On Narrativity and Genre in Film

A running joke in literary studies suggests that there are really only two stories: A stranger comes to town, and a person goes on a journey. Though reductive, a certain degree of truth rests in this punch line; it underscores our natural desire to taxonomize narratives according to their simplest distinct components. Such a desire has found its expression in disciplines as diverse as Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. Indeed, as human knowledge is both cumulative and analogous, in oral cultures and their resulting literatures the similarities of stories are often intuited without the need for deconstruction. When reading the stories of Siddhartha Gautama and the Moses narrative from the Book of Exodus side-by-side, the similarities between the two are salient enough that the presence of narrative formulae in one story might inform how we understand them in the other, whether knowingly or not. We make no value judgments about the stories based on their structure, but somehow understand the distinctions between the figures of Moses and Siddhartha despite, for example, the narrative fact of both having grown up in a palace with at least one parent who was traditionally not biological, both having left that palace for the wilderness, achieved realization, etc. But what marks the distinction is often difficult to articulate beyond the impressionistic assertion that Moses is not Buddha, or vice versa.

In the medium of film, the formulaic construction of narrative is ostensibly more problematic and implies value distinctions. A film can be deemed good or bad simply from its diegetic elements. From such formulae come the so-called “genre films,” widely viewed as artistically inferior due perhaps to a perceived lack of imagination on the part of their creators; that is, a willingness on the part of filmmakers to merely kowtow to the dictates of genre without offering their own unique stamp on their product. The objective of this short piece is to exonerate genre films from charges that they lack artistic integrity. While film theorists such as Leo Braudy, who has been instrumental to this study, take for granted the distinction between genre films and classics,—a distinction that Braudy then proceeds to challenge by showing the reader the social merit of genre films—the present discourse questions that dichotomy entirely; its first principle is that a genre film presents a hackneyed formula that can or cannot be tweaked or transcended to create a timeless art object. In other words, all films are genre films in so far as their narratives are, to varying degrees, formulaic. Generic films have a grammar just like any other language. But just like English grammar does not define what makes an excellent poem but only informs the poet’s decision of what words can go where and how a piece can and cannot be written, generic grammar offers a skeletal structure onto which filmmakers can or cannot graft ideological presentation and shaping of that material. The linguistic distinction here would be the one that Rick Altman makes in his essay, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” That is, the distinction between a genre’s syntax and its semantics. However, I also interject the linguistic concept of the idiolect, into this discourse. The idiolect is the personal speech patterns of a given speaker and his or her own unique manipulation and presentation of language. Extending that linguistic analogy to film, the idiolect is the unique combination of generic signs and codes claimed by a given filmic text or its filmmaker’s approach to that text. To draw a literary parallel, in the English oral tradition of the scops, everyone in attendance at the meadhall knew which story would be told on a given night and which formulaic, diegetic tropes would be invoked in order to tell those stories, but they were nevertheless enthralled by the storyteller’s performance. The truly talented scops could bring something unique to their performances; they could employ the oral formulae in such a way as to forge a new and transcendent product, an idiolectic presentation of the narrative. The scops were much less disingenuous than our modern artists, but they were likewise imaginative artists. The creative filmmaker is like any imaginative storyteller. Not only the stories employed by genre films but all stories are generic; however, great filmic texts transcend the formulaic nature of diegesis and denotation in favor of their own creatively significant and unique form of expression and connotation.

As Leo Braudy explains in his essay “Genre: The Conventions of Connection,” “Too often in genre films the creator seems gone and only the audience is present, to be attacked for its bad taste and worse politics for even appreciating this debased art” (535). Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the genre functions on autopilot, dragging the spectator as it jaunts from convention to convention and trope to trope, without any consideration of how it travels. Braudy’s project is to trace the trajectory of modern prejudice against the genre film, rooting it in the Romantic primacy of “personal vision” (536), before attempting to defend it. He continues, “Genre films offend our most common definition of artistic excellence: the uniqueness of the art object, whose value can in part be defined by its desire to be uncaused and unfamiliar, as much as possible unindebted to any tradition, popular or otherwise. The pure image, the clear personal style, the intellectually respectable content are contrasted with the impurities of convention, the repetitions of character and plot” (535). The fallacy of this notion, which Braudy clearly illustrates, is that such a pure narrative could ever possibly exist. For all narratives are at least formulaic if not palimpsestic. Braudy is of course seeking to explain the “literate” film watcher’s supercilious leer at the genre film as an ersatz art object in order to ultimately chide such a notion. For him, genre films could very well provide the vehicle for a more serious scrutiny of “self and society that more serious films, because of their bias toward the unique, may rarely touch” (536). Braudy’s project is to present the merits of the genre film without the caviling bias evinced by many of his colleagues and contemporaries. Like any other film, genres present a certain type of narrative, yet Braudy suggests an intrinsic uniqueness to the genre film, explaining, The methods of the western, the musical, the detective film, of the science-fiction film are also reminiscent of the way Shakespeare infuses old stories with new characters to express tension between past and present. All pay homage to past works even while they vary elements and comment on their meaning[…p]erhaps the main difference between genre films and classic films is the way that genre films invoke past forms while classic films spend time denying them. (538)

Genre films are constantly in dialogue with the past; they exist both as a part of and a commentary on a generic lineage. Though so-called “classic” films may or may not seek to defy narrative convention, the shortcoming in Braudy’s argument is that he does seem to purport classic films themselves as a sort of genre, pit in a binary against genre films. The question he never addresses is whether in a new medium such as film, all texts are not referential. A useful complement to Braudy’s simultaneous defense and reiteration of the presence of genre is Rick Altman’s structuralist approach to genre theory. Altman suggests the useful language of semantic and syntactic approaches to a film, exhorting theorists to view these aspects as sometimes in conflict: We need to recognize that not all genre films relate to their genre in the same way or to the same extent. By simultaneously accepting semantic and syntactic notions of genre we avail ourselves of a possible way to deal critically with differing levels of “genericity.” In addition, a dual approach permits a far more accurate description of the numerous intergeneric connections typically suppressed by single-minded approaches. (Altman 558) To paraphrase, simply classifying a given filmic text as “generic” does not capture the subtle interplay of traditions, codes, and valences within a text, or its degree of genericity. Though Altman argues from the a first principle that genre films are inferior to classics and simply mitigates the assumed negativity of film’s genericity by using this rubric, his methodology clears the way for an objective study of film aesthetics. If the diegesis or syntax is already a given, what defines a film’s merit is its semantic power. In other words, what really makes a film captivating is how it presents its diegetic form— whatever that form may be. This criterion can and must be applied to all films. In his seminal book How to Read a Film, James Monaco outlines “two axes of meaning” presented by filmic texts, “the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic” (132). This bifurcation sits quite nicely with Altman’s syntactic/semantic model and itself knowingly owes much to the work of early film semiologist, Christian Metz. Monaco continues that there are three crucial questions that present themselves to a filmmaker: 1) What to Shoot 2) How to Shoot It 3) How to Present the Shot Monaco sees the first question as primary in literature and the second as much less important, though he does not explain why. This paradigm is of course applicable to generic films as much as so-called classics; much like in literature, what a story is, does not carry the same weight as how it is told. These questions could present themselves to a filmmaker whether the text she adapts is War and Peace or a zombie flick, and the conclusions drawn from those questions is what pronounces the idiolect of each unique film. It exists within a language system, but it has its own diverse and unique set of linguistic idiosyncrasies. Monaco then further dissects these questions by presenting Peter Wollen’s tripartite model of the Icon, the Index, and the Symbol, viewing the Index and Symbol as those aspects of the filmic shot most disposed to the presentation of poetic language and abstract meaning. These fundamental questions and their accompanying models are the key to subverting the supposed dichotomy of classic and generic film. The concluding portion of this piece will apply some of these theoretical paradigms towards cursory readings of two classic films which straddle the liminal and artificial line between genre film and classic, Roman Pulanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Chinatown has all of the diegetic and stylistic trappings of the film noir genre: J.J. Gittes is a haggard and disgraced ex-cop and current private detective who provides voiceover monologue throughout the film; sexy trumpet saunters underneath the majority of the narrative which opens with snapshots humorously documenting marital infidelity; Gittes is mysteriously hired by Evelyn Mulwray to spy on her wealthy husband; the diegetic material presents nothing syntactically new to the spectator; yet, semantically, something feels different. In the opening scene, Gittes is dressed flamboyantly in a white zoot suit with a portrait of a smiling FDR sitting atop his desk. We sense that Gittes is a comic figure, a parody of the classic P.I. Even the fact that the original femme fatale of Mrs. Mulwray is not in fact Mrs. Mulwray at all, contributes to this reading. When he does meet the actual Mrs. Mulwray, she interrupts him in the midst of making a racist and off-color joke about the sexual prowess of a Chinese man. At the time that the viewer encounters this scene— if not for the title—the presence of “Chinese” things and Chinatown only strike her as important because they are titular. In this enigmatic reference to chinoiserie, what is clear is that Gittes is a hack. He is constantly physically deterred and beaten by adversaries, whether hot on the trail or not, and seems to be only involved in his profession for money and women. He is a failed cop, which results in his career change, and is always in the way of his former colleagues. Returning to Altman’s language as presented earlier, syntactically, Chinatown is clearly an example of neo-noir, i.e. a mystery piece; semantically, it is a Bildungsroman in which Gittes and the spectator together learn the craft of private investigation. Furthermore, the shocking denouement in which Mrs. Mulwray is shot in the eye while fleeing with her daughter/sister, which appropriately takes place within the confines of Chinatown, owes more syntactically to the gangster film of the 1950s than the film noir to which Chinatown overtly draws its inspiration. In this “classic” the formulaic elements of a generic mystery are all of course present; however, Pulanski’s answers to Monaco’s pivotal questions of “how to shoot” and “how to present the shot” both comment on and undermine any generic formula, allowing the film to transcend the bounds of form through its unique comment, or idiolectic rendering of the genre. Seemingly in contrast to Chinatown, Taxi Driver (1976) is a difficult film to categorize. We know very little about its protagonist, Travis Bickle, aside from the implication that he is a veteran, the assumption that he a recent transplant to New York City, and the narrative fact that he has garnered a job as a taxi driver. In fact, that Travis drives a taxi is the one clear constant in the filmic text. Taxi Driver is the rare film that actually does offer new syntactic material—overlooking the stranger-comes-to-town construct joked about at the beginning. A film about the gradual unraveling of a sociopathic cab driver defies all genres; but semantically, Taxi Driver owes much to film noir in the way in which its diegetic material is presented. Like a good P.I., Travis spends much of the film riding along in his taxi, searching after clues (fares) which help him to solve a mystery, with his voice-over musings becoming more and more frenzied and violent as the film progresses. Travis’ mystery is that of himself and his role in the chaotic and anonymous urban landscape. In typical film noir, the femme fatale walks into the private eye’s office, insinuating herself into his life and initiating the narrative. In this film, Travis’ taxi is his office and Iris—the 12-year-old prostitute, played by Jodie Foster—is his femme fatale; however, she does not want his help. He insinuates his services on her as her sociopathic and self-righteous protector, and the process solves the “mystery” of his own macabre destiny, namely, his evolution into a lauded public vigilante. In conclusion, this short piece sought to illustrate that the binary of generic and classic film is a misleading and artificial one. Like a language, film has both syntactic and semantic functions with which it is able to communicate narratives to its viewers. Thus, a film can be diegetically formulaic (as almost all stories are), but stylistically unique by drawing different conclusions to the questions of “how to shoot” and “how to present the shot.”