The US film industry works by way of a finely calibrated
genre system. Long ago, Hollywood learned how not to shoot in the dark, by
tailoring its expensive products to a market that it could divide and conquer.
Producing the very tastes they catered to, the studios engineered a formulaic
system of reliable genre formats, within which minor variations had the
specious effect of “novelty”.
The way that system looks today can tell us a good deal about
our own manufactured tastes. At the most abstract level, it is important to ask
how this network of forms solicits our acquiescence to the economic and
political status quo, of which it is a vital component part.
Looking at this chart, some initial points should be made.
First, we might bracket the concept of “drama”, which is not
properly a genre category, but a misnomer that obscures the complex of actual
generic energies at work under its umbrella.
Second, we should remark the relative collapse of once-healthy
and prosperous genres within the system. The Western and musical, former
pillars of Hollywood’s palatial architecture, have fallen almost completely out
of contention. Fantasy is, pace The Hunger Games, on relatively hard times,
after a high-water mark about a decade ago. And Sci-Fi has yet to regain the
foothold it had in previous periods.
Third, the small slice of the pie reserved for family
pictures is entirely disproportionate to the budget of features privileged
enough to be green-lit in that category. This is one of the system’s costliest
and most lucrative genres, but geared as it is to periodic school holidays, it
cannot risk over-production.
These caveats noted, what can we make of this spread of
generic preferences within the US film industry’s sense of its consumer base?
“Drama” aside, the four major genres, accounting for over
50% of all productions in the USA, are action/adventure, thriller/suspense,
comedy, and documentary. But if we think hard about how “drama” often enough
really works, and factor in the generic ambivalence between comedy and romance,
then clearly romance (which features poorly as a stand-alone category) is the
fifth “power genre” today. And these “big five” cover roughly 75% of the
market.
Genres, of course, never stay still. They are constantly
being reworked and reimagined to suit the ideological temperature of the
present.
Once upon a time, American comedy was a subversive genre. In
the hands of a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Lloyd, or the Marx Brothers, film comedy
shed discomfiting light on social and cultural divisions that undermined the
myth of national unity. Laughter sprang from these fault-lines in the
collective psyche.
Nowadays, American comedy commonly reduces to a single
plot-line: the idiot man-child, whose essential innocence survives all trials,
gets the girl. The exceptions — Borat, which is British, comes to mind—only
prove the rule that kicks in with iron rigidity every time Will Ferrell, Adam
Sandler, Vince Vaugn or Seth Rogen steps in front of a camera.
Why bother cultivating Groucho’s acerbic intelligence or
Chaplin’s acute sensitivity? Risible morons rule OK (though, thank God for
Melissa McCarthy).
The action/adventure film has never been particularly
interested in social matters. Its overriding imperative is to provide kinetic
stimulation and a relentlessly forward-driven narrative, in which a resourceful
individual overcomes all obstacles on the path to final victory. The wider
world boils down to a series of exotic backdrops and explosive threats, against
which the hero valiantly struggles. Tough guys (and gals) über alles.
The suspense/thriller, on the other hand, at least toys with
the idea of society. If it isn’t a woman being menaced at home, or an abducted
child, then often enough some conspiracy, criminal, corporate or state, is
generating malign effects in the social body. The individual, or a small band
of skilled professionals, has to outwit and out-manoeuver the enemy before
something truly disastrous occurs. This generally places the responsibility for
resistance beyond the reach of regular citizens, in the hands of exceptional,
gifted “experts”. We just watch.
And romance, which once enjoyed the radical connotations of
“screwball” and the cachet of Sirk’s and Cukor’s mature melodramas, today exists
predominantly for the purpose of justifying the heterosexual marital bond as
the irreducible nucleus of all social life. Female characters overcome their
misgivings about the available (and usually disappointing) menfolk, prior to
making their all-important Choice.
The ideological flavour of these four dominant generic
formations is, uniformly, socially conservative. Even when genre-blending takes
place, such that “comedic” signals are felt in a science-fictional space, or a
“thriller” plot device intrudes upon a romance, it is neutralised by the fact
that all these formats share the same essential social outlook.
That outlook is this: the world is beyond your power to
alter it.
The best you can hope for is to be a resilient and
reproductive social cell, in a trusting bond with another or some few others,
able to withstand adversity and enjoy the adrenaline rush of capitalist
experience. Flexibility trumps resistance. Stupidity beats reflection. And
getting the guy/girl sure looks better than getting organised.
All of which is raised to the power of overkill by the style
and cinematic form of these movies: crushing obviousness of plot;
metronome-like editorial cuts subservient to narrative flow; star-power as
locus of sense; opacity reserved for ‘action sequences’, where it evaporates in
kinetic heat; and a palpable dread of empty time, drift, and inconsequence.
Recently, the irresistible rise of documentary has betrayed
this excruciating conservatism of the genre system that surrounds it. But
documentary — in the hands of an Errol Morris, a Michael Moore, or any number
of others — is reformist in principle. Its agenda is to instruct a misinformed
citizenry and lift it above apathy with the power of enlightenment. It asks you
to put pressure on your Congressman and stamp out the skullduggery within the
system.
But capitalism, as was long ago pointed out, functions all
the better thanks to such principled reformism. Is there any genre that demands
of us a fighting stance adequate to a more radical reckoning with the status
quo?
Though it is certainly available to conservative
conscriptions (as witness last year’s deplorable The Conjuring), and is often
purely sensationalist, my feeling is that horror film is where the genre system
now and then tips into radical territory.
Horror teaches us to perceive the world as an unpredictable
terrain laced with terror, despite superficial order. It shows us our own
bodies susceptible to invasion, contagion, corruption, and a blasphemous
life-beyond-death. It depicts legions of mindless undead roaming the cities,
like ghastly mirror-images of our consumerist selves.
It shows how profoundly haunted we are by our traumatic
pasts. It explores how easily our own precious life-substances can be consumed
by predatory powers—something every wage-slave already knows. It confirms our
worst fears about those in command: they will never cease to feast on our
bodies, our fluids, our souls.
Horror works by way of unsettling affects: nausea, the
prickling of the skin, a shock, a shudder, a scream, the “suspiration of forc’d
breath”. It teaches through these affects the vulnerability and precariousness
of our present place in the world, and the urgent necessity of fighting back.
Particularly, contemporary horror film is increasingly
reflecting on some of the less romantic social destinies of women — as
reproductive carriers of the human “disease”, as routine victims of sexual
crimes, as daughters and wives of abusers, as shock troops in the unending war
against patriarchy — and granting them leading roles in the coming reparations.
Another thing about horror film is that the good stuff
doesn’t come with a big budget. At its best, it is small-scale, intimate, and
the more disturbing for that. It’s a genre that a bunch of talented kids can
work within confidently on some Kickstarter funding and minimal training.
2013 was interesting for two American features in the genre.
Frankenstein’s Army was a wildly imaginative work in the found-footage
subgenre, playing with the long-forgotten “mad scientist” template and
unleashing a number of seriously frightening Nazi-designed monsters, without a
hint of CGI. The film cost $22,000 to make.
Frankenstein’s Army.
And there was I Am A Ghost. With a microscopic budget of
$10k, H. P. Mendoza’s fiercely intelligent monodrama drew inspiration from the
poetry of Emily Dickinson and probed questions of possession and madness with a
lucidity impossible to locate in the blockbuster garble of the mainstream. It
also proved genuinely disturbing.
he genre system has to find some place, however slender, for
the circulation of anti-social and critical energies; it cannot altogether
manage them by way of erasure and omission.
With the relative disappearance of leftist conspiracy
thrillers, of the juridical Western, of subversive comedies, of utopian
musicals, of “hysterical” melodramas, and of speculative science-fiction, it is
in the horror genre today that the USA reflects particularly on what is most
disagreeable about its way of life.
If documentary asks us to speak up about the way things are,
horror prods us to scream at it.
Source: theconversation.com
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