But why do we like to watch the same movies all the time?

Do you also have a blanket movie? The one you keep looking at and can’t get enough of? A study explains why we watch the same films all the time.

Dirty Dancing, The Lion King or Love Actually… We all have films that we watch over and over and we still can’t get enough of them. As for the series, it’s a bit the same. We often call them our doudou series. These are the ones that we know by heart, but that we could look at endlessly throughout our lives. Like a Proust madeleine, we always come back to it. A real cute sin that we assume … or not.

It’s a funny habit when we know, especially today, all the new films and new series that are released in theaters or on Netflix and other streaming platforms. A strange habit that has a very scientific explanation: a study, published in Science Daily in 2012, sheds light on the subject and tells why we persist in watch films that we have already seen 37,896 times.

Cult films: Madeleines by Proust

It was marketing professors Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney J. Levy who first looked into the question. They analyzed the behaviors of people in New Zealand and America who watched the same movies over and over again, reread the same books, or spent their vacation in the same place every year. According to them, this habit would solve problems in our personal life.

Indeed, watching a movie or series that we know inside out, for example, requires less mental energy and gives us a feeling of control, because we already know the end. But, above all, it plunges us into a Proust madeleine which makes us feel good. Watching the series, the film or rereading the book of our childhood makes us nostalgic and it often brings back sweet memories.

There are the movies, but also the songs that we put in repeat mode

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, an academic specializing in musical cognition, also confirms this need for control. To do this, she takes the example of songs that we tend to listen to all the time. “When you listen to a song several times, you end up hearing it ahead of time, imagining what’s going to happen before it even happens. imagination”, she explains to Pacific Standard.

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Appeasement, a feeling of control and Proust’s madeleine are therefore the different factors that encourage us to watch our favorite films, and others, without stopping. All we have to do is watch (again) Dirty Dancing on Netflix!

Melanie Bonvard

Mélanie deciphers pop culture from a societal angle and questions the female gaze in films or even series, because everything is a question of gaze, she …