ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I seek to disassemble the persistently held presumption that film and music, amongst other overarching cultural forms, through their dramatic deployment of commercially projected powerful imagination, can determine the expectations of individuals as to their desires and preferences of how to behave, most directly in terms of choosing venues for holidays and how to experience them (Beeton, 2005). These near-dominant understandings are not merely in the populist tabloid press or even broadsheets and their online equivalent voices but amongst academics and other thinkers who intend to investigate, reflect, and inform. Yet is it at all sensible to emphasize meta-cultural forms in the determination of imagination? In other words, where does the multiplicity of difference amongst media themselves “fit” in the embroilment of our lives? Or, maybe, the myriad fragments of our imagination might have other, humbler, more important, resonant, and continuing as well as sudden effects on imagination. A memory from visiting a place or somebody in our individual past might even be jolted into our present by a passing sound or a visual image that appears in that wider media. This is not about inducing certain images but about making a fragment of our own imagination come to mind again, shining light on a corner that had been left in the dark for some time. Simply put, the connection between a film, a dance, a song, and our imagination is far from linear. This chapter grows from insights and evidence across the humanities and social sciences. In these threads, this chapter understands the others it shares space with in this collection but does so with a care to acknowledge the inter-weaving that inhabits life and our relations with whatever may be around us: in dreams, desires and disappointments, memories, or events.
