Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses to extend post-Jungian approaches to the analysis of films and television programmes. The boldest evidence for that is found in Roland Barthes's Marxist thesis 'Myth Today'. The book shows how a film which frustrates audiences' appetite for identification and emotional gratification allows us to see the strength of the machinery of desire in mainstream cinema. Films can arouse intense pleasure in audiences. Indeed mainstream movies, in the attempt to assure their backers of good financial returns, invariably try to please their customers. Jungian work on screen texts is exciting to undertake because it can illuminate the analyst through the mental processes undergone in casting light on the text. In the very public arena of cinema and television with which people are concerned, the psychological and the political are constantly juxtaposed, while the media amplify their conjunction.