106 Industry and the marriages. When the husbands are the stars, the hordes are built upon a rock that endures." . H J1' 89 The process is described in W. Robert La Vine, In a Glamorous Fashion: The Fabulous Years of Hollywood Costume Design (New York Scribneťs, 1930), p. 27. 90 Haver, p. 191. ff' 3 Genre These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages if is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (j) those that tremble as if they were mad, (|) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (I) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. Jorge Luis Borges' I know Billy, and he ain't exactly predictable... Pat Garrett (James CobumJ in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid {1973} Hollywood is a ^enejriccigenHr whichis nnf quite the sqmp assaying that_ ^iiLis a dnesm-ůL^sxsXSš.^ Audiences, producers, and critics all discuss movies m generic tterms, but what they each mean by those terms may be quite dirrerent Critics place movies into generic categories as a way of dividing up the map of Hollywood cinema into smaller, more manageable, and relatively discrete areas. Their analyses often suggest a cartographer's concern with defining the exact location of the boundary between one genre and another. Audiences and producers use generic terms much more flexibly: for example, you might describe the movie you saw last night as a comedy, a thriller, or a science fiction movie. The local video store similarly labels its offerings by type: action, horror, musical movies. Such everyday distinctions are descriptive and, above all, functional. If you avoid horror movies, it is useful to know that The Silence of the Lambs (1991) falls into that category when choosing a video. This use of genre as a way of differentiating among movies assumes that there is a consensus about what constitutes a Western or a musical. As Andrew Tudor puts it, genre "is what we collectively believe it to be/'2 We know a thriller when we see one. Indeed, we know a thriller before we see one, and to some degree we also recognize that, beyond describing the obvious content of a movie, these generic categories have a broader cultural resonance. Tudor suggests that they are embedded features of our social lives, providing narrative structures and emotional landscapes that we can use to construct ourselves socially. The horror movie, for instance, allows us to experiment . 108 Genre _____________________________________________ _-with the experience öf fear, and gives us a vocabulary of images with which to describe and articulate the fearful.3 J( , Generic categories such as these - the thriller, or the "weepie" - are identified by the emotional affect they produce in the^ audiences. Other . descriptions, such as "Western" or "science fiction," concern themselves primarily with content.4 These two methods of dassiéfation may be incompatible if the objective is to produce a single, coherent system of movie genres, but for everyday purposes, they indicate the ways in which categories intersect and overlap, confirming that the distinctions we make do not have to be either precise.or mutually exclusive. Genres are flexible, subject to a constant process of change and adaptation. Because different audi-encgswill use a genre in diff'ergnt_wcrysj^ can never be rijpčuy definecCInd at: the^ařněnĚSiiins susceptiblejo ^extensive subdivisioiL-Qygfeofflfl/ o^ggQOT^žan^e^K^MAWesternanrf a musical, and to suggest that it should be excluded from either category m onjhe groundsJhajLjfcfeelcaaj^^ - ficationirt a very reductive M^^M^B&^a^^s^2^Ům^j^^^y sinali cate|ory ofnuisicď^^§^wwe_mi^ht want,,ta4is.tinguishbetween^ Ötififfiomat aná. Rose "Marie (1936) gn the grounds that, they were both different types of musical (Rose Marie is an operetta) and different types of Western (Rose Marie is set in Canada). Rather than occupying discrete categories, ^therefore, most movies use categorIcäí9&er^inj:pmtyKa^ôn. We arelarruliar, with genenc hyphen-ajě^musical^mědy, comedy-adventure, Western-romance. In 1979, the i^^^Jilm BuÚetinl^cábeáNÔcturna^as "the first soft-porn-vamprre-^ct>řo3rmpvíě7^^ "a3HiÜQmfljdv": genenc mutants, perhaps, but these labels do give potential viewers quite a fulldescription of what they mighte^eTrt"&ndien~cey*cior^ ^inyenttneirown generic categories, brthbjTir^ breaking genres downjntoeyer smáTLéTšuSsejs. 'gjsTtffrtvlayer askedrěa&é^^ film preferences ml^^one^fc^^ ljexgeneia^enjoymentof "Love and Romance" movies, and then qualified this^bjr adding: 7^y-^ete-^l romances are always refreshing to me; triar^^^^j^Bett^ayK/_acthi.g.I,admire,, but continual selfrsacnfice irritates me; and the mask-like new faces with which we have recently been inundated, with the possible exceptions of Van Johnson and Lauren Bacali, bewilder me/'5 Stars and story-type distinguish preferences within the general category of romance. "Boy-meets-giri" and "triangle" stones might be regarded as sub-genres of romance; these classifications intersect with those expressed in preferences for particular stars or star types, and using this particular matrix of opinions, it would be possible to predict which 1947 romances would have been likely to appeal to this viewer. More analytically, a broad generic category such as the romance can be „understood as a-field containing a large collection of more or less familiar elements: stars, settings, plot events, motives, and so on. For both produ- _______________________________________________________Genre 109 cers developing or promoting a movie and viewers detenriining then-response to it, the individual genre movie achieves its uniqueness through the way that it combines those elements. The specificity of a genre arises not from its possessing features exclusive to it so much as from its particular combination of features, each of which it may share with other genres. Steve Neale suggests that it is this overlap of elements between genres that makes the definition of any genre so difficult, since a_geiu^jsjicitjárm?^^ differjnceibuiiLErocesj_c£cI^^ be bound by__systems of rules, but an individual genre movie inevitably transgresses those rules in differentiating itself from other movies.in the same genre. The rules of a genre are thus not so much a body of textual conventions as_a set of expectationsshared byaudiences and producers -ß&e- Genre ..movies share_fem^£e^m^^cWwítíi each other, and audiT™ ences recognize and anticipate thesefemlfiar features. Generic consistency allows for the shorthand of convention and stereotype, but also for the ' interplay between confirmed expectation and novelty. Thexonventions.of ajenre exist alongside^moje^generalxonv^ntions-of-realismor^verisirnili-JUdf^CyěBsiiruÚtude implies probability or plausibility, less a direct relation to the "réaľ'"thana suggestion of whatis^ appropriate)/^Befime^__ " gejj£ricjcflnv£n±to^ verisjmiliftidejjyJien_^ waíkih"g.iíown a. sireeJ,Jarjnstanc^Dp meaning^is created suggests ways in which.audience expectations and producers''cömmerciälmötivatiöns form a common currency. The generic context isj^e argues, "narrow enough for recognition of the genre to take place buť wide enough to allow enormous individual variation." In any individual movie, "any one or more than one element can be brought to the foreground while others may all but disappear. Plot, character, theme, • can each become central... characters can be fully individualized, given complex or conflicting motivation, or may be presented schematically as morality play figures, embodiments of abstract good or evil."8 The notion of a genre as a set of stable categories across which movies connect, or within which fluctuation occurs, is useful for both producers and critics. But it also presents critics and empirical audience researchers with the problem of how to sort the genres into mutually exclusive categories, despite the many constant features which they share, and the many ways in which categories dissolve into one another. A 1955 audience research study, for example, originally asked open-ended questions, somewhat like Mayer's, about preferences. This produced a "fuzziness ... in the meaning of names given the program types by the respondents." Substituting a predetermined list of generic categories from which respondents had to select gave rise to another problem. "If we ask, 'What type of movie do you like best?' the answers depend upon the way the movie types are classified and upon the respondents' understanding of the terms we are using."9 110 Genre When the motion, picture industry has investigated its audience's gen-$ eric preference it has usually done so by asking questions about "story;»' types." One 1942 survey by the Motion Picture Research Bureau." enumerated eighteen types: $\ Comedies: sophisticated comedies slapstick comedies family life comedies musical comedies "just" comedies War pictures Mystery, horror pictures Historicals, biographies Fantasies Western pictures Gangster and G-men pictures Serious dramas Love stories, romantic pictures Socially significant pictures Adventure, action pictures Musicals (serious) Child star pictures (Wild) animal pictures The study's author, Leo Handel, remained dissatisfied with this classification because of "the overlapping of the different types. A war picture may also be a serious drama, a historical picture, and at the same time if may contain a love story. A socially significant picture may feature a child star/' He also noted that "it has been found repeatedly that it is the particular story rather than the story type that determines the interest."10 The preferences his survey recorded, however, give some indication of why any individual movie was likely to contain a generic cocktail. Women expressed strong dislikes for mystery and horror pictures, gangster and G-men movies, war movies and Westerns. Their greatest enthusiasms were for love stories, which was the category most strongly disliked by men, whose strongest preference was for war movies. Hollywood's logic was to combine the two, a logic repeatedly expressed in movie advertisements that, for instance, summarized the Korean war movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) as "Tomorrow, the deadliest mission... tonight, the greatest love!" The advertising copy for Twelve O'clock High (1949), about World War II pilots, promised "a story of twelve men as their women never knew them." It might have been addressing the reservations of women who felt that war pictures lacked "human interest" because they dwelt too extensively on their scenes of fighting at the expense of providing thorough characterizations. Even more blatantly, perhaps, the poster for Destroyer (1943) declared "Her only rival is his ship!... You feel toward a ship as you do toward a woman when you marry her.., You take her for Genre 111 i better or you take her for worse... and you don't leave her wheh^the going gets tough!" ♦ The production industry classified its product according to "story-type" from an early stage. In 1905 the Kleine Optical Company listed its offerings under the headings of comic, mysterious, scenic, personalities, and three types of story: historical, dramatic, and narrative.11 In the mid-1940s, in the process of passing all Hollywood's feature movies through the Production "ode, the industry's trade association classified them into a heterogeneous matrix that divided its six major categories into 57 subdivisions. The largest single category was melodrama, which accounted for between a quarter and a third of all production. Westerns, comedies (which included musical comedies), and drama each made up about 20 percent of annual production, with the rest falling into a small crime category and a larger miscellaneous group. The subdivisions within drama and melodrama overlapped considerably: each group had action, comedy, social problem, romantic, war, musical, psychological, and murder-mystery as subcategories. But Hollywood never prioritized genre as such. Like that of other fashion industries, Hollywood production was cyclical, always seeking to replicate its recent commercial successes.12 For instance, what the Production Code Administration classified as the "Farce-Murder-Mystery" was a one-season wonder: although eleven were made in 1944, only two were made in the following season, and none the year after. Some cycles might last for several seasons, and perhaps come to form subsets within a larger generic grouping: Biblical and Roman epics in the early 1950s, for instance. Barbara řQinger has called these subsets "local genres": categories.that "functioned as a recognized and influential means of classifying films" for ä historically specific period.13 On occasion, critics have elevated what the production industry under-stoocľalfa~líyčTe"^ -was_^he^H>^uc£Jör^ industry's operating definitions, comprised no more than 23 pictures; ^nonethelesšTírhas attracted oTticáTättention as a genreTand mosFaíficäl™" ~ accoimtsl^ei^gjgif^ Zjü^Scaifäce 11932) "forged a new generic tradition,"14 in whichjtiiey^con-stituted "a _£omt of classical deyg^^eňtZ^JTinp. Balio has argued that HolIywoooTproduction during the 1930s is moreacčurately described ja£löllöwi^^ genres in makingjJjTCJi^^ Ranked in order of their pro- ^ucfionľ~cošts7 duration, and box-office performance, these production groupings were: prestige pictures; musicals; woman's films; comedies; social problem pictures; and horror movies.16 Some of these terms correspond to critically established genres while others, including the most important category of the prestige picture, fall across or outside academically recognized genre boundaries. In much the same way, the contemporary industry divides movies aimed at the family market into "drop-off" and "non-drop-off" movies, depending on whether they expect ] 12 Genre parents to watch the movie with their children or simply leave them at the theater. ' '|* ' For producers, then, generic distinction offers a Jayered system of classification, which they use in an opportunistic way; that does not assume that one generic classification excludes others. Thes^e systems of classification are being constantly revised, so that there is'ijlways more than one system in operation at any one time, and mevit|bly contradictions in classification arise. Nevertheless, the advantages toVproducers of the principle of classifying movies by type are clear. Firstly, they offer a financial guarantee: generic movies are in a sense always pre-sold to their audiences because viewers possess an image and an experience of the genre before they actually engage any particular instance of it. Some genres, moreover, have predictably higher earning capacities than others. Until the 1960s, science fiction movies were expected to perform noticeably less well at the box-office than other movies with comparable stars and spectacle. An analysis of theatrical receipts during the 1970s suggested that had changed, and that science fiction now carried a generic premium higher than horror or comedy.17 Secondly, genre movies promise that their fictional events will unfold with a measure of certainty for the audience and that expected satisfactions will be provided. By offering this foreknowledge, a generic cinema encourages that sense of pleasurable mastery and control that we have associated with entertainment. Andrew Britton describes his experience of watching Hell Night (1981) with an audience of teenage horror movie aficionados: It became obvious at a very early stage that every spectator knew exactly what the film was going to do at every point, even down to the order in which it would dispose of its various characters, and the screening was accompanied by something in the nature of a running commentary in which each dramatic move was excitedly broadcast some minutes before it was actually made. The film's total predictability did not create boredom or disappointment. On the contrary, the predictability was clearly the main source of pleasure, and the only occasion for disappointment would have been a modulation of the formula, not a repetition of it.18 This audience demand for predictability meshes harmoniously with the economic advantages to the industry that come with the standardization of production. In this context, genre serves as a central component of Hollywood's aesthetic regime of regulated difference, and also regulates the act of consumption. Every teenager in the audience for Hell Night was consuming a known quantity, and Britton describes the ritualized aspects of the viewing experience as well as of the movie itself.19 Low-budget production emphasizes the formulaic and predictable, as an oft-told story about Bryan Foy illustrates. Foy ran B-feature production at Warner Bros, in the late 1930s and was known as the "keeper of the Bs." He is supposed to have kept a pile of about 20 scripts on his desk. Each time his unit Genre 113 «v completed a movie, its script would go to the bottom of the pile. Over a period of about a year, it would gradually work its way back up to the top. Then it would be dusted off and given to the scriptwriter to rewrite: a crime story would become a Western, the sex of the leading characters would be changed, the location moved.20 In due course, the new script would return to the bottom of the pile to be recycled in the same way. Whether or not the story is apocryphal (and Foy did once boast that he had made the same movie 11 times), it illustrates the cost-effectiveness of Hollywood's system of constructing familiar fictions that fulfilled their audiences' requirement that movies be "just like... but completely different" from each other. The more recent tendency to produce sequels (Friday the 13th reached part 8) is an even less disguised practice, since in many cases the sequels could more accurately be described as remakes. Halloween's director, John Carpenter, has acknowledged that "basically, sequels mean the same film/' People, he claims "want to see the same movie again."21 Foy's activities were, however, as much concerned with providing novelty as predictability, balancing recognizable features with elements of difference and variation. In addition to being like other movies which have in the past satisfied the audience, a movie also needs to have certain features that set it apart from those movies, "angles" or "edges" around which to promote and distinguish the movie as something new. The higher the budget, the more likely that its recognizable elements will be provided by its stars, and the novelty by its plot and setting; lower-budget movies may rely more heavily on conventions of plot and genre, but the same principle of regulated difference applies. Hollywood's mode of promotion is similarly organized around the play between likeness and novelty. One way of summarizing a movie, used by writers "pitching" a story idea to a producer as well as by reviewers, is to describe it as a hybrid of two other pictures. A juxtaposition such as "Pretty Woman meets Out of Africa" (proposed by a character in The Player, 1992) conjures up a field of reference recognizable in the moment, but probably not over a longer period of time. Generic conventions offer more durable frames of reference, but they also accommodate change: the variations in plot, characterization, or setting in each imitation inflect the audience's generic expectations by introducing new elements or transgressing old ones. Each new genre movie thus adds to the body of the genre, extending the repertoire of conventions understood by producers, exhibitors, and ticket-buyers at any given historical point. This means that, as Steve Neale puts it, "the elements and conventions of a genre are always in play rather than being, simply, re-played; and any generic corpus is always being expanded."22 The boundaries of a genre dissolve not only to admit new movies, but also to incorporate the surrounding discourses of advertising, marketing, publicity, press and other media reviewing, reporting and gossip, and the "word-of-mouth" opinions of other viewers. These all contribute to the 114 Genre expectations and knowledge of the audience priorito the commercially crucial moment-when they purchase their tickets aťthe box-office. Including these discourses magnifies the problems in studying the movies, certainly, but an attention to the generic fluidity of Hollywood is vital if we are to progress from a concern with the individual t^xt as an autonomous object toward the emphasis that a consumerist criticism must place on the relationships among movies as elements in a system of production and consumption. \) Genre Criticism Criticism has understood genre in Hollywood quite differently from the industry itself, ignoring most of the industry's own categories and introducing alternatives of its own. In much the same way that auteur criticism found itself drawn to "rebel" directors such as Orson Welles, an ideologically oriented genre criticism has found itself involved in what Barbara Klinger has called "the critical identification, of a series of 'rebel' texts within the Hollywood empire," distinguishing certain categories of movies such as film noir, fifties melodrama, and seventies horror movies as "progressive" or "subversive."23 But as Klinger argues, to pursue "radical" or "progressive" categories of Hollywood production is to hunt for a chimera, since the politics of a genre are by no means immutably fixed. Some Westerns, for instance, are more racist than others, but few avoid the subject of racism altogether, any more than they avoid at least some gunplay. . Genre criticism also shares with auteurism a concern to delineate Hollywood cinema by defining sub-sets within the whole, but the map of Hollywood that it seeks to draw is concerned less with identifying individual creativity than with examining the kind of world in which the horror movie or the Western or the musical could make sense.24 James Twitchell has suggested that genre criticism's concern with broader cultural and historical meanings requires an approach more akin to ethnology, one in which stories are analyzed "as if no one individual telling really mattered," since the search is for what is stable and repeated in them. In such an analysis, considerations of authorship or originality are, he maintains, "quite beside the point," since the critic's main concern is with trying to understand why some images and narratives "have been crucial enough to pass along."25 In practice, however, many critics have used genre as a starting point for a discussion of authorship in Hollywood: perhaps the most frequent instances are critical essays examining John Ford's contribution to the Western.26 Twitchell's comments describe an underlying tendency in genre criticism to see the persistence of some genres as evidence that they represent a modern equivalent of folklore or mythology, stories in which contempo- _______________________' _________________■ Genre 115 rary social conflicts and contradictions can be explored. Writing about horror movies, Carol Clover has suggested that the swapping of themes and motifs between movies, their use of archetypal characters and situations in sequels, remakes, and imitations, are like oral narrative. In both there is "no original, no real or right text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual example lies outside itself."27 Robert Warshow makes a similar point about the therapeutic function of the Western's ritualized forms, which "preserve for us the pleasures of a complete and self-contained drama... in a time when other, more consciously serious art forms are increasingly complex, uncertain, and ill-defined."28 These perceptions explain why genre criticism has drawn so heavily on what we can broadly term "structuralist" methods of analysis, and has argued that the recurrent structures of a genre distill social rather than individual meanings. In Sixguns and Society, for instance, Will Wright identifies the common plot patterns in a group of Westerns, and then suggests that each of the variant plots has a "mythical" significance, encapsulating a set of "concepts and attitudes implicit in the structure of American institutions." Like other structuralist approaches, Wrighťs analytical scheme borrows from the analysis of myth in "primitive" cultures by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and in part from the formalist analysis of a group of Russian fairy tales.29 Generic distinction is of most value when it can be used to distinguish between types of object that share fundamental similarities. We do not, for instance, need a system of generic distinctions to establish the difference between a refrigerator and a camel.30 The means to distinguish between types of object become more important as the objects concerned become more like each other - a camel and a dromedary, perhaps. Douglas Pye notes that the use of genre terms like "Western" or "thriller" focuses attention on the first part of what is in fact "a double-barrelled name, with the second term suppressed." That second term, "film" or "movie," identifies a larger generic category, the Hollywood movie, of which they are variations. Pye's point is that notwithstanding the differences between these genres, they share larger similarities, which is precisely why we need the tools of generic analysis to distinguish between them.31 This gives rise to the recurring paradox of generic analysis: the attention that is paid to defining the boundaries of a genre, despite the fact that generic classification of essentially similar objects can seldom be exclusive. Not only do genres contain sub-genres, but the mechanism of generic criticism supplies different sets of criteria for making distinctions, and these sets tend to be overlapping rather than mutually exclusive. But in looking for the consistencies by which to establish stable and discrete systems of classification, genre criticism seeks to establish patterns of repetition between movies, and regards these as of more importance than differences of surface detail. Thomas Sobchack, for instance, argues that just because "the various genres have changed or gone through cycles of popularity does 116 Genre not alter the fact that the basic underlying coordinates of a genre are maintained time after time-----Any particular filnVbf any definable group is only recognizable as part of that group if it is, in fact, an imitation of that which came before."32 This critical definition of genre also distinguishes between movies that fall into specific genres and^'non-genre films,"33 in contrast to the industry's view that all of its outpuťjfell within one category or another. ÍÍ Genre criticism usually identifies up to eight« genres in Hollywood feature film production. The Western, the comedy, the musical, and the war movie are four uncontested categories. Different critics will then argue the relative independent merits of at least one of the thriller, the crime or gangster movie, and list the horror movie and science fiction as either one or two additional genres. Each of these genres is usually seen as stable enough to possess a history of its own, existing outside the flow of industry history. The history of a genre is commonly described as an evolution from growth to maturity to decay, or a development from the experimental to the classical to the elaborated to the self-referential, "from straightforward storytelling to self-conscious formalism."34 As both Alan Williams and Tag Gallagher have suggested in relation to the Western, which is the genre that is usually accorded the greatest stability and the most longevity, such critically imposed accounts lack an awareness of the historical specificity of the genres they describe, and do not take sufficiently into account either the range of variation within any given grouping at a particular moment, or the sensitivity of contemporary audiences to generic nuance.35 These generic histories, however, do not so much provide an accurate chronological account as delineate a body of work, a canon of texts, to be compared with each other, and when it does that genre criticism practices a form of discrimination similar to that we associated with auteurism in chapter 1. The imposition of an internal historical structure in which movies as texts influence each other actually eliminates the need to consider external questions of industry, economics, and audience in favor, of a search for recurrent textual structures, whether narrative, thematic, or visual. Perhaps the clearest instance of strain between critical and industrial notions of genre concerns the group of movies produced in the decade after World War II which are usually called film noir. The term was first used by French film critics to identify "a new mood of cynicism; pessimism and darkness that had crept into American cinema"36 in the postwar period. Film noir was entirely a critical classification, rather than an industry or an audience definition, something which does not invalidate it as a category, but clearly does privilege the critical recognition of common textual features (such as lighting or the characterization of the female lead) over other contexts and assumptions. The movies now usually identified as film noir probably occupied more than a dozen different categories in the Production Code Administration's classification of 57 types. Genre 117 . Genre Recognition ' Even where a critically established genre boundary more or less coincides with industrial parameters, as is the case with the Western, genre criticism reconstructs a slightly different history^ from that generated by other modes of research. Most accounts of the Western regard Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903 as constituting its birth. Recent historical research, however, suggests that such an identification came only several years later, and that contemporary audiences recognized The Great Train Robbery as a melodramatic example of one or more of the "chase film," the "railway genre," and the "crime film." The Western had emerged by 1910, its great appeal to American producers lying in its being an identifiably American product that could not be successfully imitated by their European competitors. This both strengthened their hold on their home market and improved their sales abroad. Not until the Italian film industry began producing "spaghetti Westerns" in the 1960s were European audiences, let alone American ones, prepared to accept foreign substitutes for the real American product.37 Discussions of genre recognition are commonly conducted around the Western, because the Western provides a clearer or more convincing demonstration of the case than most others. Almost every frame of a Western movie identifies it as such by the objects within it, whether these generic signifiers be setting, characters, costumes, or accoutrements. The image shown on p. 118, for instance, is dense with the Western's iconography or system of recurring visual motifs. These provide a shorthand system enabling^ knowledgeable viewer to glean a great deal of information about the characters and the situation simply from the way the characters are dressed, the kind of clothes they wear, and so on, and this level of meaning provides such viewers with another means of gaining pleasure from the movie. An iconographic approach to genre allows us to establish quite precisely what we might expect to find in a Western. Along with the recognition of recurrent plot situations, the presence of familiar objects repeatedly confirms what kind of movie we are watching, and reinforces our expectations of how the story will develop.38 This system of visual recognition works very well for the Western, which is atypically easy to identify. As part of the attempt to come to terms with visual discourse in cinema,, early genre criticism concentrated on genres marked by their iconographic richness. Along with their iconography, Westerns are equally easily identified by the actors who appear regularly in them (not just John Wayne or Henry Fonda, but also character actors in smaller roles, such as Slim Pickens, Andy Devine, or Jack Elam), and by their recurrent situations: gunfights, saloon brawls, the final scene in which the hero bids farewell to the woman he is leaving behind. While the representational conventions of these familiar icons and situations have changed over time, so that a silent Western 118 Genre John Wayne asserts his authority in Red River (1948). The audience's knowledge of Western iconography tells us a great deal about what is happening in scenes like this. United Artists (courtesy Kobal) such as The Iron Horse (1924) looks very different from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), the situations, iconography, and characterizations recur with sufficient consistency to override historical distinctions and establish the Western as a consistent, transhistorical phenomenon. The Western is not, of course, the only genre to possess such features. In looking at the crime film, for instance, we could identify an iconography and produce a list of recurring situations. We might, however, find more ambiguities at the visual level. For example, we can be sure that the image opposite, of Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart about to shoot it out, must come from the climax of the movie, in which the hero confronts the principal villain. But we are unlikely to know, simply from the iconography, which of them is the hero and which the villain. Such ambiguiti.es are an inherent part of both the recurrent plots and thematics of the crime film: this image comes from a 1936 Warner Bros, movie, Bullets or Ballots, in which Robinson plays a cop masquerading as a racketeer. The movie's advertising made use of Robinson's persona as a gangster, while its thematic concern, like those of many crime films, examined the relationship between law, justice, and morality. Genre 119 Edward G. Robinson confronts Humphrey Bogart in Bullets or Ballots (193ó).The lighting tells us that this is the city at night, but which of the two actors is the villain? Aquarius Picture Library It would be more difficult to come up with a consistent iconographic scheme for the horror movie or for the musical. On the other hand, just as the lighting in the image from Bullets or Ballots informs us that this is a crime movie becauselts play with shadow and strong areas of black and white tells us that this is an image of the city at night, so we recognize the image on p. 120 as unmistakably coming from a musical because only in a musical could all these people have any convincing reason for adopting the same pose at the same time. We can recognize gestures, and speak of there being gestural codes, although it is more difficult to attach precise meanings to them than to the iconographic elements we have discussed m relation to the Western. But in Westerns, too, we find hierarchies of gestural coding: the gunfighteťs narrowed eyes, the hero's purposeful stride, or the familiar choreography of the saloon brawl feature in different movies to broadly the same effect, while other gestures, such as John Wayne's walk out of frame at the end of The Searchers (1956), are filled with meaning by the movie, and are specific to the movie rather than being implicit within the genre. To compound the problem, not all genres have systems of gestural coding that are exclusive to them, any more than they necessarily have specific lighting or iconographic codes. v 120 Genre West Side Story (1961). Only in a musical could all these people gesture in the same way at the same time. Mirisch-7/United Artists, (courtesy Kobal) Nonetheless, most genre critics argue that movies within a genre will share recurrent situations and consistent narrative patterns. For example, in a recent study of "the stalker film/' a late-1970s sub-genre of the horror movie, Vera Dika outlines a specific sequence of plot functions that identifies them as a group. Their plots have "a two-part temporal structure," the first part of which presents a past event, structured as follows: The members of a young community are guilty of a wrongful action. The killer sees an injury, fault, or death. The killer experiences a loss. The killer kills the guilty members of the young community. The second section of the movie, set in the present, also comprises a sequence of narrative events, ordered according to a strict pattern: Genre 121 An event commemorates the past action. The killer's destructive impulse is reactivated. A seer warns the young community. The young community takes no heed. The killer stalks the young community. The killer kills members of the young community. The heroine sees the murders. The heroine sees the killer. The heroine does battle with the killer. The heroine subdues the killer. The heroine survives but is not free.39 audiences recognize genres through plot structures like these, as well as hrough advertising, iconography, and gestural codes. Often such indica-ors overlap; in the practice of a genre-based criticism this is almost bound o be the case. Rick Altman has distinguished between what he calls the "semantic" pproach to genre - a cataloguing of common traits, characters, attitudes, ocatiorts, sets, or shots - and a "syntactic" approach that defines a genre in terms of the structural relationships between those elements that carry its thematic or social meaning.40 Just as the semantic approach has been most often applied to the iconography of the Western, the structure of the Western has frequently been the subject of syntactic analysis. In John Cawelti's analysis, for instance, the Western takes place on the frontier between savagery and civilization, where the hero confronts his uncivilized double.41 Another instance of the fruitful application of a structural approach to what Altman calls "the genre's fundamental syntax" is Jim Kitses' highly suggestive tabulation of "the shifting ideological play" between what he identifies as the genre's central opposition between civilization and the wilderness. The wilderness Civilization The individual The community freedom restriction honor institutions self-knowledge illusion integrity self-interest solipsism compromise social responsibility democracy nature culture purity experience empiricism pragmatism brutalization corruption knowledge legalism idealism refinement savagery humanity 122 Genre The west The east >i America ' Europe <"- the frontier America equality class f; agrarianism industrialism H' ■ tradition change i',% the past the future42 % i Westerns contrast the west with the east, nature with culture, the individual with the community, but in describing these oppositions, the positive term in each of Kitses' pairings is sometimes in the wilderness and sometimes in civilization. This tabulation indicates that comparable situations and characters - semantic unite, in Airman's terms - can be inflected with a wide variety of thematic significances, depending upon which of these oppositions is given most weight. Kitses' table clearly and concisely illustrates the potential thematic and ideological richness of a genre form. A criticism that combines the various semantic and syntactic approaches to genre study that we have discussed can also look for the persistence of particular features in a genre, making it possible to trace fluctuations in their occurrence over time. This provides a means by which genre movies can be interpreted as rich sources of historical evidence. Film noir, for instance, could be examined as a fluctuation in the more persistent genre of the crime film, and its specific characteristics could be related to the historical circumstances of the period 1945-55. Similarly, an account of the Western might look at the ways in which the revisions of its conventions address the changing historical needs of its audience. Taking American history as its subject matter, the Western provides an opportunity to trace the changing construction of that history by the present. In its discussion of men taming a wilderness and transforming it into a garden, the Western has taken to itself a central aspect of American mythology: the civilizing spirit of American individualism. It has also become an arena in which Americans examine the relationship between individuals and society, and the tension between individual and community priorities. Along with iconographic conventions, the emphases within that ideological tension have shifted over time. Brian Henderson, for instance, has suggested that The emotional impact of The Searchers can hardly come from the issue of the kinship status and marriageability of an Indian in white society in 1956----It becomes explicable only if we substitute black for red and read a film about red-white relations in 1868-1873 as a film about black-white relations in 1956« Henderson's is a common critical strategy, in part designed to elevate the texfs status by way of demonstrating its cultural significance. By such a process critics can legitimize their own activity, finding ways to demonstrate that the texts they study are, when viewed from the "right" perspec- Genre 123 tive, far more important than the familiar and predictable objects they might on the surface appear. Genres, then, can be thought of as fields inhabited by thematic, iconographic, narrative, and political propensities, as instances and instruments of Hollywood's system of regulated difference. Their emphasis shifts over time, and from individual movie to movie. They are also subject to a range of industrial, aesthetic, cultural, and technical factors. At any time, an individual movie may be seen as crystallizing the forms and meanings of the genre as a whole -My Darling Clementine (1946), for instance, is sometimes cast in this role for the Western - but historical shifts in ideological and stylistic fashion make it difficult to speak for long about any single movie as definitive of its genre. One way of appreciating Hollywood's complex reflection of, and influence on, American culture is by looking at how such everyday phenomena as the family, romance, heroism, femininity, or childhood have been represented in different genres at different tunes. Generic features make it possible for us to account for the connections we make between one movie and another, not so much in terms of their similarities, or their resemblance to the imaginary composite which "typifies" a particular category, but in terms of the differences between them, and the extent to which they play with existing conventions. The Empire of Genres: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid The Westerner could not fulfill himself if the moment did not finally come when he can shoot his enemy down. But because that moment is so thoroughly the expression of his being, it must be kept pure___The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again fell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength.... Really, it is not violence at all which is the "point" of the Western movie, but a certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence. Watch a child with his toy guns and you will see: what most interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man might look when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero. Robert Warshow44 Much that has been written about the Western film has been written ... by men who cherish the fantasies embodied in these films and who, therefore, resent any effort at dispelling those fantasies. Jon Tuska45 The Western exhibits a number of different kinds of what Andrew Tudor has called "genre imperialism." One recent survey of the genre suggests that between 1926 and 1967, Westerns comprised a quarter of all 124 Genre Hollywood's output, and on the basis of that statistic claims that it is not only the largest but also the most significant of 'Hollywood's genres« CriticRobert Ray hasarguedthat thejjenre js in a sense even larger than "" tlýlpijéííausl^ ^C stood as "thirüy_i&mouilaged Westerns," concerned ^with the conflict be- ?Cj1 V" ijy^nmdividualism and community. For Ray, the ability to recöncliettüs . íV'w^) ""* u irreconcilable opposition makes the Western the th^maHc ^radigm for ÄVvw^^^^^pHollywood's commitment to "the avoidance of choice."47 Douglas Pye v ~ tT^V1 argtres~fór~thé čentŕäBty of the WěstemTó~gehrě äriälýšlsui similar terms. ■^-^J-'m Jjŕ **e suSSests that its thematic richness comes from "the peculiar impurity of its inheritance," by which the archetypal imagery of romantic narrative could be blended with American history.48 The genre imperialism exhibited here is similar to that of critics such as Will Wright, who see the persistence of genre, and of the Western in particular, as evidence that its formulae operate as particularly effective agencies for the circulation of cultural as well as purely cinematic meaning. Central to the operation of any genre movie, including the Western, is the cumulative expectation and knowledge of the audience. Over time, this frame of reference grows ever more dense and. extensive, although we should bear in mind that viewers.forget as, well as remember, andJl^tjhe whole field of generic knowledge is unnkelyjo be^ayailable to any given audience, everfof aficionados.4? Loss of knowledge is particularly impor-fant_inihis case as Hollywood's production of Westerns declined precipitously after 1970, with barely a handful being made during the 1980s. Hollywood's apparent abandonment of what had been its most common genre raised questions about the critical arguments that claimed that the Western was central to the expression of an American mythology. Had the mythology changed, so that the Western was no longer relevant? Or had the mythology migrated elsewhere, to other genres, and if so, had it changed its meaning in the process? Or had Hollywood somehow stopped articulating American mythology? Whatever set of circumstances had brought about the change, it shows that even so self-generating and transhistorical a genre as the Western is subject to historical forces. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a Western made at the end of the line of continuous production in J£Z&~directed by one of the genre's last celebrated auteurs, Sam Peckinpah. As a retelling of one of the genre's most oft-told tales, it is a particularly good example of the ways in which a generic movie can set in_ play a complex dynami^o£^n&m^^n_and revision of audience expectations. Its own~caslTisgiven an added complexity!^ the fácTThatjjTOmu^ědislinct versions of the movie exist: one initially released by MG&rírtl^TänčTa^^ fOT^f^5^gr^j3a2:^^^prwas daimeUlo[W^^^]^serJo_ the directoťsjjr^^ regard the latter as more "orig^al/ the existence of multiple versions caiP instead be taken as evidence of conMctmg^ In any cas^jnuitiple- variants of movies have ^w^^been^p^T^pf Genre 125 Hollywood^produc^^ t3XT^^ c0iibra^ictím"tojKe^řň^5f Anierican filn^inclustr^practice^l *-*»A "^ct- <^The case of Pat Garrett and Billy theKiifis, therefore, only unusual in the nrj ,^a amount of"attention paid to the variations, a situation that came about * / because of the claims made for Peckinpah as an author whose "work" had ^ ■jfiktt* been vandalized by the studio©£>ne critic went so far as to suggest that the ©X ^ -Ý fe "arbitrary and piecemeal" recut was ordered because the head of the _ p_^v ^^ „ ' : l£ studio, James T. Aubrey, "hated Peckinpah, and was bent on sabotaging his work."52 A more probabl^mp,tiyation is„that .the studio executives or thought Peckjnpah's cut too long and uncommercial; their one addition }$f was to elongate the scene of Sheriff Baker's (Sum Pickens).death,,.so that . ŕ* Bób^Dylän's^ "Knôckin' on Heaven's Door/' could be piayed over it. X * Although this scene hasbeen described as being "as moving as anything ^^J1"^ in Peckmpah's work,"53 its presence in the movie owes more to the com- /-^ «5^ jul * "x mercial considerations of emphasizing Dylan's contribution tolHěTřiovie" ty-*lis1mliciairiönäfl^^ ~~~Y witrTMGM"was cóna^čtedľšo[ľj^^ audience attne time of the movie's release was aware of the major differences between fflg version they saw and PecTanpärľs^ggBäET.-ihe mc^rimpörtänföf "thes^^i|fére.nces._was..the. omission/^i the MGM version, öf ä'framiňg"" device/ set in 1909, in which Gam^isjnrocfeed^ emp^yednüm as sheriff!Ö~hünt down Bi^J^ej^resence or absence öf hT^ÜZ^L-^ ^^^^^^cKešl^iis^^^^^^^t^^^^ as a flashback, cleäHyjf ^-^, " -doe^ffectfíč^tEěltnovie is interpreted. But how ifaHects thelntemreta-" /íb^';^"'l "-ticnroílteTéľeaševeTsToh^fčí^ lenewthat such a sequence was^ ^u"^ 'onginally^part_ oQhé movie is a diiierent^matter. This is an entirely .^ Tike most Westerns, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is easily identifiable in cmematfcT e_<^val™L-9L^^J^??^ ^"ÍSH^ÍL J^^on^ y^^B-JH^f^L^CľC^aT^, watches' a Hollywood^daptafiöh'of. a novel shorn of its^ more .explicit yJL-^--\. elements to~ meet censorship .requirements,. ^jp^^f terms of its setting and subject-matter. With what could hardly be a less oblique title, it establishes itself as a retelling of a familiar episode from Western history, the pursuit and killing of William Bonney by Pat Garrett. Expectations raised by the tide are confirmed in the image track: a moving camera rapidly establishes the familiar Western iconography of landscape, architecture, costumes, and props, giving us some sense of certainty as to how the story will unfold. At the same time, we are alerted to stylistic emphases that giye_newjnflections to these familiar forms. Thejnost foKgfuljg^eseare the shots of the live cMckeng_b_eingJusedJby3illy-and his fellow outlaws forJargeJLpxactice.._ We .see their destruction _inextreme_ close-up, and this encounter with a "realism" Jn tiie^presentation-of-yio^ lenT:^is~1ikdy^OTrrrö the rest of the movie. Asjhe "audience of~"Sam lJeckinpaJfsTP^12arr£ŕŕ and Billy the Kid" (as the movie was advertised), we may be aware of the director's reputation for the explicit representation of violence, often justified as a revision of Western conventions in the name of an enhanced realism. The use of setting and 126 Genre ■ -———"—~———————^—___— j h ——^———.— ,. costume, too, indicates that the movie is making claims;to historical verisimilitude: this is, it implies, the "true".story of Billy thrKid/The title, "Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1881," locates the story with a geographical and period precision that is typical of its revisionism.54 Both the expartsiveness andijmelessness of the "mythic" West will be replaced. with anlncrieasi^ sense oP'HstončäT'' cIaü^trojji3röbia^^ space are running ouOflytnlcl^^ his rh^t^ncoünter"with BiüyTGarrett announces in very simple terms the motivation of the action that will follow: "the electorate want you gone, Billy." Their subsequent exchange summarizes the shifting values that they represent and that will be contested through the story. "How does it feel," asks Billy, to have "sold out" to the Santa Fe Ring? "It feels like times have changed," Garrett replies. "Times maybe, but not me," is Billy's response. Ťhe^centrajjdramatic tension in the movie, established here and encap^ sulated in its y ery title, - recapitulates what Js_£erhapsJ^^estern^ key ^•vjíUŕ,^ structuring opposition, betweenthejndividualistvalues embodied by the /w^«^^ outlaw and those represented, by the lawman on beEa^oT^ßrammuni^ §o_endtmn^is-"^ critics have suggested that it explains the persistenceof the genre itself, because it answers a specifically vAmmcan^ltural anxiety about the need to preserye^tibv^gts^Hdeals, ' and stägesyffie^dŕamäric conHicf Between them at the historical moment " jyhén America was formed as a modem^aUojD^Jjl^assical Westerns like /Stagecoach (1939) and My_ parling_ Clementine, jhe^flMaUxer^ ^utíawireroTWeícomé^ t^TrfroTrn~lt^eä^ that greater say.a.ge /m^^fjäiôlpnger exists,,and'_ thelvaluk systems. pTshériff and outlaw are placed in wMtsjee.msto_t3ie^characJtets._a^ari inevitable opposition in which" ^one_must giveaway to^_the otherLj3o in Stagecoach,Lthe sheriff (George Bancroft) acquiesces in the outlaw's escape from "the blessings of ayiEzir-~ f^^y^g^teü^cJMic^^VjctOT^^^^Js redeemed by Ms deatrT atüieend of My Darling ClementbiirB^^^^^^^äJev^^^^^^^^i^ , such as 1 he Man W/ioSíiorTíííě^^ Kero (Jolm^WayneTis greeted withmelancholy regret and a strongly nos-tálgi'c äwäŕéňess_oJtFe price paid for the d^mocratic^gp^j^pU^pe^ěcl^r embocTTe^^Jamj^t^^ ^m/kTP^^rr^Tand Billy the Kid^ the .values of the West will be replaced only by sdmefniňg~moŕe. meag§£as ^cjy^iz^onjs _associatedjiotjvjt^commu^i^, but._with_the__ corruption lind corporate self-interest of the Santa Fe Ring whp_ hire _GanífôrWen3houlc^^ too lírmly that the generic evolution of the Western has seen "the blessings of civilization" subjected to increasingly hostile scrutiny. Tag Gallagher has pointed out how tenuous and selective such evolutionary arguments tejg "to be, and in counterpomfhäsTšúggested that because of changes in the conventions of representation across American culture as a whole, "the films of the sixties Genre 177 had to work harder, had to be more strident and dissonant, in order to try to express the same notions as earlier films." In support of his argument that Western heroes changed less in the_1960s than other critics häve~ sjgge^^^^'^^^i^'xä^^^äe^iJtílsTgit^iá^ of Hen^Föndäls" performance as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine that might also describe Jämeš CÖbürh's performance as Garrett: *-*M>"£ * V -. •#■---C charm hides a self-righteous prig, and a marshal's badge and noble sentiments hide a "near-psychotic lust for violent revenge" even from Earp himself, but this upstanding Wyatt is all the more ambivalently complex a character for the sublimation of his hypocrisy and violence___Wyatt clearly loves lording it over people without using his gun... there is no recognition irjJhefihn^ojW rattle's last death to Wyatfs solitary farewell to Clementine outside of town. Nor is there any "reward" of a wedding.56 How convincing Gallagher's analysis would have been if the later movies djd npt exist to demonstrate the possibility of such interpretations is a moot'point. For the moment, wejrnight simply settle on the. recognition that critics and audiences as well as filmmakers are capable of revisionist jng^eta^ons_of the Classical. ~" ""*-— For André Bkzm^KlV^ton had dramatized an epic.and very public battle between "the forces of evil" and the "knights of the true cause." He saw the genre addressing basic human realities through the mythologization of a particular, phase of American history.57 The Western is an ejáie that works determinedly toward its final chapter; its antagonists will eventually meet to dramatize this trial of strength through the spectacle of a shootout in the main street. The morality play character of the shootout exemplifies perhaps best of all what Robert Warshow saw as the moral "openness" of the Western, "giving to the figure of the Westerner an apparent moral clarity which corresponds to the clarity of his physical image against his bare landscape."58 But with moral terms more relative and positions more compromised, the Western universe depicted in Peckinpah's movie operates on an altogether cloudier and more domestic level; the bulk of the movie is presented as a private drama between former friends. Garrett is obsessively unwilling even to discuss the rights and wrongs of his actions, let alone to seek their ratification through their display in the public spectacle of the shootout. As the shared value-system of a Western "code" disintegrates, the traditional roles of sheriff and outlaw become confused and compromised. Garrett is no longer the archetypal independent hero described by Warshow, reluctantly acting on behalf of the community to preserve its fragile civilization from the forces seeking to destroy it. He is rather the paid employee of a corporate interest group, hired for a dangerous job and expendable. From the outside he retains something of the character attributed to the Westerner as "last gentleman", by Warshow, and certainly 128 Genre_________________________________________________■ r-gg displays the moral ambiguity which darkens hisjimage and saves him , Äif from absurdity/ but is no longer able to "defend-the purity of his own ^fj image.'' He is a long way from the godlike figures wielding near-magical ;^ powers inherited by the Classical Western from .American folklore and 1$: romantic narrative. :§ lawmen, for all his maintenance of their physical di&orum. Nor does he enjoy the support of the community itself. His silencers so long a trait of the ; ;f Westernsheriff, now bespeak not a moral status so muchasjfejmpgM^iiL Ky> ityof his claiming anyauthority förwhat he doeSTAlHiäläm^^ ;;| understanding oTthe contradictions m which hgJs^au^vt^.atranděEbg^ .:;;';: tween a paáTfiFlus^ p- f ■^BíSmešmčŕeäŠuiglyintosgective. These cont^ictionsarej^resoly^^ ^g ~~wiffrtriě~death of Billy. When GaíretľHHes~"out oTFort Surnner^a_smaU_' ;í^ chudiny iromcaHy"_ 1] :i echoěilhej^ing^ after the KeróTie idoIizeslÄ------ BfflyXKris Kristofferson) is also a revised character, no longer embodying the primitivism and savagery that must be overcome by the force of law. Instead, theouJla^vjaow_^e^ ■-■ society is itself destroying. It is the landownertHšum's men whöMland" torture for pleasure, and the character whose behavior comes closest to the psychopathic is not any of the outlaws but rather Ollinger (R.G. Billy (Kris Kristofferson) and Garrett (James Coburn} play poker, watched by Ollinger (R.G. Armstrong), in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Aquarius Picture Library __________________________________________________Genre 129 Armstrong), the fundamentalist sheriff given custody of Billy in Lincoln. However, the mov^avoia^anysenta the outlaw as a ä^omed"ngureTBilly may be an anachronism, but he j£ scarcely]* 'victim." T^dMionslräfe^ maFcTthe tráčfiHoMl7Wešŕení^7^ŕo,*buf řjejčan^also^act',.yiplentlyA ancí, ouťsiděthe "code/' when circumstances require it, shooting Alamoosa Bifi, {Jack Élam)>efbre the count in their duel is complete. A number of formal aspects of the movie echo these shifts in value and characterization. Barbed wire fences cut suggestively across a number of Classical Western compositions. The land is presented less as a symbolic scene for the realization of heroic potential than as a property value from which Billy, like everyone else, is to be excluded. As the land is closed, the protagonists are forced more than is usual into domestic spaces, where detail is emphasized at the expense of physical action. Outlaws wear spectacles, trading posts stock "fine quality tomatoes" in "airtights," colors are muted. Spaces are deprived of their mythic functions: any space can now become the scene of the violence once confined to the prairie and the main street. Tracked not to the summit of a mountain, but to a domestic interior, Billy is finally shot dead in the kitchen of an aging cowboy. If the movie dissents from the Western's tendency to endorse the role of capitalism in the settlement of the West, its revision of the genre's conventional representation of women appears much less radical. Traditionally, the genre gives women little significant presence or responsibility. Wherg, thejMioJíguxeárxJth^ Ji^Sjs to endprsei.orailtimately refuse.,.(theschool-marm,.thesaloon^girl).,^ Äs dŕr^tO£Jíudoy3oj;ti^ counts is what ^^herome;;p;rjp;TO rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."59 Western men can be redeemed by eastern women, but western women are seldom offered the same opportunity. Doc Hollida/s (Victor Mature) descent in My Darling Clementine is evidenced by his involvement with Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), whose quasi-Mexican name and overt profession as a saloon entertainer ensure that their relationship is doomed, and that she, like him, will meet her conventionally inevitable end. Traces of those roles are evident in Pat Garrett In ^-íark^nfxasjjpjll^^ wKIel^ ' women uTharratj^^ m£a&_ Q&TBRJß 3 Worna^joxjio„e,s^ Sheriff Baker's wife (Katy Jurado) briefly occupies a fraditionalmale role, taking part in a gun battle, but even as objects of display the movie's female characters are peripheral. The movie's credits include a reference to Aurora Clavell in the role of Garrett's wife, but she makes no appearance in the movie.60 The spectacle of the brothel scene is considerably elaborated in "Peckinpah's" version, with Garrett attended to by five women. The y 130 Genre scene's one plot point, however, in which Garrettfbeats up one of the prostitutes to find out where Billy is, is missing from this version. That1 information is provided by Poe (John Beck), the agent of the Ring who attaches himself to Garrett, and who kills him 28 years later.61 The movie's representation of masculinity perftaps suggests a more determined reconstruction of the genre, and there,.^e_rewardsfor a .criticism sensitive to the ways in which homoerotic elements inform the mqyie„ ŘelatíóltsrripsiTetweetí men occupy the center öf ä'sJÖrylHät revolves, as Terence Butler has put it, around "the enforcement of law versus.the fraternal loyalty of male friendship." It is^the male rather than the female ]x>dy that is displayed and celebratédľ Billy luxuriates in his already" mythical status, and his body is repeatedlj^ra^ jmjige. Garrett^J^yj^or^^ Imm^te^outset asa fastidiousdresser, he grows increasingly obsessed vjath^Bs-Qw^-áívagěí^^ T^e^^axed^tiardssismjej^s^Robert Warshow's observation that it is not violence Tvrd^rilš^e " image of man, ä style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence." WarsKaj^ Us"' - little cruelty in Western movies and little sentimentality; our eyes are not Tföcüssed on the sufferings of the defeated but on the deportment of the hero."62 Here violence is both less, restrained and less orderly in its occurrenceThei tidyntuals of the shootout are replaced by a series of haphazard ambushes, the outcomes of which are resolved not by skill but by sheer firepower. Lawmen and outlaws.carry rifles or shotguns, not sixshooters. t^h.üiejäigrufc ařeJsJpody.JPeckjnpah shows bodies cut to pieces in hails of rifle snot óT peppered by shotguns loaded with coins. Only the" nnal"gunplay reiterates __ the traditional stylization of the Western death, but the "movie concludes not with a gunfjghtbut with an execu^ônTôrTas somegmmentejorsgg^ segn'itTwjgMhp 'Vmrifi^on" thatxesolves the majority of PečlHnpah'š"* Westerns. The pŕutáližäŕibh of the body that accompanies the~de~ath of male characters^ttugughout much of PecKinpah's work is conspicuously, absent in thelfagatrnent^th^^ for which Terence Butler offersĽaJinal (and^citiiciiir^^ oJBilly'skilling underlines his female dependence on Garrett in his friend-ihipj£övards„iiim^.-....Garrett seeks to hide from himself the manner in which an oppressive patriarchy has defiled him. Billy, on the other hand, finally openly assumes a female role and thus acknowledges the working of that tyranny."63 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a complex object, both commercially and aesthetically. Our perception of its complexities depends on our awareness of the conventions that are being displaced or revised. As a revisionist j Western, the movie is particularly self-conscious about the self-; referentiality that is an implicit part of genre cinema, and therefore of Hollywood. This self-consciousness is most noticeable in the performances Genre 131 of Coburn and Kristofferson. Their dialogue, their delivery, and even the way they move convey a foreknowledge both of what will happen in the plot, and of the narrative tradition that has predestined those events. Pat, Billy, and the audience all understand the inevitability of Billy's death; little in the way of suspense is therefore sought or achieved. The wider structures of the movie also incline toward such self-consciousness. Garrett rather than Billy stands at the center of the story, concentrating our interest on the figure who will make Billy a myth by finally destroying him as a man. Peckinpah's movie thus emerges not simply as an attempt to demythologize the genre or move it toward a greater realism, but also as an attempt to revise mythology in the light of contemporary circumstances. As such it offers a particularly bleak account of American experience in the 1970s. As the quotations from Robert Warshow suggest, the genre's conventional narrative is essentially one of ideological self-confidence. Defeat in/' Vietnam, the erosion of faith in domestic politics after W^ejrgate^th^oiA crisis of the mid-1970s, and the long-term decline of. the American' economy all questioned the, self-confidence at the core of the expansionist ideology presented m of Par ^Öarreii and Billy[JheJKid is an instance of the questioning of that self-confidence^but iisself-consciousness also indicates the extent to which it-and other similar movies^made In the sameperiod> exposed the conven-tionTby; wHicH^h~Cgenre hadoperated. This excessive self-consciousness also contributed to the subsequent decline oLthe Western, as_ ij^became_ Jimpossiblélójřohcje^ the-gejir^s.cjžnventions-arjender them transparent agairyCrifacismj^ 'lírľprocuícer.working.inJhe 1980s would have had to be extraordinarily^ cine-illiterate not to know that.t^eWestern is where.Holly^oodrdiscusses... JA^enč^"ľhisfory,ahcl-. stages-conflicts-between alternative versions of heroism. The few Westerns made between the rmd-1970sand the late 1.930s all displayed an extreme generic self-consciousness, an awareness of their status within a. generic tradition that some critics and some of its practitioners havechosen to elevate to the status of art. ^At^the same time, with so few Westerns made, audiences have lost a famihariťjrwith their generic conventions. Moyi^^^^^^^w^^Z sumptiónš~aBouř^hl^~viěl^ ge^e^_and_ttyus_find^ mem^elveyl^^icapped'böTCT hardfy^üljjrtslnlh^h^ made in the 1980s were au very nön|[]nov^^ version^Jtjs also an indication of the extent to which the Western has * ^ ceased to function fluently as a vehicle for American culture to tell itself the stories it needs to heaiulnstead, the genre has acquired suffidefnt-eultural respectability for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) to become the first Western to win the Oscar for Best Picture since Cimarron in 1931. Contemporary Westerns areone^sidedršerió^álfď^TJiir *—ŕ5-—. 132 Genre _ . . , _ me^wayto^ctefeat.at the hands of a vjUainous co^^i|e Pgw^lmstea(^ °* xŕÍ3^@E^SQg^^^^^nos3EOS^^^^^]^^^^MÍages ofwfifté men transforming a wilderness into a garden, in Dances wííW^ŘoTvesXt^^ ap.d~Tfie~ľtäFo]^1i^^ jnalaise £ registered" Üu£u^ha_ceiefeatipn_oJlHe^ "Vidian. The play "(in both senses) hasj;oneoi^ " InliřL&mluňTEoŠG^^ 'HillrHave ~Evěs"(lW7)'ancí"Aliens ť 1986)_are^isgurs^Wesférns is" pé^rKapš" rooted^oojnuch_iii nostalgia for the arjp_arervfl"OiiEj^ jVestern's parácúla^^ tantly, representing tHe" central opposition in the Western's narrative between civilization and savagery in traditional generic terms has become near-impóssible given contemporary evaluations of the relation between Vňäture anď culttíŕe^^ jrjö~Iöngef ~ä rnarketaSle^conmiöcIity.'"Taus the Western's cohvenriOTÍáT tKemar^^ with civilization's"* conflict with the savage Other have migrated to other generic Eelds/where women can be given more to do, andjtvhere, smcett^ ajienjÖtiierJs .purely aSreJĹfiHe of the'm\äginätionrnc^ one will complain about cultural distor- ~" fionj or argulTtí^lffiě^ susfanP^* aH^ěxistencej^IJteble eco-system.. In space, no one-canhear-you^cream about misrejr^esöitatign.^_ Genre and Gender Although mass media can scarcely be characterized as in any sense less self-conscious or analytic than criticism and theory about them, the fact thai the discourse within horror cinema and the discourse afcour it diverge on some crucial points would seem to suggest that the folks who make horror movies and the folks who write about them are, if not hearing different drummers, then reading different passages of Freud. Carol J. Clover65 Given that the Hollywood genre about which most criticism has been written has little place for women, it is not surprising that genre criticism can hardly be described as gender neutral. Looking at the list of critically recognized genres reveals an extreme gender imbalance that perhaps reflects the simple fact that most genre critics have been men. Implicit in the preferences of much genre criticism is a valorization of patriarchal and masculine concerns, by which certain genres have been accorded an increased cultural status through a recognition of their larger thematic concerns, while the status of other genres in this critical hierarchy is demonstrated by their hardly being named or described. In the generic mapping of Hollywood, the quantitatively overwhelming omission is that of romance, which features as the principal or secondary Sp Genre 133 |S plot in 90 percent of Hollywood's output. Meanwhile, missing from our Bf list on p. 116 is that category often identified as "melodrama," which in f Y contemporary critical discourse usually refers to stories of family trauma, fŕť pathos, and heightened emotionalism. From the mid-1970s the term was W often used as an alternative generic label for "the woman's film." The **• designation of a category of Hollywood movies for women was a more or { s less deliberate attempt to redress the gender imbalance within the genre 1 ~ categories then receiving critical attention. The two terms have since be-'■"* come fixed in their meaning. Melodrama has become synonymous with a Č* group of movies preoccupied with the domestic, the sentimental, and ■* heightened emotions: women's films, "weepies," soap operas, family and Í^ maternal melodramas. In much the same way as early genre criticism of the Western identified John Ford's Stagecoach as "the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection,"66 the "ideal type" of ť ' melodrama was represented by a group of movies directed by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955), in which wealthy "■ widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) scandalizes the New England town of Stoningham by having an affair with her gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Along with this linkage has gone a critical assumption that the group of movies identified were regarded as "Hollywood's lowliest form, the woman's weepie."67 However, as Christine Gledhill has pointed out, this dismissive and pejorative use both of melodrama and of the "woman's film" reflected the , preferences of a predominantly male group of critics, rather than the practices of the industry. Jackie Byars suggests that in a way very similar to the creation of film noir as a category, "a genre was born... the theoretical genre of 'melodrama' was now formed in the mold of a group of , Hollywood family melodramas produced by a few talented directors obsessed with stylistic manipulation."68 Byars goes on to observe that constructing melodrama in these terms "obscured the existence of other ŕ melodramatic genres, the melodramatic aspects of other genres like the Western, the historical variations within individual melodramatic genres, " and the relationships between kinds of melodramatic genres." As she suggests, "melodrama" would more helpfully describe one of Hollywood's fundamental aesthetic strategies, the denning features of which would include a presentation of sensational events, a moral didacticism, and a determined attempt to provoke a sequence of emotional responses in the audience. Melodrama was a term of product classification used within the industry, and its trade meaning seems to have been almost diametrically opposite to that to which criticism has put it. "Ask the next person you meet casually how he defines a melodramatic story," wrote a critic in 1906, "and he will probably tell you that it is a hodge-podge of extravagant adventures, full of blood and thunder, clashing swords and haiťs-breadth escapes."69 From then until at least 1960, the trade's understanding of "melodrama" continued to embrace this generic sense, deriving from the 134 Genre ?' tradition of spectacular stage melodrama, full of "trapdoors, bridges to be blown up, walls to be scaled, instruments of torture for the persecuted heroines," and the like.70 The trade press, for instance, described White Heat (1950), Body and Soul (1947), and Psycho (1960&as melodramas, not Stella Dallas (1937), Back Street (1931 and 1941), or Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959). As far as the industry was concerned, Jame£ Cagney, not Joan Crawford, made melodramas, and directors of actiorftriovies and thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Raoul WalsH? and Samuel Fuller were identified in the trade press as masters of melodrama.71 In the 1940s * the industry labeled about a third of its product as melodrama, and rfc ^ clearly expected these pictures to appeal predominantly to the men m the x audience.72 Within the trade's usage, "melodrama" was certainly not an elevated term. The "woman's film," on the other hand, had a relatively prestigious status in Classical Hollywood. Most woman's films, which would be identified as "melodramas" by the conventions of recent criticism, were placed by the industry in its other general category, of "drama." As an industry term, "woman's film" embraced a range of sub-groupings that included romantic dramas, "fallen women" films, Cinderella romances, and working-girl movies.73 Given that Classical Hollywood assumed that the majority of its audience was female, it is hardly surprising that these "dramas" were generally of higher budget and status than the "melodramas" designed with a more masculine appeal.74 Far from being a despised or denigrated production category, the "woman's film" was one of Hollywood's "quality" products. This discrepancy between the language of the trade and that used by critics demonstrates with particular poignancy the difficulties in establishing an appropriate generic terminology. Although it would be possible to argue that much genre criticism, like much auteur criticism, has avoided Hollywood's history rather than explained it, that criticism has nevertheless provided many important insights into Hollywood as a cultural institution. The critical classification of melodrama also provides a useful example of the way in which, since the 1960s, critical assumptions have had a bearing on how post-Classical Hollywood has understood itself. The term has largely dropped out of currency within the trade, which has come to accept the derogatory overtones that critics incorrectly argued that it always possessed. When "melodrama" is used now to describe a movie like The Prince of Tides (1991), it implies something similar to its now * established critical meaning, equating it with the woman's film.75 That point is at the center of our second reason for considering the case of melodrama. Because criticism has constructed histories for Hollywood -generic and authorial histories, for instance - that are in important respects different from Hollywood's economic history, it is at times necessary to consider these histories in tandem. It is not a simple matter of saying that one is right and the other wrong; histories are seldom that absolute. Feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s not surprisingly recognized Genre 135 Classical Hollywood cinema's endorsement of patriarchal values. But one 0f the strategies it developed to both analyze and resist that endorsement, the creation of the "woman's film" as a genre, addressed the endorsement of patriarchal values in existing criticism at least as much as it addressed that endorsement in the practices of Hollywood itself. It both contributed to and hindered the analysis of Hollywood's representation of women. The valuable work done as part of that strategy cannot be ignored, but the discrepancies between the history produced by that strategy and other histories of Hollywood must be noted. In his essay, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," Andreas Huyssen explores the extent to which popular culture has been accorded pejorative feminine characteristics as a means of discrediting it from critical attention. From the turn of the century, Huyssen argues, political, psychological, and aesthetic discourses have "consistently and obsessively" gendered "mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities." The gender imbalance of genre analysis represents an attempt on the part of critics, almost exclusively white and male, to identify some aspects of popular culture as part of that "real, authentic culture" which the aesthetics of Modernism have seen as "the prerogative of men."76 In this respect, critical practice has differed significantly from Hollywood's own bluntly commercial project. For however it may have represented women, Hollywood did not exclude them either from its movies or from the audience it sought to attract. Recognizing these historical circumstances may allow criticism to explore tije contradictions of Hollywood genres and its generic hybrids, rather Man attempt to resolve those contradictions in the defence of an individual movie's internal coherence. When, in the early 1970s, critics first made the case for studying the domestic melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk, their arguments emphasized Sirk's subversive purposes in offering "a devastating indictment of the entire society's world view."77 For once, a Hollywood director responded positively to the needs of critics to find ideologically acceptable hidden meanings. The posters for Written on the Wind (1956) had described it as the story of a Texas oil family's "ugly secret that thrust their private lives into pubHc view!", but Sirk called it "a piece of social criticism, of the rich and the spoiled and of the American family." Declaring that "irony doesn't go down well with the American public,"78 he compared the ironic happy endings of his movies to the Athenian plays of Euripides: There, in Athens, you feel an audience that is just as happy-go-lucky as the American audience, an audience that doesn't want to know that they could fail. There's always an exit. So you have to paste on a happy end___This is what I call the Euripidean manner. And at the end there is no solution of the antitheses, just the deus ex machina, which today is called the "happy end."79 13Ó Genre Sirk's comments gave support to critical arguments that saw his movies „ Brechtian critiques of both the society they depict aSid their own generic conventions. As, Christine Gledhill has pointed out, however, these argu-, ments required their proponents to patronize the ^movies' original audiences: "Irony and parody operate between two secure points: the position which we who perceive the irony occupy and tha^which, held at a distance, it critiques. The 'radical reading' of the 70s í?|rlonged to the critics made at the expense of the naive involvement oů American 'populať audiences in the 1950s."80 These "readings'' proposed that the distance between the movie's sentimental plot and its ironie style had not been visible to the original audience. In Paul Willemen's analysis, irony was a property of the movie as a text, and the problem of the audience was dealt with by suggesting that "there appears to be a discrepancy between the audience Sirk is aiming at and the audience which he knows will come to see his films."81 The implications for, a politics of gender in critical references to Sirk's "mastery" of the "woman's film" were even more bluntly revealed in Jean-Loup Bourgeťs assertion that, "by systematically using the cliché-image he [Sirk] creates a distance not between the film and the audience (women ply their handkerchiefs at Sirk's films), but between the film and the director."82 Such criticism distinguished Sirk the subversive auteur from the genre he was working in by assuming the gullibility of the public, adopting a position that came dangerously close to the contempt for the mass audience that Huyssen drew attention to. But movies such as All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind provoke a multiplicity of interpretations, often in contradiction to each other, and most movies can provoke complex interpretations for reasons other than their own internal complexity. A movie may articulate contradictions powerfully without resolving them: in All That Heaven Allows, Car/s emotional and sexual liberation is achieved only when she subordinates her own desires to Ron's; the movie ends with the couple reunited, but only after Ron has been badly, injured so that Cary becomes his nursemaid, not his lover.83 A movie may simply be powerfully inarticulate, expressing the dramatic or ideological conflict at its center not through dialogue but in the form of spectacle, through decor, color, gesture, and composition, and through its ability to provoke an intense emotional response on the part of its audience. Or else a movie may derive its complexity from the number of contradictory viewpoints that it asks its audience to hold at the same time, something that generic hybrids do very frequently. Laura Mulvey has pointed out that ideological contradiction is "not a hidden, unconscious thread" in domestic melodrama, detectable only by special critical processes. Instead, contradiction is melodrama's "overt mainspring... the 1950s melodrama works by touching on sensitive areas of sexual repression and frustration," re-presenting contradictions in an aesthetic form.84 The women Jean-Loup Bourget disparages may have gone to "weepies" like All That Heaven Allows not only to escape from reality but also to lament it.85 Pff___________.__________________:_______Genre 137" ' l * situating a movie within the historical framework of its original recep-Ktion can change the critic's perception of its relation to genre. Barbara ^Klinger has suggested that Written on the Wind and other domestic melodramas of the 1950s can be seen as part of a general industry trend toward k more "adult" entertainment, "defined by a combination of sensationalistic -and serious social subject matters."86 In 1956 Variety suggested that along "with blockbusters, "unusual, off-beat films with adult themes that televi-' sion could not handle" allowed the industry to retain one section of its ľ audience. The production of such "adult" movies was facilitated by revi-1 sions in the Production Code in the same year, permitting the treatment of ř drug addiction, abortion, and prostitution. Studios adopted novels and plays that already had "adult" profiles, and the cultural kudos of their original authors gave the movies prestige as well as notoriety. The "adult" movie category, which involved a combination of sensationalism, "adult" subject-matter, and a style emphasizing excess and psychodrama, cut I pS across conventional generic boundaries: Klinger suggests that in the mid-f ~ 1950s it included not only adaptations of Tennessee Williams' plays like í'" Baby Doll (1956), Nelson Algren's novel about drug addiction The Man with t\ the Golden Arm (1956), or Grace Metalious' Peyton Place (1957), but also The \ Searchers, more conventionally seen as a pillar of the Western, but "adult" ■f in its sensationalist treatment of the theme of miscegenation. Certainly . Written on the Wind fits into this cycle very well. Studio pre-release publi-'? city described the movie as "a searing adult drama that at one time might ■ have been considered too explosive to handle. Today, however/it takes its r place among important HoEywood products that have dared to treat un-i conventional themes in a sensitive, realistic fashion."87 While contemporary reviewers disagreed as to its relative sensitivity or sensationalism, ; many df&its press reviews concurred with the opinion that "This adult drama, a penetrating exploration of morals and Freudianism of four people tossed into an emotional whirlpool by cross-relationships, a drama of vast dimension and delicacy, is further proof that Hollywood has really í grown up."88 Genre criticism has provided an important counter-position to auteurism, and its intertextual approach provides one of the most useful points of access to Hollywood's commercial aesthetic. But genre criticism has often itself made ahistorical assumptions about its object of study. ; Looking at the ways in which a movie like Written on the Wind was situated for its potential audience complicates an analysis that requires that audience to be no more than "women plying their handkerchiefs," victimized by a text subverting generic conventions too cleverly for them to recognize. Instead, WOW, as it was often referred to in its publicity, can be placed within a matrix of alternative definitions, allowing its audiences and critics to interpret its complexities in a variety of generic contexts. The movie's visual appearance, the focus of many later critical claims for its subversive-ness, was promoted as part of its spectacle on its first release. Articles publicizing the movie drew female spectators' attention to its decor as a 138 Genre source of inspiration for their own home decoratiorL^Barbara Klíngeťs historical examination of Written on the Wind helps to explain the way that generic conventions negotiate with and contradict each other across a. single Hollywood movie. Such analysis may fragment a critically constructed genre such as "melodrama" into something-much closer to the production industry's cycles, but it also extends our^understanding 0f , Hollywood as a generic cinema. '■£ Notes 1 Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," in Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 (London: Souvenir Press, 1973), p. 103. Michel Foucault cites this passage, and "the wonderment of this taxonomy," as the starting point for his work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1974). 2 Andrew Tudor, "Genre," in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 7. 3 Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 5,213. 4 It may be no coincidence that most of the genres delineated primarily by their content are action movies likely to appeal to a predominantly male audience. 5 J.P. Mayer, British Cinemas and their Audiences: Sociological Studies (London: Dobson, 1948), p. 217. 6 Steve Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 22-3. 7 Steve Neale, "Questions of Genre," Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990), pp. 46-7. 8 Douglas Pye, "Genre and Movies," MOVIE 20 (Spring 1975), p. 32. 9 Dallas W. Smythe, John R. Gregory, Alvin Ostrin, Oliver P. Colvin, and William Moroney, "Portrait of a First-Run Audience," Quarterly Review of Film, Radio and Television 9 (Summer 1955), p. 398; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "Audience Research in the Movie Field," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 254 (November 1947), p. 166; both quoted in Bruce Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), p. 75. 10 Leo A. Handel, Hollywood Looks at its Audience: A Report of Film Audience Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 119-20. 11 Kleine Optical Company Complete Illustrated Catalog (1905), quoted in Neale, "Questions of Genre," p. 55. 12 In his "Cultural History of the Horror Movie," Andrew Tudor provides several different overlapping chronologies which correspond to cycles within the overall group. The main agency of development, he suggests, is a commercial version of the survival of the fittest "financially successful films encourage further variations on their proven themes, thus generating a broadly cyclical pattern of successes which then decline mto variously unsuccessful repetitions of the initial formula." Other, less immediately obvious patterns of commercial, cultural, and social factors overlay this crude commercial Darwinianism. Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, p. 23. 13 Barbara Klinger, " 'Local' Genres: The HoEywood Adult Film in the 1950s," paper presented at the BFI Melodrama Conference, London, July 1992. 14 David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 293. 15 Colin MacArthur, Underworld USA (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1972), p. 34. For an Genre 139 extended discussion of this case, see Richard Maltby, "'Grief in the Limelight/: Al Capone, Howard Hughes, the Hays Office and the Politics of the Unstable Text," in James Combs, ed., Movies and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 133-82. 16 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939 (New York: Scribneťs, 1993), p. 179. 17 Barry R. Litman, "Decision-Making in the Film Industry: The Influence of the TV Market," Journal of Communication 32:3 (Summer 1982), pp. 44-5, quoted in John Izod, Hollywood and the Box Office 1895-1986 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 183. 18 Andrew Britton, "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," MOVIE 31/ 32 (Winter 1986), pp. 2-3. The tendency of horror-movie audiences to engage with the movie in this fashion has often brought down the moral or political disapproval Britton exhibits here. Rather than indicating a vicarious and sadistic participation in the acts of mayhem, it may indicate, as Carol Clover and Marco Starr have suggested, a more complex act of self-defence by viewers identifying not with the killer but with his victims. It is also worth noting that vocal audience engagement was a normal feature of theatrical audience behavior until fairly late in the nineteenth century, and remained an element in moviegoing until the introduction of sound. Marco Starr, "J. Hills is Alive: A Defence of I Spit on Your Grave," in Martin Barker, ed„ The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto, 1984), p. 54. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992), pp. 118-19. Bruce A. McConachie, "Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900," in Richard Butsch, ed., For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Lawrence W. Levine,Hig/z-brow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 19 Carol Clover comes up with an alternative formulation, in which the movie's exhibition becomes "a cat-and-mouse" game in which the movie tries to catch the audience by surprise. She also understands the vocal responses of audiences in these terms. Clover, p. 202. 20 Ring Lardner Jr tells a version of this story in Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca - Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 1992), p. 107. 21 Quoted in Clover, p. 10. 22 Neale, "Questions of Genre," p. 56. 23 Klingeťs analysis of the "progressive/subversive" genre as an object manufactured by a particular critical practice (much like two of her instances, film noir and melodrama) is acute, as is her critique of that criticism's practice of "textual isolationism." Rather than attribute an immutable politics to a text by its possession of this or that narrative, thematic, or stylistic feature, Klinger sees generic variation as a form of regulated difference and an essential functioning element of the overall Hollywood system. Barbara Klinger," 'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Genre," in Grant, pp. 74-5,88-9. 24 Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, p. 211. 25 James Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 84. 26 This move from genre to auteur is built into the organization of several of the important early works on individual genres, such as Colin MacArthuťs Underworld USA and Jim Kitses', Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969). 140 Genre 27 Clover, p. 11. T 28 Robert Warshow, "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,'" üv Gerald Mast and Marshal] Cohen, eds, Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University PresS 1985), pp. 449-50. J 29 Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study ofhhe Western (Berkeley, CA University of California Press, 1975), p. 15. Claude Lévi-Sri-auss, "The Structural Studj of Myth," Journal of American Folklore 68:270 (1955), pp. Í&8-44; Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968) Vera Dika's analysis of the "stalker film," discussed later^in this chapter, provides an example of the structuralist approach to movie narrative. 30 Although we could, if we were distinguishing among devices that could be used for storing liquids. The quotation from Jorge Luis Borges at the beginning of this chapter is both funny and provocative, because its system of generic classification is nonsensical, but it might make us wonder if our own systems are any more coherent or appropriate. 31 Pye,p.31. 32 Thomas Sobchack, "Genre Film: A Classical Experience," in Grant, p. 103. 33 For example, Barry Keith Grant, who identifies Casablanca (1942) as a "nongenre film " Barry Keith Grant, "Experience and Meaning in Genre Films," in Grant, p. 117. 34 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 38. 35 Alan Williams, "Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9:2 (Spring 1984), pp. 123-4; Tag Gallagher, "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western," in Grant, pp. 202-16. 36 Paul Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir," in Grant, p. 169. 37 Charles Musser, "The Travel Genre in 1903-04: Moving Toward Fictional Narratives," Iris 2:1 (1984), p. 57; Neale, p. 54. 38 Thomas Elsaesser refers to this as a "phatic" process, by which the movie is greeting the audience, and letting them know what kind of experience they may expect. Thomas Elsaesser, "Narrative Cinema and Audience-oriented Aesthetics," in Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott, eds, Popular Television and Film (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 271. 39 Vera Dika, "The Stalker Film, 1978-81," in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 93-4. 40 Rick Airman, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," in Grant, p. 30. 41 John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Popular University Press, 1970). 42 Kitses,p. 11. 43 Brian Henderson, "The Searchers: An American Dilemma," in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods Vol. E (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 444. 44 Warshow, pp. 438,439,449. 45 Jon Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western (Westport, CT-Greenwood, 1985), p. 263. 46 Edward Buscombe, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (London: André Deutsch, 1988), p. 35. 47 Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 75,84, 69. 48 Pye, pp. 34,36. 49 We once witnessed a critical exchange in which one speakeťs insistence that the Genre 141 cutting between shots of the feet of the protagonists during the build-up to the climax of a spaghetti Western deliberately confused their identities was greeted with the contemptuous assertion by one listener that if the speaker could not tell a Mexican boot from an American one, he had no business expressing an opinion about Westerns. In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Billy also tells a story in which a mistake in etiquette over a pair of boots leads to a fatal gunfight. w grtentJUm was a highly^rfjanea^ejonrj^mtertitles could be changed or movies short-. ened by mdiWdualexhibitors as well as by distribution companies arid censors. Al-th"öügh~sound mtřÓďuced agreatgr degree of material fixity, complete standardization " wäyttevei^cm^éôŤanä when the recycling of movies on television became acknow-_■ IgdgedTnthé production process, the practice 5? maklng~"prötection shots" to preserve^ *K-narraove continuity while usingljss_expliatjrtaterial.once again became as common""1 ^Ctice-as-iťKáa~been in the 1930s. Close Encounters of the ThirdI Kind had a second" "ť?Aj >-fti^ ^ÉK* ^eatricaTreieasejnra ''apedai-edittbn^ťrlree years afteŕlfsTrgfiáT'áppearance\'m^777^/fj.\^'}i---'^ ^*Kyř ^ ^ happens occasíô^airýlYtth-^^ f; tK - l g9867Jplginoted itself by advertising_that it contameo^^ev^te^^ of extra *+^^ ^ v •"i&r | footägerestöretnolJheo J as^ä dance i^ľ^Teter yean andT^Sj^ermoáejobjex^eJiial^itis-noJonger_enough_^ fn hmrá. 5SFH^~W.«^o. h,-. «-------:-i&istejruistj?a/^ E: jormat^liřtorriayejňjBKÍěssIj^dlssected the workinan attempt to diyine-iand_perhaps' * control) its indefinable power."_í?ěter Dean anrTMark TrWmnHö "Wín^rr« " anu* ™j p ' '-"i " ^^ I f k introD its indefinable_power.'^Petěj: rjeanaňo^arkXenrj.0^ 'WmdUp," Sf^ŕfl"^ ? "lU-j 5oOTí^-3^ÝteTV^enesrMa^h^93), p^621The newest technology thus promises to ; jgturnJ^th.eJdea_Üi^moyje£ejdsnnmulu^ejyersiQrjďUeminding us of how question- \j t^fj?~ ablejs_the idea of an "originaĽlversion of a Hollywood movie. 5 ~Jf^- - 51 Producer Darryl Zanuck removed thirty minutes from John Ford's director's cut of Myj ^~,^J "*" Darling Clementine, "deleting some humor and 'sentimentality/" and allegedly/ strengthening "the storyline and pace." To Ford's chagrin but on the basis of preview/ Ij) reactions, Ford's preferred ending was changed so that instead of shaking hands with! ' Clerŕíentine before he rides off, Wyatt kisses her. Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and\ his Films (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 233. J §-■ 52 Philip French, in his introduction to a BBC television screening of the version released #< in 1989. The acrimony surrounding the movie's production and editing is detailed in *■ Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 183-211; Garner Simmons, Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976), pp. 169-88; and Marshall Fine, Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah (New York: Primus, 1991), pp. 240-60. Michael Bliss discusses the differences between the two versions, and suggests that the 1989 release version was an early, unfinished cut, in Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 217-18, 327-8. 53 Buscombe, p. 289. 54 The title has a more obvious explanatory function in "Peckinpah's" version, where it | distinguishes between the flashback and the framing scenes. 55 The opposition between "official" and "outlaw" heroes is explored in Ray, pp. 59-66. 56 Gallagher, in Grant, pp. 209-10. 57 André Bazin, "The Western: Or the American Film Par Excellence," in What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 147. 58 Warshow, p. 438. Budd Boetticher, quoted in Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 19. 59 142 Genre Although Mulvey, whose use of the quotation has made iť notorious, does not record the fact, Boetticher was referring specifically to the role'ofrwomen in Westerns rather than movies in general. 1 '"- 60 Garrett's Mexican wife appears in one scene in the script, when Garrett returns to Lincoln after Billy's escape. She denounces his pursuit of-Billy, and they argue. The scene was cut for the MGM release version, and is alsá: missing from the version released in 1989. Seydor, p. 201; Doug McKinney, Sam"Beckinpah (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 166; Terence Butler, Crucified Heroes: The Filmsfpf Sam Peckinpah (London Gordon Fräser, 1979), p. 123. '^e 61 As a result, Garrett's reluctance to pursue Billy, and the ambivalent attitude theyshare to the law, is more explicitly enacted in this version than in the "original" release 62 Warshow, p. 449. 63 Butler, pp. 90-1. 64 Carol Clover produces a brilliantly perverse account of the generic migration of the "settler-versus-Indian" story to rape-revenge movies such as I Spit on Your Grave (1977): "by making the representative of urban interests (what would normally be taken as the white male elite) a woman, and the representatives of the country (what would in the western have been Native Americans) white males, these movies exactly reverse the usual system of victim sympathies. That is, with a member of the gender underclass (a woman) representing the economic overclass (the urban rich) and members of the gender overclass (males) representing the economic underclass (the rural poor), a feminist politics of rape has been deployed in the service of class and raaal guilt. Raped and battered, the haves can rise to annihilate the have-nots - all in the name of feminism." Clover, p. 163. 65 Clover, p. 168. 66 Bazin, "The Evolution of the Western," in What is Cinema? Vol 2, p. 149. 67 Christine Gledhill, "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London British Film Institute, 1987), p. 11. 68 Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), p. 14. 69 Frederic Taber Cooper, "The Taint of Melodrama and Some Recent Books," Bookman (February 1906), pp. 630-5, quoted in Ben Singer, "Female Power in the Serial-queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly," Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990), p. 95 70 Montrose J. Moses, "Concerning Melodrama," The Book News Monthly (July 1908), p. 846, quoted in Singer, p. 95. 71 Steve Neale, "Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term 'Melodrama' in the American Trade Press," The Velvet Light Trap 22 (Fall 1993), pp. 70, 75. 71 Neale, "Melo Talk," p. 72. 73 Balio, p. 235. 74 Carol J. Clover notes that video stores are more likely to classify a plot as "horror" when it is low-budget and "drama" or "suspense" when it is high-budget. Clover, p 5. 75 Halliwell's Film Guide describes The Prince of Tides as "a lushly romantic melodrama " Halliwell's Film Guide, 8th edn (London: Grafton, 1992), p. 896. 76 Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 191. Tania Modleski and Dana Polan also engage these issues in their essays in this book. 77 Roger D. McNiven, "The Middle-class American Home of the Fifties: The Use of Architecture in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life and Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Genre 143 Allows," Cinema Journal 22:2 (Summer 1983), p. 55. A number of influential essays first appeared in a special issue of Screen 12:2 (Summer 1971). "Irony doesn't go down well with the American public. This is not meant as a reproach, but merely that in general this public is too simple and too naive - in the best sense of these terms - to be susceptible to irony. It requires clearly delineated positions, for and against." Sirk, quoted in Paul Willemen, "Distanciation and Douglas Sirk," in Laura Mulvey and John Halliday, eds, Douglas Sirk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972), p. 26. 79 John Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 116,119. 80 Gledhill, p. 11. 81 Willemen, p. 26. 82 Jean-Loup Bourget, "Sirk and the Critics," Bright Lights 6 (Winter 1977-8), p. 8. 83 Brandon French, On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (New York: Ungar, 1978), p. 102. 84 Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," MOV7E 25 (Winter 1977-8), pp. 53-6. 85 Rainer Werner Fassbinder suggested that the audience weeps during Imitation of Life (1959) because it understands why the movie's characters must be in conflict, and how that conflict is inevitably produced by social forces: "The cruelty is that we can understand them both (Annie and Sarah Jane], both are right and no one will be able to help them. Unless we change the world. At this point all of us in the cinema cried. Because changing the world is so difficult." Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "Six Films by Douglas Sirk," in Mulvey and Halliday, p. 106. 86 Barbara Klinger, "Much Ado About Excess: Genre, Mise-en-scene and the Woman in Written on the Wind," Wide Angle 11:4 (1989), p. 11. 87 Quoted in Klinger, "'Local' Genres," p. 10. 88 Quoted in Klinger, "Much Ado," p. 12. 89 Klinger, "Much Ado," p. 15.