Introduction: Agents of Our Own Lives, Centers of Our Own Stories
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Published:December 2023
The film Minari (2020) shows how choices and actions are building blocks of filmmaking in ways paralleled in spectatorship and psychoanalysis. Both entail interpretive acts of forming oneself and others through an evaluation of representations and relationships. The introduction presents concepts from object relations and self psychology such as the true and false self, the good enough mother, selfobjects, and healthy narcissism with the goal of showing how youth forge autonomy in the face of grief, especially from the loss of parents and homespace, as opportunities to rebuild the self. The goal of the book is to show how films are analyzable as growing up can be. It is the act of evaluating and understanding experience through interpretation that is captured in the process of agentic attunement. This concept incorporates a generative understanding of agency as acting for the sake of self and others in the face of obstacles.