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:
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”
—Andrew Lang (1844–1912)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“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)