Word: pavlovians
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Both the Baptist minister in Chicago and PTL's Bakker feel concern for their congregations. But PTL traps its audience in a Pavlovian circle of wealth coupled to religion, a ritual of cash register bell-ringing. Like commercial television, it inflames material appetites and arouses expectations, rather than hopes. Facing no adversity as persistent as graffiti blackly spattered, its viewers can have faith that God provides for believers. As a result, there is no reason to care for the truly needy beyond one's small circle of friends. To clutch a phonebook and express passionate concern for those listed...
...argument goes like this: every movie is propaganda. Every character is a walking placard-for capitalism or idealism or monogamy or the status quo. Every shot, by its placement and rhythm and duration, is one more Pavlovian command to the viewer. A narrative movie is usually successful to the extent that it obscures these facts, transforms the thesis into entertainment and the placards into persuasive semblances of human beings...
...supervisor whose arteries the Shape has skillfully tapped. He just keeps coming, walking through thick glass doors, bullet after bullet pumped into him. On his way to the hospital he spies a buxom cheerleader type on her porch and takes a quick detour: the slaughter in this movie is Pavlovian...
...James Otis, John Adams, Joseph Hawley and Josiah Quincy--to rebel against the king. For an historian seeking to identify the roots of rebellion, they are not a surprising group: inevitably, they all had problems with their fathers, or father-figures, early in life--the sure trigger to a Pavlovian response from a Freud-fancier. But Shaw pursues the issue with considerable sophistication. The patriots. Shaw believes, saw Hutchinson as the perverter of the king's wishes. By attributing the onus for contested British actions--particularly the Stamp Act. Townshend Duties and Tea Act--to Hutchinson and not the king...
American society has devoted special energy to perfecting what can be a creatively insidious form of exploitation--advertising. In its worst forms, the advertisement seeks to induce a Pavlovian response of slobbering acquisitiveness through irrelevant, and often exploitative associations: the blonde languishing on the hood of a Lincoln-Continental, or the leather-skinned cowboy touting the manly virtues of Marlboro Country. Yet these tactics are by no means confined to the world of Madison Avenue: they are used to sell daily newspapers and cheap novels, pornographic magazines and T.V. shows. The values of the advertising world steadily creep through...