sit in on the demo itself. It was very interesting to see how mediation practice happens at places like the Peace Institute. The ability of these people to de-escalate a situation that can seem so tense is very interesting and, honestly, an incredible thing to see.
Post 4: Full Metal Jacket
This week, I watched Full Metal Jacket (1987), a Stanley Kubrick film set during the Vietnam War that highlights the horrors of war. There is no shortage of conflict in this movie to analyze, so finding three scenes wasn’t difficult at all. In the first week, I explored negotiation and conflict resolution through compromise; in the second week, I examined insanity and how to deal with it. For the third week, I focused specifically on examples of people repressing their urge to fight back against someone, such as a drill sergeant yelling in your face, calling you all sorts of names, and insulting you.
Because of this, I asked questions like, “Why is Private Joker able to stay calm despite the drill sergeant screaming in his face?” and “When dealing with an authority figure, how do you keep from worsening the situation?” I also analyzed a scene that illustrates insanity and definitely not how to handle it, when the drill sergeant essentially signs his own death warrant by screaming at and insulting a clearly unstable man holding a loaded gun. This led me to ask questions like, “What should the drill sergeant have done instead?” and “Was there anything Private Joker could’ve done differently?”
I also looked at battlefield conflict between soldiers and commanding officers. In one scene, a soldier’s friend is shot and left behind, so he goes back to save him against the squad leader’s orders, creating a different kind of conflict between personal loyalty and authority.
While at the Peace Institute, I was given curriculum documents that highlighted a lot of interesting ideas, especially about how people approach conflict. A “conflict type” is basically how someone approaches and views conflict. For example, you can be a lion, assertive and confident, focused on your goals; a turtle, avoidant and hesitant to get involved; a chameleon, accommodating and willing to change for others; a zebra, compromising and focused on the best solution for the group; or a bee, who is very collaborative and working together. I haven’t fully decided which participants fit each type yet, but I will by next week and will include that in my blog.
Week 4: Do the Right Thing
This week, I watched Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee (1989), a true New York classic about racial tensions plaguing the streets. The main character, Mookie, played by Spike Lee himself, is a black man working at an Italian family-run pizzeria in the hood, where he delivers all the orders. Throughout the entire movie, there are moments of tension between the Italian owners and annoyed customers. The perfect example of this is when Buggin Out, a black man, gets upset with Sal, the owner of the pizzeria, because there's only Italian Americans on the wall of fame, despite their customers all being black. This is clearly a racially motivated argument, and I wanted to break down how the participants of my study reacted to an externally motivated conflict. When I say externally motivated, that essentially just means the true reason the conflict arose isn't because of the reason that seems obvious, like there aren't any black people on the wall of fame, but rather that African Americans have been systematically oppressed more than Italian Americans. So to do this, I asked questions such as, "How do the underlying racial tensions between the Italian owners and the black customers portray racial inequalities throughout this time?"
I believe this movie and The Way Way Back are the two most important movies to analyze because they feature the most interpersonal conflicts that happen every day to normal people, and they both show how underlying issues surface in small inconveniences. These two movies will inform a large part of the de-escalation course.
Week 5: Police Training
This week, I wasn’t able to watch The Way Way Back (2013) because I had several other committments. On Monday, there was a Dine & Dialogue lunch event hosted by New York State’s Department of Hate Crime Prevention that The Peace Institute was invited to. I went to take pictures because they didn’t have another photographer. Then there was the police training, which was the more important of the two events this week.
On day one, the focus was on understanding different reactions to conflict, distinguishing between needs and interests, and practicing active listening. I’ve already broken down the five reactions to conflict, so I won’t repeat them here. This part of the training was meant to help you better understand yourself and how your presence affects conflict. This is extremely important because you might see yourself as a problem solver and think you’ve de-escalated a tense situation, but later discover that someone who tends to be overly accommodating didn’t get what they needed because you found a solution too quickly and applied it. The most effective way to avoid a situation like that is not to immediately jump into solving the problem, but to first understand it.
They also went over how to better identify an interest versus a need. An interest is something you want. For example, they showed a clip from The Break-Up where a big argument starts over doing the dishes. In the clip, the girlfriend asks her boyfriend for 12 lemons, and he brings back three. This is an example of an interest: she didn’t actually need the lemons, she needed her boyfriend to pay attention to what she was saying and listen to her. In the same clip, he says all he wants is to play video games before doing the dishes after a long day. He doesn’t need to play video games; he needs a break from work before doing something labor-intensive again. This clip perfectly illustrates the difference between positions and needs, and how to identify them. This is important when de-escalating a conflict because, without understanding what people truly need (rather than just what they want), there is no way to fully resolve it.
Active listening is actually a rather simple concept. Basically, you repeat back what someone has said to you. It causes a somewhat surprising effect: the person speaking often begins to open up and share more. It may seem unbelievable, but it works very well, and people naturally do it all the time in everyday conversations. There was probably a moment in your life when someone was talking to you and you repeated what they said, maybe even accidentally, because you didn’t know what else to say. Looking back, you might realize that it encouraged them to keep talking. This is a very important skill for a de-escalator to have because it gets people talking and gives you more information about what actually happened. There are also variations of this technique. One of the best is asking open-ended questions so people are encouraged to answer more fully. You can also ask about a different time something similar happened to help take the speaker out of the immediate situation, or ask something slightly unrelated to keep the conversation flowing.
Week 6: The Way Way Back
This week, I watched and wrote the survey for The Way Way Back (2013). The movie is about a 14-year-old boy, Duncan, who is on vacation with his mother, Pam; her boyfriend, Trent; and Trent’s daughter, Steph. Duncan dislikes Trent, which is understandable, since Trent is a poor father figure, boyfriend, and person overall. However, Duncan gets a job at a water park, where he finds a new father figure, more like an uncle figure, but, most importantly, a positive male role model in his life. I chose this movie for my research project because everyone can relate to familial conflict, even if it is never as extreme as it is in this film. It is also important to analyze how people react to authority figures who impose questionable rules on those who cannot easily push back.
To explore this, I looked at three different instances of conflict between various members of the family. The first occurs when Trent tells Duncan to wear a life jacket on a boat, even though no one else thinks it is necessary. To understand how people respond to conflict, I asked participants to put themselves in Pam’s position and answer the question: “What would you have told Duncan to do in this situation?” I wanted to see how they would handle the conflict, whether they would confront Trent, avoid the situation, or defer to someone with more experience.
I also examined the family’s major conflict, which arises when they discover that Trent has cheated on Pam. This revelation takes place at a large party, where Duncan becomes very upset. He urges Pam to take action and confront Trent, but he is clearly enraged, while Pam remains composed and saddened. Trent, meanwhile, becomes upset with Duncan for causing a scene. Once again, I asked participants how they would respond if they were in Pam’s position, in order to determine whether they would react emotionally or take a more restrained, pragmatic approach.
Week 7: CODA
For this week, I wanted to look specifically at conflict that is actually, completely unavoidable. CODA is a movie that follows a girl named Ruby, who is a senior in high school from a deaf family. Because her whole family is deaf, they rely heavily on her. They are fishers off the coast of Massachusetts, and because she is the only one in her family who can hear, she fishes with them in the early morning, waking up at three a.m. to go fish with her father and brother. Then, when they get back on land, she immediately goes to school at an unidentified time. At school, she joins the choir because she loves singing. She's actually really good at it, and her music teacher helps her apply, and eventually get into, Berklee College of Music. So throughout the movie, she is challenged by the question of whether she will go to college and leave her already financially struggling, deaf fisher family to pay for a sign language translator, or stay with her family and keep fishing.
But there is more conflict than just that, and it's far more unavoidable. I looked at instances of when her deaf family can't hear something, and a conflict is created out of that. For instance, she told her brother Leo to demand three dollars per pound of fish instead of the 2.75 the seller was asking for. The seller was only doing that because Leo couldn't hear, and he thought Leo was exploitable. However, Leo got upset at Ruby because Leo felt Ruby thought he needed help because he is deaf. This is the perfect example of an interfamilial conflict stemming from Ruby wanting to help her brother.
I want to analyze how people react to conflicts like this because it'll help me understand how to best approach conflicts rooted in misunderstanding, a lack of prior communication, and ones that are just completely unavoidable.
Week 8: Analyzing Responses
Throughout this week, I have been meticulously reviewing every answer I received from my seven different surveys. First, I started with the pre-survey and went through each participant's responses. Because the purpose of this survey was to discover the biases and tendencies of each participant, I did not intend to draw any firm conclusions from it. However, it was very interesting to see how the participants responded.
The very first question on the pre-survey was, "What is conflict?" Despite some variation in wording, the general sentiment was the same. Most people believed that, at its core, conflict is simply a misunderstanding or miscommunication between different entities. However, the responses did not remain as similar throughout the rest of the pre-survey, or any of the other surveys.
My goal in analyzing the surveys was to understand how mature adults handle conflict in movies. Therefore, I examined how aggressive or avoidant they were, who they placed blame on, and why they believed conflicts had escalated. Understanding their reactions gave me insight into how I should design the course for high school students. What participants prioritized most would help determine what I should emphasize in the course.
After much deliberation, I concluded that the most important skills to teach high school students are how to listen effectively, when to step away from a situation, and how to recognize a conflict before it escalates. I plan to do this by showing clips from films and building interactive questionnaires around those clips.