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 [log in to unmask]