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Chapter 1: What Is a Movie?

Essay: Film Genres

Films belong to the same genre not because they share a common story but because they share certain formal characteristics and storytelling conventions. As your textbook author points out, the most critically admired films strike a balance between their genre’s pre-established conventions and the artist’s unique contributions. Film scholars are not the only ones who find it useful to categorize films by genre. Movie reviewers often critique a movie based on how it stacks up against others in its genre. Some libraries and video stores organize movies by genre rather than by such broader classifications as “Drama” and “Family.” Before you look at your newspaper’s movie listings, you may already have a general idea of what genre of movie you are most interested in seeing. Scanning the list of available options, you probably expect a movie’s title to make it easy for you to recognize what genre it belongs to.

Of the eleven films screening Memorial Day weekend 2006 at my local multiplex, seven qualify as genre films. Silent Hill and See No Evil are horror films, the popular film genre of the moment. Mission: Impossible III is an action film. The DaVinci Code is a thriller. X-Men: The Last Stand qualifies not only as science fiction, but also as a comic book film, an emerging genre that, thanks to Sin City, Blade, Spider-Man, and others, has grown darker and more effects-laden since the modern genre’s birth in 1978’s Superman.

Sin City Effects Picture

There’s no official name for the emerging genre that places anamorphized celebrity-voiced animals in straightforward goal-driven plots that speak to children’s fears of - among other things - parental abandonment. But this kind of movie has been around since Dumbo (1941) and lives on this weekend in the form of Over the Hedge and Ice Age 2, The Meltdown.

Casper the Ghost

Unlike a film movement (such as the French New Wave or Dogme), in which a group of like-minded filmmakers consciously conspire to create a particular approach to film style and story, film genres tend to spring up organically, inspired by shifts in culture, politics, or society. Many classic genres, including westerns, horror, and science fiction, emerged in literature and evolved into cinematic form during the twentieth century. Others, such as the musical, originated on the Broadway and Vaudeville stages before hitting the screen. Some, like the gangster film, were born and bred in the cinema.

Elements that unite films of any given genre include theme, setting, presentation, character types, plot types, and even stars.

Theme

The Great Train Robbery

Not every genre is united by a single, clear-cut thematic idea, but the western comes close. Nearly all westerns share a central conflict between civilization and wilderness, with the civilization taking t

he form of settlers, towns, and lawmen, and free-range cattlemen, Indians, outlaws, and the wide-open spaces themselves filling the wilderness role. Many classic western characters exist on both sides of this thematic conflict. For example, the Wyatt Earp character played by Henry Fonda in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is a former gunfighter turned lawman turned cowboy turned lawman. He befriends an outlaw, but falls in love with a schoolteacher from the east. Early westerns tend to sympathize with the forces of civilization and order, but many of the westerns from the 1960s and 70s valorize the freedom-loving outlaw, cowboy, or Native American hero.

2001 Space Odyssey Stargate

Science fiction films are also often built around a clear conflict between two opposing thematic forces - those of humanity and technology. That threatening technology can take the form of advanced alien invaders such as those in War of the Worlds, or computers, robots, or creatures engineered by the humans themselves in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Robot, or Blade Runner.

Setting

Obviously, westerns are typically set in the American west, but setting goes beyond geography. Most classic westerns take place in the 1880s and 90s, an era of western settlement when a booming population of Civil War veterans and other eastern refugees went west in pursuit of land settlement, gold rushes, and the booming cattle trade. The physical location of Monument Valley became the landscape most associated with the genre, not because of any actual history that occurred there, but because the area was the favorite location of the director John Ford.

Since science fiction films are speculative and therefore look forward rather than backward, they are usually set in the future; sometimes in space, sometimes in futuristic earth cities, sometimes in a post-apocalyptic desolation, but almost always in an era and place greatly effected by technology.

Star Wars 2

While gangster films are almost always urban in setting, horror films seek the sort of isolated locations - farms, abandoned summer camps, small rural villages - that place the genre’s besieged protagonists far from potential aid.

Presentation

Many genres feature certain elements of cinematic language that communicate tone and atmosphere. For example, horror films take advantage of low-key lighting’s deep shadows

Future World

to conceal information and convey an eerie mood. Ironically, science fiction films use the latest high-tech special effects to tell stories that warn against the dehumanizing dangers of advanced technology. Westerns employ the extreme long shot to dwarf their “civilized” characters against the overwhelming expanse of wilderness around them.

Character Types

While most screenwriters strive to create individuated characters, genre films are often populated by specific character “types.” Western protagonists personify the tension between order and chaos in the form of free-spirited but civilized cowboy, or gunslinger turned lawman. Female characters also personify this tension, but only on one side or the other - as schoolmarm or prostitute, only rarely as a combination of both. Other western character types include the cunning gambler, the greenhorn, the sidekick, and the settler. John Ford packed nearly every western character type into a single wagon in his classic western Stagecoach.

The horror and science fiction film antagonist is almost always some form of “the other” - a being utterly different than the movie’s protagonist in form, attitude, and action.

Godzilla

Many movie monsters are essentially large, malevolent bugs - the more foreign the villain’s appearance and outlook, the better. When the other is actually a human, he almost always wears a mask designed to accentuate his otherness. In these films, the only thing scarier than being killed or consumed by the other is actually becoming the other, which is why horror and science fiction protagonists are often threatened with transformation into a vampire, werewolf, zombie, or other creature.

Plot Types

The way a movie’s story is structured—its plot—also helps viewers determine what genre it belongs to. For example, gangster films from 1932’s Scarface to 1990’s Goodfellas tend to share a plot structure based on one of three well-worn clichés: rags to riches; crime does not pay; absolute power corrupts absolutely. In most gangster movies, an underprivileged and disrespected immigrant joins organized crime, works his way to the top with a combination of savvy, innovation, and ruthlessness, becomes corrupted by his newfound power and the fruits of his labors, and as a result is betrayed, killed, or captured. The Godfather trilogy, perhaps the most famous gangster genre series, is notable for managing to include the humble origins, rise to power, and even the corruption plot elements without ever destroying (physically at least), protagonist Michael Corleone.

Stars

In the 1930s and ‘40s actors worked under restrictive long-term studio contracts.
With the studios choosing their roles, actors were more likely to be “type cast” and identified with a particular genre that suited their studio-imposed persona. Thus John Wayne is forever identified with the western; Edward G. Robinson with gangster films, and Boris Karloff with horror. These days, most actors avoid limiting themselves to a single genre, but several contemporary actors have become stars by associating themselves almost

exclusively with a particular genre. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and others have benefited from action films’ privileging of physical presence and macho persona over acting ability. That’s not to say that no action stars can act. In fact, an actor who has become identified with one genre will often receive extra attention and accolades for performing outside of it. For example, Bill Murray became a star while acting in screwball comedies, but his subtle performances in the dramas Lost in Translation (2003) and Broken Flowers (2005) made him an actor worthy of movie critics’ praise.

Die Hard 2

So, if genre films keep repeating the same stories, with the same characters, in the same settings, and even with the same actors, why do audiences continue to see them? Because, contrary to popular perceptions, movie viewers value predictability over novelty. Elements of certain genres appeal to us, so we seek to repeat an entertaining or engaging cinema experience by viewing a film that promises the same sure-fire ingredients. There is a certain pleasure that comes from seeing how different filmmakers and performers have rearranged familiar elements. And when audiences have a series of set expectations, filmmakers have the freedom to either fulfill those expectations or to surprise and challenge their viewers with new twists on the familiar formula. Virtually every pizza features a flour-based crust topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, but it’s the potential variety within that familiar foundation that has made the pizza pie America’s favorite food.

And just as a pizza chef would soon tire of making the same plain cheese pizza, filmmakers are endlessly innovating genre elements to create mixed genres, sub-genres, and even anti-genres. Horror films have mutated into slasher movies, zombie movies, haunted house movies, demonic possession movies, gore movies, and monster movies. There are horror-westerns (Ravenous), science fiction-action-monster movies (Aliens), and even horror-comedies (Evil Dead 2, Shawn of the Dead). During the 1960s, when artists and audiences began to question the traditional American values of conquest and sublimation espoused by so many westerns, filmmakers like Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and even John Ford (Cheyenne Autumn) made Westerns that reversed the antagonist/protagonist formula and questioned the dominance of civil “order” over wilderness. Similarly, the mixed-genre science fiction-horror-comic book-action X-Men series places “the other” in the role of the protagonist. But the monster-as-hero is nothing new. The monster, not the mad scientist referred to in the title, is the true protagonist of both Frankenstein and its superior sequel Bride of Frankenstein.

A genre has truly arrived as a significant cultural touchstone when people start making fun it. Filmmaker Mel Brooks made a career of lampooning familiar genre conventions in parodies such as Young Frankenstein (horror), Blazing Saddles (western), and High Anxiety (Alfred Hitchcock-style psychological thriller). Every eighteen months or so, a new Scary

Mighty Joe Young

Movie serves up a satiric stew of characters and situations from the latest crop of popular horror films. These films wouldn’t be funny if viewers didn’t understand the familiar conventions they mock.