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Guilty pleasure unwittingly encapsulates a construct of classical psychoanalytic theory: a superego-id conflict. In popular use, the phrase characterizes pleasurable experiences that don't conform to conventional aesthetic standards, elite value judgments, or political or social objectives: norms that may be shared by the speaker. What to make of this? Hooked, subtitled Art and Attachment, is a scholarly but zestful and accessible book that addresses apparent inconsistencies in taste and the frequently irreducible proliferation of motives underlying personal preferences. Hooked documents our captivation by certain cultural productions, many reputable and widely appealing, but some that we may regard as suspect. These attachments can be inexplicable to ourselves. They include both what is consciously overdetermined in our responses and the je ne sais quoi of what we just happen to like.
In anticipation of the subject matter of Hooked, consider the following comments by film director Martin Scorsese about the 1956 film Giant. Scorsese has an encyclopedic and pragmatic knowledge of film technique and history and a mind that's a treasure house of movie pleasures, including this self-admittedly “guilty” one:
I've seen the film over forty times. I don't like the obvious romanticism, and it's very studied, but there's more here than people have seen. It has to do with a lifestyle through the passage of years. You see people grow. I like James Dean; I like the use of music, even though Dimitri Tiomkin did it; I like [production designer] Boris Leven's image of the house; I like the wide image of Mercedes McCambridge riding the bronco, then cut to an extreme close-up of her hitting the bronc with her spur, then back to the wide image. As far as filmmaking goes,
Page 47Giant is an inspiring film. I don't mean morally, but visually. It's all visual. (Scorsese, 1978, p. 63)
Applying modernist critical standards of the late 1970s, Scorsese dismisses Giant's “romanticism” and a