Stephen,
  In the vein of exploring our fascination with violence - and in
particular its relation to the visual medium - there are some good texts.
For a purely cognitive perspective there's _Why People Play_
by Michael J. Ellis; _Stories, Scripts and Scenes_ by Jean M. Mandler (the
first three chapters are especially interesting); "Some Consequences of
Cognition" from _Cognition and Reality_ by Ulric Neisser.
  As our perception and structuring of the world relate to narrative and
cinema Edward Branigan has some interesting stuff, as well as Noel
Carroll. Carroll wrote an article called "Toward a Theory of Point-of-View
Editing: Communication, Emotion and the Movies" that does a nice job of
bridging the gap between abstraction and the movie experience. I don't
know what journal it was in but I have a copy of it.
                        Robert Hurst
                        University of Iowa
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