Support Group - Support Groups in Popular Media

Support Groups in Popular Media

  • The 1996 novel Fight Club (and the 1999 film adaptation) presents a wry analysis of support groups and their function.
  • In the Pixar film Finding Nemo, the two main characters encounter three sharks that form a self-help support group to help each other swear off eating fish and change their image.
  • The hit musical RENT, there is a support group to help sufferers of AIDS cope with their illness.
  • In Evermore, the teenage heroine's best friend is 'what you'd call an anonymous-group addict...she's attended twelve-step meetings for alcoholics, narcotics, codependents, debtors, gamblers, cyber addicts, nicotine junkies, social phobics, pack rats, and vulgarity lovers'. Contemplating her lack of parental support, however, the heroine concludes that 'if standing before a room full of people, creating some sob story about her tormented struggle with that day's fill-in-the-blank addiction makes her feel important, well, who am I to judge'.
  • In Wreck-It Ralph, the titular villain finds a support group for the "bad guys" that are involved in other video games. While he had been invited for 30 years, he had refused until his 30th anniversary of being in the arcade. Ultimately he finds that he is not as crazy as he thought, which goes back to the point of the support group.

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Famous quotes containing the words support, groups, popular and/or media:

    Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other—only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.
    Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)

    Only the groups which exclude us have magic.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.
    Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)

    One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.
    Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)