Genre and Popular Culture
Although central to film, genres far exceed the cinema. As Rick Altman
observes: ‘Of all the concepts fundamental to literary theory, none has
a longer and more distinguished lineage than the question of literary
types or genres’ (1999: 1). The western was already established in litera-
ture before the invention of cinema, while the musical took much from
pre-existing theatre forms and conventions. Providing a useful overview
of the historical debates surrounding literary genres, Altman argues that
Aristotle, the first genre theorist, initiated the unfortunate tendency of
genre analysis to restrict discussion to textual analysis. Nevertheless, in his
Poetics Aristotle did address two major concerns of film genre study. First,
in distinguishing between the very different kinds of endings in comedy
and tragedy, Aristotle anticipated the descriptive attempts of film genre
study to enumerate the formal properties of genres, the common elements
that allow a number of films to be grouped together and conceived as
a category. Second, Aristotle’s notion that tragedy is achieved through
a psychological affect (catharsis, the purgation of fear and pity aroused
through identification with the actions of a tragic hero) prefigures the
critical attention given to the ways in which genre films address spectators
as well as the particular pleasures and experiences offered to viewers by
different genres. Already Aristotle was considering the fundamental ques-
tion of why people like genre works – a particularly thorny question given
their formulaic, repetitive qualities.
Classical literary theory assumed differences between literature and
popular writing; such judgements were based on underlying assumptions
of aesthetic value. This distinction continued in the modern era as a debate
between ‘true’ art and popular culture, art and trash, high-brow and low-
brow. If good art was original, distinctive and complex, ‘the best that has
been thought and said’, as Matthew Arnold put it (i960: 6), then popular art
was formulaic and unsophisticated. Popular culture (including, of course,
film) has often been criticised for lacking originality or authenticity. In the
1930s and 1940s, cultural theorists associated with the Frankfurt School’s
Institute for Social Research dismissed popular art as industrial products
of a capitalist economy that inculcates false consciousness. Most influ-
ential^, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997) argued that popular
culture – the culture industry, as they termed it – had turned folk art into
commodities of mass culture, and that generic formulas functioned simply
to control the masses of consumers by organising and labelling them like
the films themselves. Later, in the United States, Dwight Macdonald argued
that modern industrialisation had eroded the earlier distinction between
high art and popular art, resulting in the rise of mass cult, which he derided
as formulaic at every level (1964:14). Traditional critical thinking consigned
genre art in whatever form to the realm of the popular and, for the most
part, excluded it from the canon.
Although such cultural distinctions are still upheld by many, high
culture and popular culture in fact had merged long before Mickey Mouse
shook hands with orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski in Walt Disney’s
Fantasia (1940). In 1915 literary critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote about the split
in American culture between high-brow and low-brow, and suggested there
was ‘no community, no genial middle ground’ (1970: 18). But already he
might have looked to the movies, where popular, formula-driven motion
pictures were even then gathering large and faithful communities of spec-
tators across the United States. Movies were central to the American ideal
of the melting pot, for they were an inexpensive entertainment that intro-
duced newly-arrived immigrants to the American way in visual stories that
transcended the barrier of language.
Indeed, because of the importance of genre movies within culture,
and because they are collaborative efforts that require the work of many
individuals, genre movies have been commonly understood as inevitable
expressions of the contemporaryze/fge/sf. This is true not only of individual
genre movies, but also of the changing patterns and popularity of different
genres and of the shifting relationships between them. For whether they
are set in the past or in the future, on the mean streets of contemporary
New York or long ago in a galaxy far away, genre movies are always about
the time and place in which they are made.
Today, with entertainment in its myriad forms controlled by an increas-
ingly small number of transnational corporations, popular culture is largely
mass culture in the derogatory sense that Macdonald claimed. However,
many politically-oriented critics understand the importance of studying
popular culture, if for no other reason than to expose the ideology of its
artefacts. But they also argue that works of popular culture offer empower-
ment to various cultural groups and are sites of ideological struggle rather
than mere purveyors of the status quo. Taking a more inclusive view of
cultural production and avoiding the value judgements of high-brow critics
like Macdonald, John Cawelti suggests that all art be thought of as existing
on a continuum between invention and convention (1985: 27-9). Such a
perspective allows for a greater appreciation and understanding of genre
texts and how they work.
Whatever their politics, genre movies are intimately imbricated within
larger cultural discourses as well as political ones. As Steve Neale points
out, within popular culture genres always exceed simply a group of films or
other texts. Neale emphasises the importance of advertisements, publicity
photos and studio stills, reviews and so on in keying and shaping viewers’
expectations even before they see a film by promoting its ‘generic image’
(2003: 164). These instances of ‘institutional’ and ‘industrial’ discourse
reveal how audiences perceived films when they were released, and also
help us understand how genres have changed over time. As an example,
Neale notes that most histories of the western film begin with The Grea
Train Robbery (1903), but when released it was promoted not as a western
but marketed for its relation to the then-popular genres of the chase film,
the railroad film and the crime film; at that time, there was no recognised
genre known as the western into which to categorise it.
The Classic Studio System
Early filmmaking in the US was located in and around New York City on
the east coast, near the nation’s urban, industrial centres. But southern
California quickly proved more appealing, and film pioneer D. W. Griffith
and many others moved west. The area around Los Angeles was attractive
to film companies for a number of reasons. Geographically distant from
the controlling power of the monopolistic Motion Pictures Patent Company,
founded in the east in 1908, the region’s more hospitable climate also
offered more varied topography and provided greater opportunities for
location shooting. Labour and land were also less expensive than in
the east, and incoming film companies were able to buy large tracts on
which to build their studios for interior shooting. Thus, the American
film industry became concentrated in a relatively small area, Hollywood.
Dubbed the ‘dream factory’ by anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker in
1950, Hollywood produced appealing fantasies in an industrial context that
millions of people have watched, as if in dreams awake.
Regularised film exhibition developed as a result of the popularity
and rapid growth of nickelodeons, the first venues devoted exclusively
to cinema exhibition. The steady demand for new films made year-round
production schedules necessary and provided the impetus for the devel-
opment of a factory-based (Fordist) mode of production. As movies were
made in a competitive, profit-motivated context, the Hollywood studios
developed a production system that supplied product’. In the Studio Era
(roughly 1920S-1950S), all members of the cast and crew were workers
under contract to the studio, and the different kinds of work (for example,
script, editing, music) were divided into departments. Very few directors
were able to choose their own projects, but were required to direct movies
as the studio heads and producers dictated.
Hollywood movies have become so dominant throughout the world that
the terms ‘Hollywood style’ or ‘classic narrative style’ are often used inter-
changeably to refer to the style of narrative filmmaking that emphasises
the crisp and seamless flow of the story combined with high production
values. Film historians have argued convincingly for a view of Hollywood
cinema as ‘a distinct mode of film practice’ with its origins dating as early
as 1917 (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson 1985: xiii). Within the context of
Hollywood’s industrial mode of production, genre movies are dependable
products.
Genre filmmaking developed early, with producers seeking maximum
acceptance at the box office through the repetition and variation of
commercially successful formulas. Seeking to balance standardisation and
differentiation, filmmakers combined sameness and difference. The formu-
laic qualities of genre films meant that studios could turn them out quickly,
and audiences could understand them just as quickly. In their catalogues,
producers loosely grouped films in generic categories.
Genre movies allow for an economy of expression through conventions
and iconography. Colin McArthur provides a vivid example of the shorthand
of generic expressivity in his comparison of specific shots from two gang-
ster films from different periods, Little Caesar (1931) and The Harder The
Fall (1956). Both films offer an image of three men in doorways wearing
Marge hats and heavy coats’ and standing in triangular formation, the
dominant character at the front and flanked by two underlings behind. As
McArthur notes, the repetition of certain visual patterns in genre movies
allows audiences to know ‘immediately what to expect of them by their
physical attributes, their dress and deportment. It knows, too, by the dispo-
sition of the figures, which is dominant, which subordinate’ (1972: 23). This
system of signification, developed over time and with repetition, served
well the fast pace of classic narration in films intended to be shown as part
of a double bill that changed frequently.
In the classic studio system, genre movies are like Ford’s assembly
line cars with interchangeable parts. The James Bond series continues
because of the formula – lots of action, fancy gadgets, beautiful women
and colourful villains – despite the changes in directors, writers and even
the actors playing Bond himself. Individual genre films may lift elements
from one genre and put them into another, as The Band Wagon (1953)
incorporates film noir and the detective film into the climactic ‘The Girl
Hunt’ ballet. In the western Red River (1948), a young and softly-spoken
cowhand on the cattle drive gently admits that if the drive succeeds his
goal is to buy new shoes for his wife; when he is the first casualty during
a stampede, audiences recognise a convention borrowed from countless
war movies. Recombinant genre movies like Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (1948) and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) mix elements from
seemingly disparate genres. More recently, movies like Freddy vs. Jason
(2003) and Alien vs. Predator (2004), both of which are simultaneously
recombinant movies and sequels, show the same process at work despite
the end of the studio era.
By the 1930s the Hollywood studios had achieved vertical integration,
controlling distribution and exhibition as well as production. In response,
the federal government initiated anti-trust proceedings against the major
studios (MGM, Paramount, RKO, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros.),
which culminated in 1948 with the US Supreme Court ruling in what has
become known as ‘the Paramount Decision’ which decreed that the studios
were engaging in monopolistic practices and had to divest their exhibition
chains. The studios eventually diversified by concentrating on the new
medium of television as well as on film production, and on establishing
themselves as the major national exporter of films around the world,
but the practice of block booking and the steady output of dependable
B features soon ended. With the breakdown of the studio system came
the end of the Production Code, the self-monitoring system of censorship
established by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 as a
response to growing criticism from conservative forces within American
society, which was replaced by a ratings system in 1968.
Yet despite its constraints, the studio system did provide a stable
context for filmmakers to work with consistency and to be expressive.
As Robin Wood notes, Hollywood is one of the few historical instances
of a true communal art, ‘a great creative workshop, comparable to
Elizabethan London or the Vienna of Mozart, where hundreds of talents
have come together to evolve a common language’ (1968: 9). The justly
famous opening scene of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) tells us almost
everything we need to know about the heroes played by John Wayne and
Dean Martin well before the first word of dialogue is spoken. Hawks uses
the conventions of the western to express his sense of professionalism,
heroism and self-respect, which would not have been possible without the
established conventions of the genre as his raw material (Pye 2003: 213).
As Andre Bazin observed long ago, ‘the American cinema is a classical art,
but why not then admire in it what is most admirable … the genius of the
system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition’, which he praised apart
from the achievement of individual films and directors (1968:154).
Elements of Genre
Whether they are expensive epics or egregious exploitation, genre movies
are composed of certain common elements. However we may define
specific genres, the films that we choose to include in any generic category
necessarily share certain of those elements. Yet generic description must
always avoid slipping into evaluation by reifying generic patterns of a
historical period as norms. ‘Classic’ should refer to a particular type of
western but, confusingly, in common parlance it also denotes greatness,
which is a judgement of value. Altman rightly observes that traditional film
genre criticism has the unfortunate tendency to emphasise ‘genre fixity’, to
think of genres as permanent (1999: 50). Both Bazin and Robert Warshow
are guilty of this in writing about the ‘classic’ western, and although they
may be forgiven because they lacked both a critical tradition and the
historical vantage point we have today, many other critics have fallen into
the same trap.
conventions
In any art form or medium, conventions are frequently-used stylistic tech-
niques or narrative devices typical of (but not necessarily unique to) par-
ticular generic traditions. Bits of dialogue, musical figures or styles and
patterns of mise-en-scene are all aspects of movies that, repeated from
film to film within a genre, become established as conventions. In anar-
chic comedies like Duck Soup (1933), Groucho Marx addresses the camera
directly, breaking down the cinematic equivalent of the proscenium or
‘fourth wall’. Such moments are violations of convention analogous to those
normative values lampooned in these films’ narratives. Despite the obvious
breach of realism in such a convention it is accepted by audiences within its
generic context, contributing to the pleasure we derive from genre movies.
Conventions function as an implied agreement between makers and
consumers to accept certain artificialities, but such artificialities work
in specific contexts. In musicals the narrative halts for the production
numbers wherein characters break into song and dance; often the char-
acters perform for the camera (rather than for an audience within the film)
and are accompanied by non-diegetic music that seems suddenly to mate-
rialise from nowhere. Like the direct address to the camera in comedy, this
convention of the musical is fundamentally anti-realist. For this reason it is
not as readily acceptable in the context of dramatic genre films, which typi-
cally invite spectators to suspend their disbelief and invest in the exciting
illusions of reality they construct. Thus the opening of West Side Story
(1961) seems momentarily jarring when RussTamblyn and his gang of Jets,
apparently in a teen film about juvenile delinquency, begin to pirouette
and dance on the concrete streets of New York City.
Conventions also include aspects of style associated with particular
genres. For example, melodrama is characterised by an excessively stylised
mise-en-scene, while film noir commonly employs low-key lighting and
narrative flashbacks. Horror films often rely on tight framing, preparing for
the inevitable hand that suddenly reaches into the frame for someone’s
shoulder. Even the graphic style of opening credits may be conventional,
as in the case of the ‘Wild West font’ often found at the beginnings of
westerns, evocative of the rough-hewn wood of pioneer homesteads, or
the scrawled and edgily kinetic credit style of serial-killer films like Seyen
(1995) that suggest a psychological disturbance haunting the killer.
Mainstream cinema also features numerous aural conventions on the
soundtrack involving dialogue, music and sound effects. Film scoring in
all genres often featuring Wagnerian leitmotifs associated with particular
characters or places is commonly used to enhance a desired emotional
effect in support of the story. This convention is parodied in Mel Brooks’
Blazing Saddles (1974) when the black sheriff (Cleavon Little) rides through
the desert accompanied by the incongruous tune ‘April in Paris’, and then
passes by Count Basie and his Orchestra inexplicably present, playing
one of their signature tunes in the wilderness. Different types of musical
accompaniment are conventional in particular genres. Sweeping strings are
common in romantic melodramas, while electronic music or the theremin is
used in science fiction for its futuristic connotations.
The familiarity of conventions allows for parody, which becomes
possible only when conventions are known to audiences. As discussed
in Chapter 2, much of the humour of Mel Brooks’ film parodies depends
upon viewers being familiar with specific genre films. Conventions can also
be used by filmmakers for disturbing purposes precisely because viewers
expect them. George A. Romero’s undermining of numerous conventions
of the classic horror film in Night of the Living Dead (1968), also discussed
later, is one of the main reasons the film had such a powerful effect on
audiences when first released.
iconography
The term ‘iconography’ derives from art historian Erwin Panofsky’s discus-
sion of Renaissance art, wherein he suggested that themes or concepts
were expressed by symbolically-charged objects and events. Genre critics
such as Lawrence Alloway adapted the idea of iconography – that familiar
symbols in works of art have cultural meaning beyond the context of the
individual work in which they appear – to the medium of cinema. Icons
are second-order symbols, in that their symbolic meaning is not neces-
sarily a connection established within the individual text, but is already
symbolic because of their use across a number of similar previous texts.
While Alloway’s discussion of violent American crime films focuses more
on story, theme and cinematic style than on objects within the mise-
en-scene, Ed Buscombe (2003) concentrates on the iconography of the
western in drawing a distinction between a film’s inner and outer forms. For
Buscombe, inner form refers to a film’s themes, while outer form refers to
the various objects that are to be found repeatedly in genre movies – in the
western, for example, horses, wagons, buildings, clothes and weapons.
In genre films, iconography refers to particular objects, archetypal char-
acters and even specific actors. In the western, the cowboy who dresses
all in black and wears two guns, holster tied to either thigh, is invariably a
villainous gunfighter. This is the iconographic wardrobe of a generic type,
bearing little relation to historical reality. Just as religious icons are always
already infused with symbolic meaning, so is the iconography of genre
films. In a horror film, when the hero wards off the vampire with a crucifix,
religious iconography works in support of film iconography: symbolically,
such scenes suggests that the traditional values embodied in Christianity
(and, by extension, Western culture generally) are stronger than and will
defeat whatever threatening values are assigned to the monster in any
given vampire film.
Iconography may also refer to the general mise-en-scene of a genre,
as in the case of low-key lighting and Gothic design in the horror film or
the visual excess of the melodrama. Gunbelts, Stetson hats and spurs are
icons of the western, just as chiaroscuro lighting is iconographic of film
noir. Like conventions, iconography provides genres with a visual short-
hand for conveying information and meaning succinctly. Pinstripe suits,
dark shirts and white ties define which side of the law characters are on in
the gangster film as typically as black hats and white hats differentiate hero
and villain in the western.
Of course, while the icons of genre films may have culturally deter-
mined meanings, the interpretation or value attached to them is hardly
fixed. Rather, the particulars of their representation in each genre film mark
the relation of outer form to inner form, and are indicators of the film’s atti-
tude and theme. Although a crucifix in a horror film is an icon of Christianity
and dominant ideology, the film itself may either critique or endorse that
ideology. In the western, the town always represents civil-isation, but every
film will have a different view of it. The town in, say, The Gunfighter (1950)
has children and domestic spaces, representing the familial stability that
Gregory Peck’s ageing gunman can only long for, while in McCabe and
Mrs. Miller (1971) the town springs up around a muddy, makeshift brothel,
suggesting that base desire is at the core of civilisation. Even more point-
edly, Sam Peckinpah put a gallows in the centre of town in Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid (1973), indicating the propensity towards violence at the heart
of civilisation.
Buscombe clearly shows how Peckinpah criticises modern society
through the careful manipulation of the iconography of the town in the
opening scene of Ride the High Country (aka Guns in the Afternoon, 1962)
As the film begins, a visibly ageing Joel McCrea (star of over a dozen earlier
westerns, including the 1946 version of The Virginian), rides into town
during a Fourth of July celebration. American civilisation has advanced on
the frontier, as signified by the brick buildings rather than the convent-
ional clapboard structures of the typical western movie town. A uniformed
policeman instead of the singular sheriff with a badge suggests institut-
ionalised law, while the lampposts and automobiles tell us that historically
the period of the Wild West is over. People are cheering and McCrea thinks
the cheers are for him, but in fact they are cheering for riders in a race
between horses and a camel. As Buscombe notes, ‘a horse in a western is
not just an animal, but a symbol of dignity, grace and power. These qualit-
ies are mocked by having it compete with a camel; and to add insult to
injury, the camel wins’ (2003: 23).
The deflating treatment of the horse as icon is emblematic of this film’s
general subversion of the genre’s typically positive view of civilisation. The
town may be commemorating the birth of the nation, but Peckinpah ques-
tions the gospel of progress that is so visibly evident there. The celebration
of the nation’s founding is depicted in the film as a carnival, a decadent
display complete with exotic dancing girls, hardly the expression of social
and spiritual bonding that such celebrations are in John Ford’s westerns.
McCrea is almost run over by a car – a ‘horseless carriage’ – as he begins
to cross the street, while the policeman, calling him an old-timer, shouts at
him that he is in the way. The western hero is an anachronism as the film
starts (later we see in a close-up that his shirt cuffs are frayed). Civilisation
in Ride the High Country boasts technological progress, but Peckinpah
ironically depicts it as morally retrograde. He shows the carnival from a
high angle, as if judging from above, looking down in disapproval from a
higher moral ground – the high country of the title.
setting
The physical space and time – where and when a film’s story takes place
– is more a defining quality of some genres than others. Musicals, for
instance, can take place anywhere, from the actual streets and docks of
New York City in West Side Story and On the Town (1949) to the super-
natural village in Brigadoon (1954). Romantic comedies and dramas, like
some science fiction, may span different eras, as in Somewhere in Time
(1980) and Kate and Leopold (2001). In the gangster film the city weighs
down on the protagonist – ‘not the real city’, as Warshow observes, ‘but
that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more
important, which is the modern world’ (1971a: 131). Warshow claims that
gangsters dwell exclusively in the city, yet while most gangster films do
take place in urban settings, important gangster movies like The Petrified
Forest (1936), High Sierra (1941) and Key Largo (1948) do not.
When science fiction movies located in the future use contemporary
architecture for settings rather than construct sets in the studio or with
computer imaging, they suggest a more disturbing continuity between the
present and the future, as in THX1138 (1971) which uses the San Francisco
subway system, and the actual mall setting of Logan’s Run (1976). Similarly,
horror movies often use isolated and rural settings, and old dark houses
with mysterious basements for psychological effect; but films such as
Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Dark Water (2005) work by violating conven-
tion and setting stories in contemporary and familiar locales rather than in
exoticised foreign spaces like Transylvania or Haiti.
By contrast, the western by definition is temporally restricted to the
period of the Wild West (approximately 1865-1890) and geographically
to the American frontier (broadly, between the Mississippi River and the
west coast). Movies that change this setting to the present, such as Lonely
are the Brave (1962) and Hud (1963), or ‘easterns’ like Drums Along the
Mohawk (1939) and The Last of the Mohicans (1936,1992), are considered
exceptions to the norm, westerns for some viewers but not for others.
Yet movies such as Coogan’s Bluff (1968) and Crocodile Dundee II (1988)
that import elements of the western into the contemporary urban east are
generally not thought of as westerns.
The relative fixity of the western setting allows the landscape in the
genre to assume thematic weight. It may function as an objective correlative
to the spiritual state of individual characters, as in Anthony Mann’s west-
erns, or of society more generally, as in Ford’s repeated use of Monument
Valley. Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970) begins with a
montage cutting between a cowboy (Clint Eastwood) riding through the
wilderness and various animals in the environment: an owl, a rattlesnake,
a cougar and a tarantula, the last of which is squashed by Eastwood’s
horse as he rides by. The animals are predatory which suggests the film’s
harsh view of life on the frontier, borne out in the plot which begins with
three men preying sexually upon a woman and involves a French colonial
army oppressing the Mexican people.
Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) contains a famous scene in which
Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) join a
dedication celebration for the partially-built church with the people of
Tombstone. The scene deftly uses generic iconography to depict what John
Cawelti calls ‘the epic moment’ of American history – that pivotal moment
when civilisation comes to the wilderness (1985: 39). As Douglas Pye notes,
Earp and Clementine walk down the main street of Tombstone, their linked
arms roughly centred in the frame, as if down the aisle at a wedding, church
bells solemnly tolling. Behind Earp lies the wilderness of Monument Valley,
while behind Clementine are the town’s buildings, representing commu-
nity, commerce, civilisation (2003: 210-13). Their coupling here suggests
the integration of the individualist western hero into the community.
Christianity and nationalism provide the literal foundation of Ford’s mythic
American society, as the church floor is flanked by twin American flags on
one side and the church steeple on the other. With these values, the film
suggests, the church can be completed and the nation soundly built.
stories and themes
Most genre films, as instances of classic narrative cinema, are structured
according to the principles outlined by David Bordwell in his discussion of
standard Hollywood practice (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson 1985). They
feature a common dramatic construction, focusing on an individual hero
who must overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. A problem is introduced
that creates a disturbance or ‘disequilibrium’ in the world of the story,
and that must be resolved by the story’s end. According to Bordwell, this
primary dramatic arc of the classic narrative film, with its rise and fall
action, is entwined with a secondary one that focuses on a heterosexual
romance. Such stories also contain narrative closure, in which all plot
strands are brought to resolution. For example, in many science fiction
movies of the 1950s, such as Gog (1954) or The Creature from the Bla
Lagoon (1954), the hero combines masculine prowess with technology to
defeat the monster, after which he wins the scientist’s lovely assistant or
daughter, along with the paternal blessing of the elderly scientist.
Genre movies take such social debates and tensions and cast them
into formulaic narratives, condensing them into dramatic conflicts between
individual characters and society or heroes and villains. Thomas Schatz
observes that ‘all film genres treat some form of threat – violent or other-
wise – to the social order’ (1981: 26). The gangster, the monster, the
heroine of screwball comedy all threaten normative society in different
ways. Some genre theorists argue that the overriding theme of genre films
is some version of the individual in conflict with society, and that this
tension represents the ongoing negotiation we all make between desire
and restraint (what Freud called ‘civilisation and its discontents’). This
struggle is ongoing, hence the reason for both the popularity and the repet-
itiveness of genre films. Schatz distinguishes between what he calls genres
of ‘determinate’ and ‘indeterminate’ space: the former involve a physical
conflict in a convent-ionalised arena of conflict (main street at high noon
in the western, the city’s mean streets in the gangster film) and address
social integration, with the physical threat to society forcefully eradicated;
while the latter (the musical, melodrama, romantic comedy) are concerned
more with social order, coding the conflict within the tribulations of a
heterosexual relationship.
The extent to which a genre film achieves narrative closure is an impor-
tant factor in reading its political implications. Closure – usually in the form
of an upbeat or happy ending – is, like all conventions, artificial, since life,
unlike such stories, continues. For this reason a lack of closure, suggesting
that the lives of the characters carry on after the film ends, is associated
more with realist films like La Grande Illusion (1937) and Ladri di biciclet
(Bicycle Thieves, 1947) than with genre movies. Because films with closure
leave the viewer with no unanswered questions about the fate of the
major characters or the consequences of their actions, they are viewed
as providing tidy but unrealistic solutions to real problems. Yet while
closure may be provided by a film, it can be ironic, thus undercutting its
own pretense at resolution. This may be the case in Psycho (i960), where
the psychiatrist’s concluding explanation of Norman Bates’ mental illness
reduces him to a mere ‘case’ but cannot possibly contain the universal dark
impulses the film has succeeded in encouraging in the audience (Wood
1989:149-50).
In the wake of European art cinema definitive closure has become less
common in Hollywood film today than in the past, but the reasons for this
are as much historical as aesthetic. In the horror films of the studio era
monsters were almost always defeated in the end, providing reassuring
and confident messages to the audience, just as in the westerns of the
period the cavalry came to the rescue when necessary. True, the occasional
movie like The Blob (1958) leaves its ending tantalisingly ambiguous,
since the gelatinous creature, seemingly invincible, is frozen and dropped
in the Arctic; but this ending seemed motivated more by the possibility
of a sequel than a social critique. By the late 1960s, however, with the
mounting horrors of the Vietnam War and domestic violence escalating,
many horror films tended to be open-ended, as in Night of the Living Dead,
Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive (1974). Popular cinema at the time avoided
addressing Vietnam directly and instead expressed the anxiety of an uncer-
tain victory and increasing divisiveness on the home front coded within the
context of genres.
characters, actors and stars
Discussing characters in literature, novelist E. M. Forster distinguished two
kinds of fictional characters: flat and round. Flat characters, which also may
be ‘types’ or ‘caricatures’, are built around one idea or quality; it is only as
other attributes (that is, ‘depth’) are added that characters begin ‘to curve
toward the round’ (1927: 67). In genre movies characters are more often
recognisable types rather than psychologically complex characters, like
black hats and white hats in the western, although they can be rounded
as well. The femme fatale is a conventional character in film noir, like the
comic sidekick, schoolmarm and gunfighter in the western. Ethnic char-
acters are often flat stereotypes in genre movies: the Italian mobster, the
black drug dealer, the Arab terrorist, the cross-section of soldiers in the
war film’s platoon. While flat characters are usually considered a failure in
works that aspire to originality, in genre works they are not necessarily a
flaw because of their shorthand efficiency.
In genre movies, character types often provide similar kinds of actions
and purposes within the story. Structuralist critic Vladimir Propp refers to
these repeating appearances in generic narratives as ‘functions’, which
he defines as the acts of characters in relation to their ‘significance for
the course of the action* (1968: 21). So, for example, both Yoda in the
Star Wars films and Kesuke Miyagi (Pat Morita) in The Karate Kid (1984)
are ‘donors’ who provide the hero with both a test and help in his quest.
Another way of thinking about characters in the context of genre is offered
by Northrop Frye’s concept of modes. As Frye identifies them, there are five
modes of fictional narration: from myth (the hero is superior to other men
and his environment, a super-hero or god), romance (the hero is superior
in degree, marvellous but mortal, like Hawkeye or Batman), high mimetic
(the hero is superior in degree to other men but not to his environment, as
with all tragic heroes), low mimetic (the hero is superior neither to other
men nor to the natural world, but is one of us) and ironic (the protagonist
is an anti-hero, inferior to ourselves in terms of power or intelligence). In
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a romantic
hero because he succeeds in his quest against all odds (although at
times he verges on mythic status, as when he manages to hang onto a
submerged German submarine crossing the Atlantic Ocean); by contrast,
the unfortunate protagonist of Detour (1945) is an ironic anti-hero who,
trapped by circumstances beyond his control, finds himself a doomed
murderer.
Of course, characters are embodied by actors, all of whom have dis-
tinct physical characteristics. The hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe is
different as played by Dick Powell {Murder, My Sweet, i944)» Humphrey
Bogart {The Big Sleep, 1946) or Elliott Gould {The Long Goodbye, 1973).
Some actors (for example, Paul Muni and Johnny Depp) are known for
chameleon-like performances, but many, whether they are featured stars or
supporting actors, often play variations of a type. For this reason, they are
often cast in similar films within the same genre and become associated
with it. Fred Astaire is always thought of in relation to the musical, Cary
Grant with screwball comedy and, of course, John Wayne with the western,
even though all these actors also appeared in other kinds of films. Clint
Eastwood’s strong association with the western lends added depth to
such non-western roles as the tough detective Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry
(1971) and its sequels.
Character actors contribute to the look of particular genres, popu-
lating the worlds of genre movies and becoming part of their iconography.
Often they are known to viewers as vaguely familiar faces rather than by
name. Richard Jaeckel, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Paul Fix and Slim Pickens all
appeared in countless westerns, so when they are in the same cast and
many of them die in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the film may be read as
being as much about the death of the genre as it is a story about particular
characters. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, following from the thea-
trical tradition of commedia dell’arte where actors perform types rather
than individual characters, developed an approach to casting which he
called typage. Eisenstein cast actors according to physical qualities that
provided the audience with visual cues about them: so, for example, in
his films capitalists are always overweight fat cats, a sign of their material
acquisitiveness and greed. The iconographic casting in mainstream genre
movies is not unlike typage, for actors are often cast in variations of roles
because of their physical attributes. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body deter-
mined that he would star in action films; the incongruity of the muscular
actor appearing in a different generic context provides the comic premises
fox Kindergarten Cop (1990) and junior (1994).
Stars embody in concrete, physical form society’s values at particular
historical moments. Raymond Durgnat writes that ‘the stars are a reflection
in which the public studies and adjusts its own image of itself… The social
history of a nation can be written in terms of its film stars’ (1967:137-8).
Of course, the same might be said about the genre movies in which stars
appear. Indeed, stars and genres reinforce each other.
Actors sometimes offer definitive performances that forever asso-
ciate them with a particular role, as we might associate Anthony Perkins
with Norman Bates, no matter in which films he subsequently appeared.
Sometimes these roles assume iconographic proportion, as in the case
of Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula. Actors who succeed at playing a
certain generic type are often trapped by such roles, fated to be typecast
as similar characters. Dick Powell began as a romantic (‘juvenile’) lead in
several Warner Bros, musicals in the early 1930s, but managed to reshape
his image entirely in the following decade, playing a tough guy in such film
noirs as Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (1945) and Pitfall (1948).
Some actors become icons because of their performances in genre
films, their faces and bodies instantly recognisable in the culture. John
Wayne had such a strong iconographic presence as the rugged American
individualist and western hero that the death of his character, Will
Anderson, at the hands of villainous Bruce Dern in The Cowboys (1972) is
as shockingly unexpected as Marion Crane’s death in Psycho. Also, since
Anderson is killed in full view of the group of adolescent boys in his charge
without sacrificing his dignity, his death becomes a statement about the
death of the classic western hero. This theme is even more explicit in
Wayne’s last film, The Shootist (1976), in which he plays a gunfighter who
is dying of cancer, as was Wayne himself at the time.
Because actors may become typecast, they can be cast in genre movies
against type, as in the case of William Hoiden playing the leader of The Wild
Bunch (1969) or Tom Cruise as a hit man in Collateral (2004). In the famous
opening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a Mexican
family enjoying a pleasant picnic meal in front of their hacienda is suddenly
and brutally gunned down by unseen assailants. In a long take, the killers
ride in from the distance and eventually we are able to discern that the
leader is a grim-faced, blue-eyed Henry Fonda – the same softly-spoken
man who was Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Tom Joad
in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The moment has a greater emotional impact
than it would if the actor had been a familiar Hollywood heavy.
viewers and audiences
Genres are dependent upon audiences for both their existence and
meaning. Well before the first scholarly writing on film genre, the idea
of genre circulated in public thinking. Almost from the beginning movies
have been promoted in the media primarily through their generic affilia-
tions. They signal to prospective viewers the type of story as well as the
kind of pleasure they are likely to offer and assist them in choosing which
movies to see. For example, some viewers dislike horror films because
they do not enjoy being frightened or because they disapprove of violence.
Some people prefer different genres at different times, wanting to watch a
comedy, say, if they have had a bad day. Fans of particular genres comprise
what Rick Altman calls ‘constellated communities’ of readers (1999:161 ff.).
Fans of horror films, for example, form a distinct subculture, with their own
fanzines, memorabilia, websites and discussion lists.
Genre films work by engaging viewers through an implicit contract.
They encourage certain expectations on the part of spectators, which are in
turn based on viewer familiarity with the conventions. As Robert Warshow
observes, the familiarity of viewers with generic convention creates ‘its
own field of reference’ (1971a: 130). Spectators appreciate the climactic
fight in Terror in a Texas Town (1958) in which the hero, a former whaler,
meets the villainous gunfighter at high noon in the centre of town with
his harpoon instead of a pistol, only because of the westerns they have
seen. Familiarity with a generic field of reference allows spectators to enjoy
variations, however slight, in a given film. Warshow also writes that for
viewers of genre films ‘originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that
it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it’
(ibid.), although this claim does not adequately explain the popularity of
revisionist or ‘anti-genre’ films. The act of reading genre films implies active
readers who bring their generic knowledge to bear in watching movies. A
postmodern horror pastiche like Scream (1996) depends upon its viewers
being generically literate.
The opening of Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
offers an instructive example of how spectator knowledge can be mobilised
by a genre film to generate complex meaning. Set in Mexico, the film begins
with an idyllic scene of a young woman sitting peacefully by a tranquil pond
with swans. But the scene is abruptly interrupted as the girl is informed
that her father wants to see her, and she is escorted to him. Surrounded
by armed men and watching women, the girl’s stern, authoritarian father
demands to know who has made her pregnant. When she refuses to
answer he orders one of his men to break her hand, after which she reveals
the man’s identity to be Alfredo Garcia. The father then makes the demand
for revenge that serves as the film’s title. Until this point Peckinpah has
carefully inserted numerous icons of the western (boots, horses, guns,
spurs) and included nothing that is clearly contemporary. We are prompted
to read the film as a western – a reading also encouraged by knowledge
of Peckinpah’s previous films, almost all of which were westerns. Then,
immediately upon the father’s enraged demand, Peckinpah cuts to shots
of cars and motorcycles roaring out of the ranch and a jet screaming on a
runway, after which it is clear that the story has a contemporary setting.
Because of its western elements, the film has led us to think about how
cruelly patriarchal the world was in the past; then we are caught up short
with the sudden, grating intrusiveness of technology, revealing that the
story is in fact a contemporary one and that, according to the film, such
abuse is equally true today.
Problems of Definition
Fundamental to defining any genre is the question of corpus, of what films
in fact constitute its history. Janet Staiger suggests that there are four ways
to approach genre definition, each with its own limitations. The idealist
method, which judges films against a predetermined standard, is proscript-
ive in that certain films are privileged over others to the extent that they
remain close to the chosen model; the empiricist method involves circular
logic in that the films selected already have been chosen as representing
the genre; the a priori method, in which common generic elements are
selected in advance; and the social convention method, which is problem-
atic in how cultural consensus is determined (2003:186-7).
The empiricist method is perhaps the most common. Andrew Tudor
explains a major problem of genre definition, which he terms ‘the empiri-
cist dilemma*:
To take a genre such as a ‘western’, analyse it, and list its principle
characteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate
the body of films that are westerns. But they can only be isolated
on the basis of the ‘principle characteristics’ which can only be
discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated.
(1973:135)
Tudor’s solution to this problem of definition is to rely on what he calls
a ‘common cultural consensus’, that is, to analyse works that almost
everyone would agree belong to a particular genre, and generalise out from
there. This method is acceptable, he concludes, because ‘genre is what we
collectively believe it to be’ (1973:139). Tudor’s solution offers a pragmati-
cally useful approach that has been taken up by many genre critics.
Nevertheless, a problem with the various genres that have been estab-
lished by common cultural consensus, as several scholars have noted, is
that different genres are designated according to different criteria. Such
genres as the crime film, science fiction and the western are defined by
setting and narrative content. However, horror, pornography and comedy
are defined or conceived around the intended emotional effect of the film
upon the viewer. Linda Williams (2003) has referred to horror, melodrama
and porn as ‘body genres’ because of the strong physical response – fear,
tears and sexual arousal, respectively – elicited by each. The extent to
which films of these genres produce the intended response in viewers is
commonly used as a determining factor in judging how good they are.
But however defined, generic categories must be useful. Categories
such as narrative, documentary and abstract or experimental, while they
do cover the range of possible types of filmmaking, are too broad to be very
useful for genre criticism. Both Stuart Kaminsky (1974: 9) and Tom Leitch
(2002: 1-18) acknowledge the difficulty of defining the genre of crime
films, since it includes gangster films, detective and mystery films, action
films, police films and heist movies. Kaminsky, however, goes on to discuss
comedy as a genre, even though the category might be said to include such
different forms as the screwball comedy, romantic comedy, slapstick, black
comedy and parody.
jim Collins has argued that since the 1980s Hollywood movies have
been characterised by an ‘ironic hybridisation* that seeks to combine
elements from previously pure or discrete genres. As examples, Collins
cites Back to the Future III (1990), a western and science fiction film, as
well as Blade Runner (1982), Blue Velvet (1986) and Who Framed Roger
Rabbit (1988) (1993: 245). However, Janet Staiger has convincingly coun-
tered the notion of genre purity, arguing that ‘Hollywood films have never
been “pure” – that is, easily arranged into categories. All that has been
pure has been sincere attempts to find order among variety’ (2003: 185).
She cites Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), a film emblematic
of Hollywood studio practice in that Universal Studios was recycling the
conventions of its earlier genre films to fit with its new stars (2003: 192).
Staiger, as in her earlier work with Bordwell and Thompson (1985:16-17),
concludes that nearly all Hollywood films were hybrids insofar as they
tended to combine one type of generic plot – a romance – with others, a
point with which Steve Neale heartily concurs (2003:172).
Clearly genre movies have always been hybrid, combinative in practice.
Stagecoach (1939), one of the most famous and important westerns ever
made, was described as a ‘Grand Hotel on wheels* on its release, and it
also contains elements of the road movie and disaster film as well. Vivian
Sobchack notes that the monster movie sits uneasily between the horror
film and science fiction (1980: 47). Movies such as The Thing (1951), It!
The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and the film on which it was in part
based, Allen (1979), all combine elements of science fiction and horror,
visually turning spaceships and laboratories into the equivalent of haunted
houses.
Case Study: The Strange Case of Film Nolr
Film noir (literally, ‘black film*) is a generic category developed initially
by critics rather than the industry. It was French critics who first used the
term to describe a number of dark and stylised Hollywood movies that
began to appear after World War Two and into the 1950s. These movies
featured corrupt characters in the ruthless, fatalistic world. Many film noirs
were B movies, which ironically added to rather than detracted from their
expressiveness, as their frequent lack of high production values tended to
emphasise the seemliness of their fictional worlds. Their downbeat vision
and expressionist stylisation constituted a remarkable divergence from the
traditional optimism and plentitude of Hollywood.
The visual conventions of film noir include such expressionist elements
of mlse-en-scene as chiaroscuro lighting, contrasts of dark and light in
the image, imbalanced compositions that suggest powerlessness and
geometric compositions that imply entrapment and doom. Most noirs are
set in the city, its impersonal and alienating qualities reflecting the deca-
dent and cynical world they depict. In noirs such as The Naked City (1948),
the city is a palpable presence, taking on a menacing quality that threatens
to overwhelm the individuals who dwell in it. The opening shot of Force
of Evil (1948) shows a church dwarfed and crowded by skyscrapers – an
image that, in sharp contrast to the church scene in My Darling Clementine,
bespeaks the secular motivations of greed and desire that have squeezed
out spiritual or religious values in the world of noir. Film noir’s iconography
includes puddles, rainwater, mirrors, windows and blinking neon lights,
all reflecting the darkness of the souls within the asphalt jungle. As Paul
Schrader notes, the location photography of many noirs would seem anti-
thetical to the stylisation of noir, but’the best noirtechnicians simply made
all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting
onto realistic settings’ (2003: 233).
Plots in film noir frequently involve some variation of a man lured
into a criminal act, often murder, by an attractive but dangerous woman,
ultimately leading to mutual self-destruction (Damico 1978: 54). Narrative
construction is frequently complex, as in The Big Sleep, which features
multiple storylines and murders. The interweaving of characters and their
motives is so layered that the film’s director, Howard Hawks, confessed
he was unable to figure out the perpetrator of one of them. Often told in
voice-over with flashbacks, noir narratives suggest a fatalistic, entrapping
world in which action has already been determined, as in Out of the Past
(1947). Protagonists are often caught in a web of circumstances beyond
their control, as exemplified by the unfortunate drifter who inadvertently
commits murder in Detour. In Sunset Boulevard (1950) the protagonist
narrator is already dead when the story begins, telling his story from
beyond the grave, and the poor salesman in D.O.ACL950), after being
fatally poisoned with a radioactive isotope, seeks to capture his own killer
before expiring in the final scene.
Noir protagonists are almost exclusively male, and many critics have
suggested that they reflected the disturbances to traditional notions of
masculinity and gender roles caused by the war and post-war readjust-
ment. The period was particularly fraught in this regard, as popular culture
sought to reposition the proper place of women in the domestic sphere,
which they had been encouraged to abandon, to join the home front
work force; this new empowerment for women is expressed in the stark
dichotomy of noir’s representation of women as either domestic and bland
or as sexualised femmes fatales. Frank Krutnik (1991), for example, argues
that film noir expresses a crisis in masculinity that reveals male anxiety
about loss of power in a post-war society, while feminist critics see some
women in film noir as smart, independent, active characters who inevitably
are punished within the films’ narratives for their independence.
Noir is commonly explained as the result of several converging influ-
ences, most significant being the influx to Hollywood preceding and during
the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930s of many directors, actors, cinema-
tographers and others involved in German expressionist cinema. Also, there
was a renewed interest in realism during and after World War Two, inspired
by war reportage and Italian neo-realism. This influence is apparent in the
location photography in such noirs as House on 92nd Street (1945), Kiss
of Death (1947) and The Naked City. The American or ‘hard-boiled’ style o
detective fiction by such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler
and James M. Cain provided many of the stories adapted by noir. It has
been said as well that film noir also depicted a sense of post-war disil-
lusionment that was in part a delayed reaction to the enforced optimism
of popular culture during the Depression and the war years, as seen in the
noir films about returning veterans discovering unfaithful wives or suffering
from war trauma, such as Cornered, The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Ride the
Pink Horse (1947) (Schrader 2003).
David Bordwell argues that noir was not a genre because the term did
not exist in popular discourse: ‘Producers and consumers both recognise
a genre as a distinct entity; nobody set out to make or see a film noir in
the sense that people deliberately chose to make a western, a comedy or
a musical’ (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson 1985: 74). Not alone, Bordwell
sees noir as a style, not a genre. Like the broad category of comedy, the
noir style seeps into any genre, including westerns (Pursued, 1947; Rancho
Notorious, 1952) and even comedy – most famously, when George Bailey
Games Stewart) imagines what the town of Bedford Falls would be like if
he had never been born in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The
expressionist conventions of the noir style can be found in several other
genres, including caper films, detective films, gangster films and thrillers.
Another argument against defining film noir as a genre is that it had a
specific time span, conventionally seen as extending from John Huston’s
The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958. Certainl
by the late 1950s, the evolving production values of Hollywood cinema
undermined the noir style and the look of Hollywood movies changed.
Techniques such as widescreen and colour, introduced to combat a dwind-
ling audience because of the growing popularity of television, provided a
look that was antithetical to that of noir: the vivid intensity of colour proc-
esses such as Technicolor countered noir’s black-and-white chiaroscuro
lighting, while widescreen images opened up its entrapping mlse-en-
scene. Further, a contributing industrial factor was that B films were no
longer guaranteed distribution as the bottom half of a double feature, but
were now threatened by Hollywood’s move toward the single-feature epic
or blockbuster.
But in 1974 the commercial and critical success of Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown – a paranoid thriller about a utilities conspiracy set in 1930s Los
Angeles, the city and time associated with the classic ‘hard-boiled’ detec-
tive novel – brought about a renewed interest in film noir and spurred the
production of a cycle of neo-noirs beginning with the British versions of
Farewell, My Lovely (1975, a remake of Murder, My Sweet) and The Big Sle
(1978, original 1946), both starring noir icon Robert Mitchum as Chandler’s
private detective Philip Marlowe, and Body Heat (1981), with a steamy but
doomed romance indebted to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Later, the remakes of D.O.A. (1988) and The Big Clock (1948, remade as
No Way Out, 1987), as well as the science fiction noirs (techno-noir) Blade
Runner and Dark City (1998), in which a noirish world is constructed on
an asteroid for unaware humans as an alien experiment, show that noir
remains a vibrant generic tradition. Some directors such as Joel and Ethan
Coen (Blood Simple, 1984; Fargo, 1996; The Man Who Wasn’t There, 200
and John Dahl {Red Rock West, 1992; The Last Seduction A1994) are assoc
ated with neo-noir. Furthermore, the 1990s cycle of erotic thrillers, begin-
ning with the box office success of Fatal Attraction (1987), employs elements
of noir in the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice (remade in 1981
The return of film noir after more than a decade suggests that it was not
temporally bound, and some critics have made a convincing case for noir
as a genre with distinct narrative and visual conventions.
(Short Cuts)
