The 90-Minute Effect

How We Shape Our Lives by the Hollywood Formula and Rarely Reach Our Own Happy Endings

By: Eric Robert Morse

Narrated by: Kal Mann

From Bogart and Bacall to Batman Begins, from Pride and Prejudice to The Princess Bride, and from Ben-Hur to Ben Kenobi, our lives are filled with personalities and narratives that grip our very souls. What connects us with these tales so naturally and powerfully? What provides the magic of a great character or plot twist? What is it about a good story that makes us want to triumph like Batman and fall in love like the Princess Bride? And why is it so difficult to achieve those happy endings ourselves?

The 90-Minute Effect explores the subtle manner in which all good stories are molded and shows how we as audience members shape our own lives according to what we see on screen and read in books. In a comprehensive survey covering Hollywood movies, novels, television shows, plays, and video games, both modern and classic, Eric Robert Morse examines the patterns in plot structure and character development that arise in all good stories, showing how each example offers its own unique approach to the universal formula.

This fascinating and inventive study fuses a detailed look at the inner-workings of stories with astute social analysis that will rivet lovers of storytelling as well as those interested in current sociological trends. The 90-Minute Effect stands as a mesmerizing window into the human psyche and provides an entirely new theory of poetics that will change the way you watch movies and read novels forever.

©2009 Eric Robert Morse (P)2013 Eric Robert Morse

Introspective work is what's needed for our happy ending

It's a bit refreshing to read about this hypothesis. The idea that films and classic stories carry the key to happy endings in our own lives. This is not something typically analyzed even in film school as I would know, I graduated from Chapman University's Film School.

Overall, the essence is that characters have an internal struggle of values and outer struggle which is their tangible goal in the film. We see them obtain their goal but must realize only by truly recognizing their inner conflict and accepting change can they obtain their new values and thus truly achieve a happy ending of which we need to do the same in our own lives.

This is a worthy endeavor to partake when watching cinema, to analyze what each story is really trying to say behind the central narrative and take away our own thoughts about how that characters journey may apply to our own. Thank you.