4 Characteristics of a Feel-Good Film

About five years ago, my mother-in-law asked me a terrifying question.

“Would you like to watch a movie?”

The simple answer to her query was “yes.” I would always like to watch a movie. A movie has to be really bad for me not to enjoy it. But picking a movie to watch with my mother-in-law? That particular proposition still makes me shudder.

“Sure,” I answered carefully, and then I tried to stall. “What kind of movie do you have in mind?”

“I don’t really care,” was her answer. “Just show me something that makes you feel good.”

And it was at this stage that my stomach began to hurt. This was truly perilous territory. My love for movies is such that I could suggest almost anything. Thanks to the marvels of streaming technology, horror, science fiction, romance, and action, the TV screen is my oyster. Still, for reasons that to this day I am hard-pressed to explain, A Walk on the Moon leaped to mind. Before I could undo what seemed a grave mistake (I’ll explain why in a second), she was enthusiastically agreeing with this choice, though I don’t think she'd ever heard of the film.

If you’ve seen A Walk on the Moon, you’ll understand my trepidations. It’s not exactly mother-in-law stuff. A Walk on the Moon is a steamy romance set against the backdrop of the first 1969 moonwalk and the competing spectacle of the Woodstock music festival. It features some very attractive actors who sometimes don't wear that much.

You’ve got Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen, and Liev Schreiber, all blessed in all sorts of ways. I had somehow pushed into the carnal regions of my mind the rather explicit on-screen depiction of the illicit affair that Ms. Lane's and Mr. Mortensen's characters enjoy, and during a particularly erotic scene, I finally had to turn away from the television and say to my mother-in-law that I was finding watching these scenes with her a bit awkward.

“Why,” she asked.

“Because,” was all I could muster, and then I began to stammer, which I think she enjoyed for longer than was perhaps necessary before she summed up her thoughts about what we were watching in wonderfully charitable and understanding terms.

“This," she told me, pointing towards the television screen, “This looks like they're having fun.”

I think she may have had a mischievous smile on her face, but I can’t be certain since I didn’t really make direct eye contact.

All of this matters because last week, I asked a bunch of medical students to watch A Walk on the Moon for a film class that I’m teaching. I had intended the film to be an example of how some movies just make us feel good, and I was trying to make the point that if a movie makes you feel good, then something very basic and fundamentally therapeutic has to be happening.

My experience in talking to the students about this movie brought to the forefront some genuine challenges with my premise. First of all, there is the problem of definitions. After all, what exactly is a “feel-good” film? There aren’t any formal definitions, though scholars have tried. Writing in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Noel Brown noted that the classification of a film as “feel-good” is less about genre and more about marketing. Brown said that the “feel-good” designation is merely alluded to in most critical film literature, likely because the term itself is deceptive and defies a simple explanation.

Most of us have a few movies we can name when asked to list our “feel-good” films, but what, exactly, are the criteria that link these films together? And, even more importantly, it seems that one man’s treasure is another man's garbage. My feel-good film doesn’t have to be your feel-good film. That is the beauty of art and individual preference, but this lack of clear definitions makes understanding the therapeutic utility of movies awfully hard to parse.

My students, unlike my mother-in-law, were not particularly fond of A Walk on the Moon. They didn’t hate it. They just found it flawed and had all sorts of good reasons for their critiques. Their discussion was lively and smart, and like any teacher with his back against the ropes, I threw the question back at them.

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“Fine,” I said in a mock-pouty voice. “That’s my feel-good film. What’s yours?”

Predictably, each student had a different feel-good movie. This finding leads to criterion 1 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Movie Classification (The DSMMC? Maybe I need a more original title.)

1, A “Feel-Good” film is really best and only defined by who is doing the feeling while they’re watching the movie.

And thank goodness for that.

What if every December, everyone equally loved Die Hard and felt lousy after Love Actually? To put this question more broadly, what if everyone only liked a certain kind of film to make them feel better? That would, in my humble opinion, be horridly boring.

One student in my class pointed out that she feels good after an action film like The Fast and the Furious. Another noted the bounce in his step after watching Legally Blond. A third noted that intense and thoughtful films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest legitimately brightened his day.

This leads to criterion 2 of the “feel-good” movie:

2. A “feel-good” film exists outside of and apart from genre.

Horror can make some of us feel good. Comedy can make some of us feel rotten. Or vice versa, and so on. For the purposes of these criteria, it is not necessary to account for individual preferences. One feels good when one feels good, and the reasons one feels good are worth exploring so that we can duplicate the effect. It’s why we explore any therapeutic phenomenon.

This, therefore, brings us to criterion 3.

3. For a given individual’s feel-good movie, the results should be at least somewhat replicable.

For many people, Say Anything always feels good, no matter how many times it’s watched. In this sense, a replicable feel-good movie is similar to a favorite song, and favorites of this sort are almost always tied to memories and nostalgia. What you were doing when you first watched your “feel-good” movie very likely plays an important role in labeling that film a feel-good experience. Because we are social creatures, sharing those memories with those you love often enhances the experience.

Finally, there’s biology. "Feeling good” isn’t just something you say. It’s something that you feel. Something molecular is happening. This is especially the case if we limit the definition to an amalgam of cognitive and emotional experiences. Here it is important to remember that whenever we start combining emotions and cognitions, biology gets pretty complicated.

We can invoke neurotransmitters like dopamine, or increased immunocompetence after experiencing aesthetically pleasing events, or even qualitative analyses in which these biological findings map closely with words that carry positive emotional valence. In other words, what makes art feel good is complex and wondrous and worth our attention. This leads to criterion 4, our final criterion:

4. The feel-good film must create a complex interplay of positive biological and, ultimately, emotional experiences.

Without these experiences, one literally cannot feel good. I think that’s why my feel-good films are sometimes ephemeral and often varied. I’m human, and as such, I am constantly accumulating new experiences. I'm trying to enjoy whatever epiphanies I can find, and I'm doing my best to let go of previous convictions that no longer appear to be helpful.

Ultimately, I'd argue that a designated feel-good film changes with its viewer. When I watched A Walk on the Moon last week, it still felt good, but it felt good in new and unexpected ways. That’s called growth, and generally growth is a good thing. Similarly, there were parts of the movie that felt less good. Paying attention to these changes is illuminating. Just like a “feel-good” movie, we grow, and we change, and we see the world through endlessly varied glasses based on our own unique experiences. Thank goodness for all that variety.

That’s why we have so many movies to choose from.