I have this year gone back to University to study a Post-Graduate Diploma in Communications. Last week I wrote my first essay, on the concept of a genre, and I thought, "Why not upload it to my blog?" So here it is. It is, I believe somewhat better written than many of the posts I have slapped together recently. It may be a little academic but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
2. “Pop culture analysts identify and dissect the various genres that make up their subject and also explore the nature of audiences for each genre” (Marcel Danesi, Popular Culture). Discuss the relationship between popular media and genre.
Genre and The Much Exaggerated Reports of The Death of the Author
The concept of “genre” has enormous utility in the identification and elucidation of the diverse texts that make up the subject studied by pop culture analysts. Pop culture arguably grew out of sociology and the concept ‘genre’ provides a bridge between a sociological approach to culture, in which texts emerge from and ‘reflect’ society as a whole, and the traditional approach adopted by old-fashioned literary scholars in which an individual work, such as a book or a film, is interpreted in isolation from its social, cultural and generic context, as the expression of the life and world-view of an individual author. Pop culture analysts today often adopt the perspective that the author of any particular work can be safely discounted, overlooked, bypassed, that we can move directly from society to popular media texts via genre. This essay aims to show the limits of this approach and argue that the author remains important. The intention, hopefully, is to resurrect the author.
The study of popular culture combines elements of two different disciplines: the sociological or anthropological study of people and cultures generally, and literary criticism. Traditionally, up until the mid-twentieth century, literary critics believed that the meaning of a text lay in the intentions of the author; the purpose of literary criticism was to interpret the author’s intent, to translate it into simpler language or bring it to light. When films first became objects as worthy of study as written works, in the 1940s, French film critics invented the term ‘auteur’ to circumvent the problem that films are created collaboratively: when studying a film, they argued, one should look to films that bear the distinct imprint of the director’s creative personality and assume that the meaning of a film lay in the director’s intent when making it. Starting in the ‘sixties however, in particular with the publication of The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes (1967), the meaning of a text floated free of the author’s intent, Barthes arguing that the meaning of a text lay not in the author’s (or auteur’s) mind but in the mind of the reader.
Beginning in the sixties, the erasure of the notion of ‘author’ enabled a new paradigm to come to the fore: the idea that societies and cultures create texts rather than individuals. This change occurred as Saussure’s Structuralism became popular. The anthropologist Lev-Strauss had produced a Structuralist account of myth, arguing that all myths express universal formulas that arise from timeless characteristics associated with mankind and primitive societies (see for example Structural Anthropology 1976); in 1928 Vladamir Propp (Propp, 1968) had argued that all the tales in Russian folklore are based on simple formulas, that the semantics change but that the syntax never does. Both Lev-Strauss and Propp argue that story structures are universal and atemporal. This idea soon came to be applied to contemporary fictions. As the twentieth century progressed, however, Post-Structuralism eclipsed Structuralism and the idea of eternal narratives fell away. Culture was still seen as structured like a language, stories were still seen as instances of parole arising from an underlying langue, but it was recognised that societies and cultures, language itself, could change, was diachronic rather than synchronic.
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism both informed the developing field of Popular Culture Studies and found expression in the concept of ‘genre’ as a means of approaching popular culture. Thus today we often find Pop-Culture academics making two bold claims – that the putative authors of works are not fully conscious of their own intent when creating texts and that texts ‘reflect’ society as it is when the texts are written. Society itself speaks through works of fiction. In Popular Culture Genres (1992) Berger repeatedly makes both these claims. For example, he says when talking about westerns,
"At the same time, as Wright has tried to show, stories tend to reflect changes going on in the economic and political structures of society: the westerns evolved, mirroring changes taking place in the American economic system. This mirroring is, of course, not done consciously by writers of westerns or anyone involved in producing them. The changes in the westerns reflect changes in American society as felt by writers, who then, without consciously trying to do so (generally speaking) mirrored these changes in their scripts."
(p. 77, italics mine)
Producers of pop cultural texts are in a way puppets of the social forces in which they are enmeshed. Consumers too are also in a way puppets – the popular success of a particular text can be attributed to some kind of social affinity between consumer and commodity. Elsewhere in Popular Culture Genres, for instance, Berger divides the population into four groups – Hierarchical Elitists, Individualists, Egalitarians and Fatalists – and proposes that each group gravitates towards different genres. For instance, he argues that Egalitarians may tend to like comedies and Fatalists may tend to like Country & Western songs (p. 60-63).
In Popular Culture studies, the term “genre” mediates between society and individual texts in a way that the term “author’ once did in literary criticism. The aim of this essay is to show the limitations of a theory that has societies generating narratives and downplays authorial creativity.
The simplest way to argue in favour of this thesis would be to focus on non-generic texts, on texts that bear an author’s distinct imprint, but this shall not be the strategy of this essay. Genres certainly exist and much popular culture, particularly movies, is certainly generic. According to Danesis: “Genres are identifiable by certain conventions, which audiences have come to recognise through regular exposure” (Danesis, p. 32). It is useful to distinguish between three different types of convention: conventions of style, of structure and of content. For instance, the film genre ‘comedy’ has as its unifying feature a shared style. Every moment in a comedy is intended either to be funny itself or to set up a later joke. Films like Living in Oblivion (DeCillo, 1995), Bruce Almighty (Shadac, 2003) and The Trip (Winterbottom, 2011) have nothing in common in terms of content or structure: what they share is a style, an ‘intent’ to make audiences laugh regularly.
A sub-genre of ‘comedy’ is ‘romantic comedy’. Beyond the stylistic convention of presenting gags regularly, these films have a shared structure. They present a man and a woman who usually meet early in the film, are destined to be together but only couple up at the end because, until then, obstacles of some sort stand between them. In the film Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993), the obstacle standing between the two protagonists is the fact that they live on opposite coasts of the United States. In You’ve Got Mail (Ephron,1998), the future lovers form an attachment anonymously via email but, in person, dislike each other because they own competing business. Towards the end, however, they discover each others’ ‘secret identities’ and realise their love for each other. In both When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989) and What Happens in Vegas (Vaughan, 2008), the protagonists initially dislike each other but gradually fall for each other over the course of the film, only realising the depth of their feelings towards each other at the end; in this latter film the two have drunkenly married in Las Vegas and are forced by a judge to remain married if they wish to receive a fortune made at the casino. In both Friends With Benefits (Gluck, 2011) and No Strings Attached (Reitman, 2011), the principle characters start sleeping together early in the film, a significant innovation in the Romantic Comedy genre (it is interesting to note both films were made in the same year), but only commit heart as well as body to each other at the conclusion.
Romantic comedies are always concerned with a man and woman who make some kind of contact early in the film but do not commit to each other until the end. However, what brings the two together in the first place, and what keeps them apart until the resolution, can vary from film to film, and this point-of-difference or ‘high concept’ is the selling point for each film, what makes each film distinctive. Thus every romantic comedy balances convention (the love story, a story which is always the same) with innovation (the particular obstacles that stand between the two lovers). This innovation can be attributed to the conscious and intentional creativity of writers and directors. A significant audience exists for romantic comedies and they are marketed to this audience as ‘romantic comedies’ but every film in the genre (ideally) depends upon a uniquely different situation.
Another significant genre is the High-School Film. Examples include Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982), The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985) and Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993). The High School Film is not a recognised genre and many movies of this kind are categorised as coming-of-age films or romantic comedies: for instance the seminal film Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) is often classified a coming-of-age film, while 10 Things I Hate About You (Junger, 1999) is often classified a romantic comedy. Clueless, Cruel Intentions (Kumble, 1999), 10 Things I Hate About You and Easy A (Gluck, 2010) are notable because all either adapt or refer heavily to literary classics – respectively Persuasion by Jane Austen, Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Chaderlos de Laclos, The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Each classic has a quite different plot. Adapting classics and setting them in high schools being so common, such films might be said to form a sub-genre of the High-School-Film. One wonders if anyone has thought to adapt Wuthering Heights for teens yet?
What High-School films share is a sense that a High-School is a world unto itself, a microcosm of society. Some of these films, such as the first three mentioned, are ensemble pieces; others, while tending to focus on a single character, typically female, also tend to have subplots about the romantic fortunes of second-tier characters. This makes them significantly different from romantic comedies which usually focus only on the romance between the two central characters. Conventions include not only the high school setting but the sense of a high school as composed of various cliques; teachers are generally presented positively and students are generally presented as engaged and enthusiastic. This makes these ideal films to be taught in real schools. The High-School film is particularly amenable to genre hybridisation – for example the film Brick (Johnson, 2005) pastiches hard-boiled detective fiction even though its main setting is a school and all its significant characters are teenagers. Although the High-School film is a genre, each film in the genre differs significant from the rest.
The Vampire Film genre also shows how films within a single genre can vary significantly from film to film. Whereas romantic comedies share a style (a continuing humorous tone) and a structuring premise (“Love Conquers All”), and High-School Films have in common a common setting, what ties together Vampire Films is that they all contain vampires, a convention at the level of content. The seminal vampire story is the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) and the first film vampire is Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922). Many of the films that followed were horror films in which the vampire played the part of a monster terrorising innocents, an example being Dracula (Browning, 1931). Insofar as ‘Vampire Film’ can be considered a genre unto itself however, it allows for the possibility of many different styles and innovations. Comedic Vampire Films include Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948) andThe Fearless Vampire Kiillers (Polanski, 1967). Innocent Blood (Landis, 1992) features a good vampire who only preys on criminals: this film is notable also for mixing horror, comedy and gangster (specifically mafia-film) conventions. My Best Friend Is A Vampire (Huston, 1988) is a pure comedy featuring a teenager turned vampire who drinks only pigs’ blood. What ties together all these films is simply the vampire concept.
Two vampire films that deserve special mention are The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1987) and Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987). These two films, released only two months apart, have virtually the same basic plot. A young man is turned into a vampire (fully in Near Dark and partially in The Lost Boys), spends time with the other cool kids, the vampire posse, and falls for a girl who runs with the vampires. In Near Dark, the protagonist recovers his humanity through blood-transfusion and at the climax kills the vampires who were formerly his peers to rescue his girlfriend; in The Lost Boys the protagonist must kill all his former friends before he can become fully human again. In both films, the protagonist runs with the vampires for a time before turning against them. These two vampire films, made independently of each other, must have spoken for something in the zeitgeist. Both films are concerned with the dangers of teenage rebellion, the simultaneous lure and peril of the peer group. The vampire lifestyle stands as a metaphor for drug and alcohol use, for rock and roll, for casual sex, flouting of authority, risk-taking, staying up past one’s bedtime, all the gestures adolescents value as the highest form of freedom. Both films concern a dalliance with a teen culture that must finally be rejected.
And then in 2008 we had Twilight (Hardwick, 2008). This film features a family of good vampires who do not burn when exposed to sunlight but sparkle instead. It marks a complete inversion of the original vampire films, the vampires now being heroes instead of monsters. Twilight has been classified as a “romantic fantasy film” in stark contrast to earlier vampire films which traditionally were horrors. It is possible the vampire genre may recover from this film but it has dealt the genre a grievous blow.
This brief discussion of different varieties of genre points to the fact that even within a genre there is significant room for variation and innovation. Arguably, to suppose that the creators of genre films and the consumers of genre films are unconscious of a genre’s societal implications is to underestimate the critical and intellectual capacities of writers, directors and audiences. Sleepless in Seattle deliberately alludes to An Affair to Remember (McCarey, 1957) and Scream (Craven, 1996) is a slasher film featuring characters who themselves know the conventions of the slasher film genre. This intertextuality and metatextuality evinces the fact that the creators of genre fiction are quite consciously aware of the rules of their chosen genres and recognise that their audiences similarly know the rules. They know when the rules are being followed– and when they are being broken. Creators innovate deliberately and audiences appreciate innovation. The Author is not really dead.
Berger argues that genres change as a result of social change, that pop culture texts are epiphenomena mirroring an underlying and temporally prior social reality. In this his view resembles the idea in Orthodox Marxism that the base (conditions of class and of economic production and exchange) determines the Superstructure (a structure that includes Popular Culture). I would like to propose a radical counter-argument – that popular culture is quasi-independent of social reality. Popular culture continually reproduces itself independently of the ‘real world’. When authors create new texts they engage in “What if?” type scenarios: for instance, before Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red conceived the film Near Dark, they probably asked themselves, “What would happen if we mixed vampire and western iconographies?” and the story emerged as an answer to that question. This innovation did not follow, or reflect, a social change. Every new story arises from an interplay between conventional, established narrative forms and innovation that is essentially speculative and aleatory. Changes in society do not bring about genre change; rather creative minds hit upon lucky accidents.
Popular Culture analysts are interested not only in genres but in the audience particular genres attract. In this relation, it is interesting to consider the film Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996). This film can not be easily situated within any particular genre and yet found its own sizeable audience and is considered a great success – it was ranked 10th greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999. The fact that this text could be so successful without belonging to any recognisable genre shows the limitation of approaching popular culture entirely in terms of genre. Nevertheless, one could argue that Trainspotting does draw on a kind of formula – it is about a young man who is faced with a choice between his peer group and with teenage rebellion on the one hand, and growing up and ‘choosing life’ on the other. Most of the film shows the consequences of his continuing decision not to grow up – but at the end Renton turns his back on heroin and his former friends and ‘chooses life’ instead. The film dramatises a choice between teen culture and adulthood, and in this way closely resembles both The Lost Boys and Near Dark. The difference is that it substitutes heroin addiction for vampirism as a metaphor for youthful rebellion. All three films appeal to adolescents, particularly male adolescents, who feel a wish to rebel but are anxious about the consequences of rebellion.
In 2017, a sequel to Trainspotting was released. T2 Trainspotting (Boyle, 2017) is not aimed at the same demographic as the original – rather it is intended for the exact same audience as the original, males who saw the first film in their teens and early twenties and are now in their late thirties and early forties. T2 does not concern a character who must reject teen culture and grow up; rather it is concerned with nostalgia for lost youth. It is just as non-generic as the original.(Arguably the recent Star Wars film The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015) also exploits the power of nostalgia to engage its audience.) In an interview Robert Carlye said of T2 that it “is going to be quite emotional for people. Because the film sort of tells you to think about yourself. You are going to be thinking: 'Fuck. What have I done with my life?’ ” (Levine, 2015). Neither Trainspotting nor its sequel can be considered generic.
Another pop cultural example that shows the limitations of viewing all pop cultural texts in terms of genre is the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling, 1997) is not admittedly sui generis; it is indebted to Fantasy fiction (a school for young wizards had featured in Ursula Le Guin’s 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea), to boarding school stories and to teen mysteries such as The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. But it was sufficiently different from what was considered usual children’s fiction at the time it was written that the novel was rejected by eight publishers before being picked up by Bloomsbury. The Harry Potter series was entirely different from the rest of contemporary children’s fiction then being published. Nevertheless it became an enormous success over a few short years. If we accept Berger’s view that popular culture reflects society then we have to suppose that in the period just prior to the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, significant social change had occurred around the world which would explain its success– but no such significant change is in evidence. Presumably, furthermore, if successful pop cultural texts reflect society, publication and production companies should be able to predict which books and films will succeed through market research – but the fact that Rowling’s manuscript was rejected by eight publishers suggests either that these publishers were very poor at judging the market or that the success or failure of a work to reach an audience is only tenuously connected to real world conditions.
This essay has sought to show the limitation of an approach to popular culture in which all texts are viewed as belonging to fixed genres. Berger is representative of a strand in popular culture analysis beholden to Structuralism and Post-Structuralism based on the idea that texts reflect society as a whole, mirror society, and which emphasises the similarities between texts; in this essay I have attempted to show how even texts within a single genre can differ markedly from each other and how important Pop Culture texts, such as Trainspotting and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, can be almost entirely non-generic. Audiences value novelty as well as familiarity. The author remains important. As Grazian points out in “Mix It Up: Popular Culture, Mass Media and Society” (Grazian, 2010), “After all, in the end, all hits are flukes, and nobody knows anything.” (p.118). If this is true, it undercuts the assumption that a knowable causal connection can be found between society and popular culture, the premise of Berger’s argument. Grazian argues that genres are not natural but artificial, are convenient marketing devices: the creative industry is risk-averse and selects and promotes cultural commodities that are similar to past successes, a conservatism that expresses itself in the selection of directors with proven track records, actors with proven track records and genres with proven track records. Perhaps if the profit motive were taken out of the creative industries, genres themselves might either disappear or greatly diminish in importance.
The issue of the relationship between popular media and genre is related to an age old question in narrative theory. Is there only a finite number of possible stories or is there an infinite number of stories? If we apply Structuralist and Post-Structuralist ideas to popular culture, we may be led to believe the former, but in fact the latter is true. Innovation is always possible and the number of possible stories is limitless.
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