A Question of Genre

A sampling of the conversation I had with my friends this past weekend outside the Southpoint Cinema.

“I don’t really want to see Amelia –it sounds too much like a biopic”

“Yeah, I’m in the mood for something more sci-fi”

The word genre is ubiquitous in film conversation today – it’s how movies are organized at Blockbuster or categorized on Fandango. It’s how award shows are segmented and how Netflix makes its recommendations.

So the question then arises, are movies sacrificing quality and originality in order to fit a populist mould of genre?

The Economics of Film

In his article, Questions of Genre, Neale states:

“…genres are not simply bodies of work or groups of films, however classified, labeled and defined…

They help render films, and the elements within them, intelligible and therefore explicable.”

Neale argues that all films primarily fall into one of three primary genres – the narrative film, experimental/avant garde film and the documentary. All other movies would then fall into sub-genres of these three categories.

As film analysts and academics, we like to identify elements that are common to a certain ‘type’ of movie because this allows us to study the movie against its predecessors both within and outside its genre.

Hollywood likes this classification because it assumes that a movie will find an audience similar in size to others of its genre. Indeed, audiences have been conditioned to believe that if they enjoyed for instance the harsh realism of Spielberg’s wartime flick, Saving Private Ryan then they would also enjoy Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima.

When you consider the huge production and marketing budgets of most movies that come out of the Hollywood system, it makes perfect financial sense that studios would take into consideration the return on their investments. It’s Marketing 210.01 (Mondays and Wednesdays at 1.40pm in the Fuqua Keller classroom) In an increasingly risk averse Hollywood, the ‘customer-creating organism’ wants to generate profit by ‘micromarketing’ a product to a ‘niche demographic’. So if a movie based on a popular children’s toy does well, the market is flooded with copycat-movies like Transformers, GI Joe and even a Monopoly movie !!!

Narrative Images

Neale says that the idea of genre is further reinforced by a ‘narrative image’. He explains this term as follows:

“An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema’s anticipatory reply to the question, ‘What is the film like?’”

A film’s entire marketing campaign – its posters, tagline and trailer are thus designed around this narrative image – a specifically tailored marketing hook. Much like the packaging on a box of cereal, you know precisely what you’re going to get.

In this clip, an astute observer created a mash-up of the 2012 movie trailer to decry its generic imagery. Indeed, the tagline of the film could very well be “Stuff Blows Up”!

Which is why, I’m always excited when I see posters like the one for Synecdoche, New York or this one for the upcoming A Serious Man:

Genre Bender

On the question of movies spanning across genres, I identified the following three points in the Neale article.

• One - Neale says that you could pretty much take any two disparate texts and find elements common to both and put the resulting union in a class of its own but is there any merit to calling the result of such a  union a genre?
• Two - All genres initially evolve by combining elements from previously discrete and separate genres.
• Three - Genres are best understood as processes. They are marked fundamentally by difference, variation and change.

Neale is basically saying, and I’m inclined to agree with him, that genres are constantly evolving. The movies that contribute most to a genre are those which in fact push the boundaries of the genre. By picking and choosing elements from the movies that preceded it, the “generic corpus” is constantly being expanded by these movies.

“Each new genre film constitutes an addition to an existing generic corpus and involves selection from the repertoire of generic elements available at any one point in time.”

So a movie like Chicago does more for the genre of Broadway adaptations than The Producers or Rent, the latter being more straight-forward examples of the genre. While in the Producers, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick burst into song at an opportune moment, Chicago adapted the musical by asking what cinematic elements could the screen add? As a result, you have visually astounding production numbers that also serve to move the narration forward.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is in essence a comedy but adopts narrative techniques of the noir. Slumdog Millionaire pays homage to its Bollywood roots with its kitchy closing sequence. And love him or hate him, Michael Moore changed the way filmmakers approached the documentary and inspiring a style later adopted by movies such as Super Size Me.

These movies are constantly challenging the notion of what constitutes a genre – and as a result the movie-goer is only richer for it.