In Bridghet’s blog post Guys, He’s Literally Me, the author writes about how prosthetic memories, proposed by Alison Landsberg, can be imagined through films to shape identities that lived memories do. The article further argues how this mechanism may also enforce confirmation bias when being uncritical about who they identify with. Referencing to American Psycho and the modern “Sigma Male” trend, the author shows that viewers do not always empathize with the intended subject of the film, instead adopting the film as a means of validating misogyny, narcissistic masculinity, and entitlement. Thus, films double in their effects: they have the capacity to build empathy and understanding, but they can also maintain oppressive social narratives and reproduce damaging identities when audiences misread them or internalize them selectively .This dynamic is not unique to American Psycho or Sigma Male culture.
“We’re promoting merchandise to adults as well as little girls,” said the company’s director of licensing in 1987, referring to products that had been created for the 50th anniversary of Snow White (Tait). I couldn’t help but wonder, do we grow out of Disney—or does Disney simply grow into us? 91% self-identified “Disney adults” expected to remain Disney adults for life, showing how prosthetic memory and identity production by media is structural, not individual. It is not simply just building a nostalgic childhood, as one may naturally think. It is an actual lived, long-lasting identity.
Disney films have been producing similar “prosthetic identities” for decades—often in ways that also affirm harmful cultural scripts. Disney’s narratives generate extraordinarily powerful memories in childhood audiences: for many people, these films become their earliest emotional templates for love, heroism, gender, and belonging. If Landesberg argues that films allow us to “construct narratives for ourselves,”(186) Disney arguably teaches us who we are supposed to want to become.
Take the “princess” narrative: Disney’s heroines repeatedly enact the prosthetic memory of transformation-an ordinary girl becomes the chosen one, love is fate, goodness is destiny. Children adopt those feelings, internalize the desire, and carry that prosthetic memory into adulthood. But, like the men who selectively identify with Bateman, audiences often internalize the surface fantasy and neglect the critique. For example, the early Disney canon accidentally supports the fantasy of male entitlement and female reward: the prince’s perseverance is framed as love, not stubbornness, and the princess’s silence or sacrifice becomes virtue, not constraint. The audiences “remember” these roles even without living them. The result can be the same confirmation bias, except directed toward romance, gender norms, happiness, and competition.
Disney has also perfected the art of extending these memories beyond the screen and into everyday consumption. Through theme parks, merchandise, streaming platforms, and curated nostalgia, Disney provides an entire ecosystem where these identities are reinforced repeatedly. Visiting Disneyland becomes a ritual–wearing themed dresses, buying branded products becomes an act of belonging, and nostalgia becomes a commodity that is constantly renewed. In the same manner that Sigma Males “perform” masculinity through imitation, Disney fans perform their identity through participation in a shared fantasy world that blurs the line between media and lived memory. This shows that prosthetic identity is not just emotional or psychological. It is economic, cultural, and social, quietly infiltrating every aspect of our community.
Interestingly enough, Disney has recently attempted to revise this prosthetic memory. Films like Frozen and Moana actively resist the earlier narratives of entitlement or rescue (Mendelson). In other words, Disney knows that people don’t just watch princess movies—they model themselves after them. Disney has had to become aware of film’s power not just to teach empathy, but to reinforce bias.
Taking the author’s argument further, the problem isn’t just that audiences identify with Bateman incorrectly–it’s that culture conditions us to look for ourselves in the narratives to confirm the scripts we already carry, whether that’s the Sigma Male fantasy, the Nice Guy narrative, or the Disney princess myth. Prosthetic memories can produce empathy, but they also produce archetypes that get recycled across media and across identity.
What Bridghet’s post reveals—and what Disney makes even clearer—is that prosthetic memory is not neutral. It can produce empathy, or entitlement. It can create community, or isolation. Perhaps the task for filmmakers and audiences isn’t to stop identifying with characters, but to become more aware of what we are being trained to desire in the first place. So I agree with the author’s conclusion that film produces identity as much as emotion. Still, I would add that even the most seemingly innocuous films, especially Disney films, have always been doing the same kind of cultural work that American Psycho does: shaping what we think we are, who we think is heroic, and what futures we believe we deserve.
Works Cited
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.
Mendelson, Scott. “Why ‘little Mermaid’ May Mark the End of Disney’s Remake Factory Hits: Analysis.” TheWrap, 1 June 2023, www.thewrap.com/disney-remake-little-mermaid-moana-frozen/.
Tait, Amelia. “The ‘Disney Adult’ Industrial Complex.” New Statesman, New Statesman, 26 Feb. 2024, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/02/disney-adult-superfan-industrial-complex#:~:text=Far%20more%20common%20answers%20include,%E2%80%9Cmakes%20me%20feel%20happy%E2%80%9D.
Cover art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118430665278991259/
Written by Gina Chang
Gina! I am so flattered you chose my blog post as a critical response! I believe you emphasized my points with a greater case study and solidified my own argument within myself more! The two pieces of media we chose (American Psycho and Disney, respectively) are a couple of examples of the two extremes of how people consume content and you supported the argument super well!
This is amazing! Great job!
Thanks Bridghet! I loved your blog post, and it gave me an opportunity to build on my thoughts. I loved how our posts ended up in conversation with each other. I agree our examples sit on opposite extremes, but I also think that’s where the real tension is, not that they’re different, but that both rely on the same mechanism of identification. Whether it’s Disney or American Psycho, the viewer is still encouraged to see themselves inside the story.
Your post highlighted the affirming side of that, while mine was more oriented toward the unsettling one. Put together, I think they suggest that media invites us to project ourselves onto characters, but also projects certain identities back onto us. It’s that overlap where things get complicated, and I believe that is what makes this topic so interesting.
Great blogpost! I think Disney is so unique and special in the sense with the hold it has on society that spans through generations and cultures. Your argument on the body of Disney works extending both memories and experiences also relates back to semiotics in the sense that Disney is known for reinterpretation of old art and literature (like reimagining Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, etc.) and how that permeates into our language. When we think of words “frozen” and “tangled”, we think of the films. Even the phrase “true love’s kiss” (although mentioned in early Shakespearean and Brothers Grimm work) was massively proliferated by Disney films like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and The Little Mermaid. I think the analysis of how media affects our actions and behaviour is deeply necessary in the field of media studies, so this was a great contribution to that.
Xelena, I especially appreciate your insight into semiotics for my post, particularly the fact that Disney not only reinterpret older stories but also reshapes the language we use to speak of love, childhood, and even everyday terms like “frozen.” Your examples well demonstrate how deeply the vocabulary of Disney has embedded itself into culture and reinforce my argument of its influence reaching beyond entertainment.
At the same time, that’s also where the stakes rise as Disney’s reinterpretations become the dominant meanings people associate with these stories. It’s no longer just a question of adapting folklore. It’s actively rewriting cultural memory. That’s why the examination of how these narratives shape our behavior feels so crucial within the media studies framework. Your comment really helped expand that perspective for me. I wonder, do you think there is a boundary regarding how much cultural language and collective memory a media company should influence, or is that simply an occurrence of modern storytelling?
Great response! I thought that your work did an excellent job at highlighting how prosthetic memories shape identity in ways that are both subtle and profound. The discussion of American Psycho and the Sigma Male trend made me think about how Disney films operate on a similar level. They aren’t just stories, but guides that teach audiences how to feel and behave. I was especially struck by the idea that Disney adults carry these prosthetic memories throughout their lives, turning nostalgia into almost an identity. If films are shaping so much of who we think we are, how can we become more aware of the narratives we’re internalizing?
Thank you so much for this response! I really appreciated how you acknowledged my effort on connecting prosthetic memories to Disney, because the mechanism is so similar. Despite American Psycho and Disney sitting at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, both create emotional templates that audiences internalize, sometimes without noticing. With Disney, nostalgia becomes more than a feeling. It’s a guiding narrative about who they are and how they move through the world.
What I find intriguing is how these narratives slip so seamlessly into our identities, often camouflaging themselves as comfort or familiarity. When a movie informs our visions of love, courage, or “a good life,” those ideas can seem instinctive rather than fabricated. That influence only comes into view through active work, given the ways in which prosthetic memories feel personal even when they’re not.
To answer your question, I think the first step is simply to recognize that the stories we grew up with aren’t neutral. They carry values, templates, and emotional cues that quietly shape how we come to imagine ourselves. Becoming aware involves slowing down our consumption and asking ourselves why certain scenes, characters, or dynamics would feel “natural” or comforting to us.
I found your post really thought-provoking, especially the way you connect prosthetic memory to Disney and long-term identity formation! It made me wonder how much of this identification we actually choose. Do you think people recognize when a film is shaping their sense of self, or is it mostly happening beneath awareness? I was also curious about your point on Disney revising its own narratives. Do you think those newer films genuinely change the prosthetic memories people form, or do they just layer new messages on top of older ones that are still culturally dominant?
I really value the questions you raise because they form a tension between agency and unconscious influence that sits at the center of prosthetic memory. I’m not sure we fully choose the identities we absorb from media. Films, especially those encountered in childhood, tend to work beneath conscious awareness in a period of time before we have the full language capability to describe it. So even when we later “recognize” that a narrative shaped us, that insight arrives after the fact that the memory has already sedimented into how we imagine growing up, such as concepts of love and bravery. In that sense, prosthetic memory is less an elective process and more a cultural atmosphere we grow inside.
Your question about Disney revising its narratives is equally tricky. I do think newer films attempt to reshape the affective and ethical terrain—for example, by destabilizing binaries or critiquing empire. But I’m not convinced that these revisions fully overwrite earlier prosthetic memories. Those classics remain institutionally reinforced through theme parks, merchandise, remakes, and intergenerational nostalgia. So the new messages don’t erase the old ones. They accumulate. Disney’s revisions feel more like layers in a palimpsest—updates that coexist with, and sometimes even soften the contradictions within dominant cultural memories.
Hi Gina! This blog ironically made me feel nostalgic. It immediately caught my eye because the sleeping beauty banner stood out to me and immediately connected with a part of my brain that stores my childhood. You so accurately explained that films and television have a way of getting ingrained into a phase of a person’s lives and therefore a part of their identity.
This made me think about the recent trend of dressing up for movies. I think part of it stems from how people dress up to go to Disneyland, but if I am correct, it got popularised with the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. A marketing tactic turned into a trend that makes people so much more invested in a piece of media. People become the extension of a movie just as much as the movie becomes an extension of a person.
Thanks! I think your mention of Barbie really elevates my topic. It’s a great example of how media can shape identity and female appearance on both symbolic and embodied levels. In Greta Gerwig’s hands, Barbie went from a static, idealized doll to a cultural mirror, reflecting pressures, contradictions, and aspirations set upon women. And with that, it is crucial to acknowledge the incentive for the dressing trend and the chain reaction it has for others.