UNIT PAPER ON INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

UNIT PAPER ON
INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

Robert B. Reed
Spring Arbor University
COM 504 Communication Theory and Worldview
Fall 2004

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Unit Paper on Interpersonal Communication

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Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to describe interpersonal communication in the movie
Life is Beautiful (Gori, Gori, & Benigni, 1997) from the perspective of three theoretical
models of interpersonal communication: symbolic interactionism, interpersonal deception
theory, and social judgment theory.

The movie opens in Italy in 1939, and is the story of Guido, carefree Italian Jew,
who moves to a nearby city to improve his life. He is a naïve, eternal optimist, and falls in
love with and marries Dora, a school teacher, whom he woos through his love of life and
vivid imagination. They have a son, Giosue, and live happily until Italy is occupied by
German forces during World War II. When Guido and Giosue are sent to a Nazi
concentration camp, Guido manages to protect his son and tries to shield him from the
horrors of the camp by convincing him that the Holocaust is a game, and that the prize for
winning is a tank.
Discussion

Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism views meaning as a social construct.
Blumer assumes that “humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meaning they
assign to those people or things” (Griffin, 2003, p. 56). Guido’s son takes on the meaning
of the concentration camp that his father creates for him through his story-telling and the
illusory fantasy of a game. The reality of the danger and tenuousness of life in the camp has
no meaning for the boy, because his reality is the reality created for him by his father. As
Griffin describes it, the correctness of the interpretation—the reality of the camp or the
“reality” of the “game”—doesn’t really matter; what matters is that “[o]nce people define a
situation as real, it’s very real in its consequences” (2003, p. 56). Guido creates the
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symbolic meaning of the fantasy world through language, by naming their situation a game.
Giosue takes his cues and his role from the interaction with his father (“taking the role of
the other”) and sees himself as a looking-glass self in the construction his father has
created. Guido applied symbolic interaction theory by creating “reality” for his son, and
creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that the boy never realizes until the end of the movie.

Buller and Burgoon’s interpersonal deception theory says that people make “less
than completely honest statements” to avoid hurting other people, among other reasons
(Griffin, 2003, p. 95). Guido has lived as though he could always make things better by
laughing and joking about anything that came along in life, whether good or bad, so he
creates a fantasy world through falsification, to avoid the pain the truth would cause his
son. Although interpersonal deception theory usually is applied to whether the person
deceived can figure out that he or she has been deceived, and the result of that revelation on
the relationship, Giosue is too young to figure it out—he is a child in an evil, adult world.

Sherif’s social judgment theory analyzes the likelihood that a person can be
persuaded by having them assess the degree to which they agree or disagree with
statements about a situation on a continuum that makes sense for the situation. This
assessment places these statements in one of three zones, a zone of acceptance, rejection,
and noncommitment. Sherif studied the extent to which perceptions were modified by
group membership. In the case of this movie, the group was made up of the people with
Guido and Giosue in the concentration camp, but Giosue’s closest identification was with
his father, who created a perception for his son that the unpleasantness of the camp was
part of a game. His father’s attitude toward the camp made the situation bearable for the
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son, and he accepted his father’s social judgment, even though it was at variance with his
own perceptions—the camp smelled bad and was unpleasant.

Hall (1982) and Wood (2001) refer to Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality, in
which Whorf suggests that “every language plays an important part in actually molding the
perceptual world of the people who use it” (Hall, 1982, p. 91). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
is a model in anthropological linguistics that refers to the spatial-temporal structuring of
reality by linguistics categories embedded in different languages. Hall quotes Sapir with a
notion that is especially applicable to the present discussion:
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially
without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means
of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the
matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent built up on the language
habit of the group (Hall, 1982, p. 93).
Hybels and Weaver’s (2001) discussion of communication between parents and children
includes the use of support and control messages. Guido’s masterful story-telling creates a
reality which makes a horrible situation bearable for his 5 year old son, a beautiful support
message.
Conclusion

McLuhan’s view of survival seems especially applicable to this movie:
“Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social
drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive
response to the unperceived” (1967, p. 10).
In reality, many people went mad in the horrors of the concentration camps.
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This paper has presented an analysis of the movie Life is Beautiful from several
different theoretical perspectives in interpersonal communication. They have all considered
the notion that reality can at times be socially or linguistically constructed, even to the point
that the “reality” thus defined has no relation to the objective situation of communication.
This raises ethical questions for any thoughtful person, and especially a Christian—when is
it legitimate to deceive, to create a socially or linguistically constructed “reality” that has no
relation to objective truth? If God has called us to be people of truth, as He Himself is
Truth, does deception ever have a place in a Christian’s communications toolbox? Our
culture would tell us that there are times when deception is the greater good, and my
understanding of Biblical ethics is such that Old Testament examples of deception abound,
such as Rahab and the Hebrew spies, or Esther and the king, or Joseph and his brothers,
where deception to preserve life was honored by God. Justifying deception is not nearly so
clear-cut in most cases in our everyday lives.
References
Gori, M., Gori, V. (Producers), & Benigni, R. (Writer). (1997). Life is Beautiful [Motion
picture]. Italian with English sub-titles. Italy and United States: Miramax Films.
Griffin, E. (2003). Communication: a first look at communication theory. Boston: McGraw
Hill Higher Education.
Hall, E. T. (1982). The hidden dimension. New York: Doublesay.
Hybels, S., & Weaver, R. L. (2001). Communicating effectively, 6th ed. Boston: McGraw-
Hill.
McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York: Random
House.
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Wood, J. T. (2001). Communication mosaics: an introduction to the field of
communication, 2nd ed. Wadsworth-Thomson Learning.
© 2004 Robert B Reed

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