Exam 4: Genre Films

 

Note: the password for the readings GANGSTER READING and TOOTSIE READINGS on my website is

filmclass

 

THE PUBLIC ENEMY

 

 Our second unit of study is on FILM GENRES, and the genres we’ll study are the gangster film, the romantic comedy, and the western.  A genre, simply stated, is a category of film like the three that we’ll be studying, but also the musical, horror film, science fiction film, film noir (Touch of Evil), war film, disaster film, or family melodrama (Far From Heaven).  According to Thomas Sobchack a genre film “is a film which belongs to a particular group of films that are extremely similar in their subject matter, thematic concerns, characterizations, plot formulas, and visual settings.  Such a film somehow depends on these similarities for its very existence and for the satisfactions it brings the viewer” (Hollywood Genres)   Your textbook further says of genre films, “As filmmakers bring forth more variations of a genre, the genre changes, and the genre changes as the times do” (631).  Thus in the evolution of films within a particular genre there will always be this balance between what an audience expects of a film and what is new to the audience, between an individual film belonging to a genre but at the same time challenging it.

 

 

FORMULA, CONVENTION, ICONOGRAPHY

 

    How do we know, instinctively, when we’re watching a film that it belongs in a particular genre?  We know this from our past experience watching films.  We can identify a film as being a Western, musical, horror film, or whatever by its FORMULA PLOT, SETTING, TYPICAL CHARACTERS, and ICONOGRAPHY, and sometimes by its VISUAL STYLE. 

 

            FORMULA is “a pattern of dramatic actions or plot that becomes familiar as it is repeated with minor variations from film to film” (Sobchack).   In the classic Gangster film, for instance, the formula plot runs as follows: the hero is an ambitious, independent young man, usually ethnically identified (Italian, Irish, Jewish) who comes from the lower classes in an urban setting.  He becomes part of a criminal gang, and by using violent means, he rises in wealth and power through the course of the film.  But it is inevitable that in the end of the film he will fall.

 

            The SETTING of the classical gangster film is the city.  In your reading for this week, Thomas Sobchack describes setting this way:

 

“The gangster’s milieu is the modern city, generally seen at night, with its enclsoing walls of concrete and shadow, its rain-soaked streets, and its careening black automobiles.  The gangster’s setting…is one of contested space where forces of social order and anarchy are locked in an epic and unending struggle.” (83)

 

Conventional settings within the city include the nightclub, the gang hideout, the streets and back alleys of the city.

 

            The TYPICAL CHARACTERS in the gangster film, beyond the hero as I’ve described him above, include sometimes a side kick (as in the western), gang bosses, ‘soldiers” who work under the bosses in the gang hierarchy, police (sometimes corrupt), women as sexual objects to be possessed by the gangster, and family members like a mother or a father (who is often either weak or dead).  This nuclear family is presented in the films in opposition to (that is, in conflict with) the gang “family.”

           

            Perhaps the way we most readily identify a film as belonging to as particular genre is through its ICONOGRAPHY.  Sobchack defines an ICON as “an object, landscape, or performer who accrues symbolic as well as particular meaning and conveys that meaning through recurrence in a group of genre films.”  In other words, within a particular genre, these iconic objects carry meaning that they would not necessarily carry outside of that genre.  The iconography of the western is perhaps the most familiar to us of any genre: six guns, horses, the stagecoach, black hats and white hats, and so on.  The iconography of the gangster film is nearly as familiar: machine guns, fast black cars (often from the 1930s, even in films shot much later), fancy clothes (and in fact the clothes of the gangster often change as he rises in power and wealth), and women dressed in sexually provocative wear.  Often there are a lot of long guns and long cigars that are clearly identified with men!

 

Unlike other genres, the classic gangster film has a characteristic VISUAL STYLE as well.  There is usually a good deal of editing and camera movement.  Sometimes the view is obstructed or the frame is dark.  The rhythm is often choppy, the story told in a fragmented form.  Settings are often crowded with people (remember it’s an urban genre).  Obligatory scenes may include a family dinner, a religious scene, the gang hideout, the police raid, as well as a shootout in an alley.  The rise of the classic gangster film in the early 1930s corresponds to the rise of sound film, so sound becomes an important element, and we hear the screeching tires of getaway cars and the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons.

 

              The question arises then, if these genre films are so much alike, and if they depend on stereotypes and conventions, why bother to study them?   

 

            We study genre films not because they are necessarily great works of art, but because our assumption is that they are reflective of the culture that produced them.  In this case, American culture.   

 

The reasoning goes something like this: Although there’s a good deal of craft and artistry that goes into the making of a film, commercial Hollywood film is and has always been primarily a business.  The same is true of other elements of our popular culture.  You’ve all heard the lament from sports fans that big time sports in America, even collegiate sports, is no longer carried out for the satisfactions of competition, but is first and foremost a business concerned with making the most money possible.  What about television and popular music? Here too, it seems, business—making money—takes precedence over the creation of something of artistic value. 

           

           Genre theory further holds that because filmmakers are engaged in this business, they will do whatever is necessary to please an audience, since the more people they please, the more money they can make.  Hence, the product—the film—can tell us something about the audience that that film is trying to please.  Specifically, it can tell us something about the shared values, beliefs, symbols, myths, and likes and dislikes of that audience: which is to say, its culture. 

           

            If this theory is correct, then genre films are particularly fertile grounds for the study of culture through film.  The reason is that in studying a genre, we can study not just one film to see what it tells us about the audience that liked it, but a whole series or category of films.  This series of films, or genre, has perhaps lasted for fifty or even a hundred years.  The first western, The Great Train Robbery was a silent short made in 1902. Another famous early silent, A Voyage to the Moon, is a French science fiction film.  The first talking film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, was somewhat of a musical.  Surely if these film genres have lasted so many years, and if individual films in those genres have so many of the same characteristics, then these film genres can tell us something about the culture which has produced them.  These film genres don’t exist in nature like a tree or a bird. They didn't come from god (at least not directly). They're not natural phenomena; they're cultural constructions.

 

THINGS TO LOOK FOR

 

Try to identify the Plot Formula, Setting, Typical Characters, Iconography, and Visual Style of the gangster film as it occurs in The Public Enemy.  It’s not at all hard!  Think about the character of Tommy Powers, as played by James Cagney.  How would you describe him?  How would you describe his attitude toward women and towards his family? And how might he be a precursor or forerunner to types that you see in action or crime films today? 

 

The early 1930s were a golden era for gangster films.  In 1931 and 32 Hollywood produced about 120 of these films, and people flocked to see them.  This was the time of prohibition and gangsters and their misdeeds made headlines in the newspapers.  Just as in today’s culture (with films involving terrorism or corporate malfeasance)  people went to movies to see something of their own times, their own concerns reflected on the screen.  Audiences saw these gangster films as essentially true stories.  As you watch this film, ask yourself what may be the basic question we ask as students of all popular culture:  why is popular culture popular?

 

And remember too that this is an old movie, made in 1931.  I particularly enjoy the language of the times, the attitudes towards sex, the old cars, and some of the production values of the film.  Much of what we see here is funny to us now, even though it wasn’t intended to be funny in 1931.  I think you can enjoy that element of the film and still appreciate why it works.

 

AFTER FILM LECTURE

 

I’m sure you noticed the disclaimers at beginning and end of the film, which read as follows (overhead)

 

DISCLAIMERS

 

 

(Foreword)

 

It is the ambition of the authors of “The Public Enemy” to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.

 

While the story of “The Public Enemy” is essentially a true story, all names and characters appearing herein, are purely fictional.

 

                                                --Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc.

 

 

(Afterword)

 

The END of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum.  “The Public Enemy” is not a man nor a character—It is a problem that sooner or later WE, the public, must solve.

 

 

This gives you an idea of how controversial the film must have been upon its initial release, as innocent and in fact comical as it seems to us now.  The years of the 1930s, the first years of talking pictures, were years before the Hollywood Production Code was implemented.  People were becoming concerned that popular films like those in the gangster genre were causing corruption in audiences, leading people astray, and so on, something like the controversy today over violent video games.  Protests ensued.  Perhaps this came about because films like The Public Enemy portrayed gangsters sympathetically.  Even though a central figure like Tom Powers gets his just desserts at the end of the film, his rise to power takes up much more screen time.  Thus we see him powerful much more of the time than we see him humbled or dead.  Yet this powerful central character of the film is a murderer and criminal.  James Cagney has star power, an attractive figure to the audience.

 

In 1933 Hollywood initiated its Production Code, which stayed in effect until it began to be ignored by filmmakers in the 1960s  (show still picture of things forbidden by code, 427), and which you read about for this week.  It was only after the Code came into being that the filmmakers of The Public Enemy went back and added the disclaimers to the beginning and end of the film, trying to bring it into compliance with the new standards of the day.

 

I’d like to show you about eight clips from this film illustrating points I brought to your attention before the screening.  But first, consider the film’s plot and content in terms of these two oppositions which are characteristic of some gangster films.  By “opposition,” a term I’m borrowing from structuralist theory, I mean a conflict or inconsistency presented in a film and which reflects a concern of the audience at the time of its production. The action of the film may attempt to mediate the opposition.  That is, it may attempt to erase this contradiction, to let the audience believe it can believe two opposing ideas at the same time.  (More about this over the next two weeks).

 

Business                                                                                  Family

 

Mr. Lehman – “legitimate” businessman                                Ma Powers

 

“Nails” Nathan   (like Lehman, Jewish)                                  Molly Doyle/Mike Powers as couple

 

Paddy Ryan                                                                            Matt Doyle/Mamie as a couple

Schemer Burns  --gang bosses, both Irish

 

Putty Nose                                                                  Kitty

 

“Pa” Powers

                                                                                    Jane (the older prostitute)                  

                                                                       

                                                                        Gwen Allen

 

<-Tom Powers->

 

 

This chart classifies the characters of The Public Enemy in terms of their alignment in regard to one of the central oppositions in the film (and in the Gangster genre) of “business” vs. “family.”  The men in the left column are listed arguably from the most powerful to the least.  Mr. Lehman is the brewer, the formerly legitimate businessman made otherwise by the passage of prohibition.  He is insistent that his name not be linked to any of the corrupt or violent activities that the gang undertakes to distribute his beer.  His appearance in the film suggests that in the minds of the audience, the corruption of the gangsters differs from the practices of mainstream business, of American capitalism, not by its basic nature, but by degree.  In other words, everyone breaks the law, some just do it more flagrantly than others.  Some get caught, some don’t.

 

Nails Nathan would seem to represent the ideal of a gang “soldier” like Tom Powers, with his flashy clothes, money, and easy manner.  The gang bosses hold power, but are less glamorous than Nails.  Note that all of these characters are ethnically identified in the film.  Putty Nose is more or less a small time hood.  And at the bottom of the list is Pa Powers, a figure of power over the boy Tommy, but merely a police officer, and a character who is dead by the time the main action of the film begins.

 

On the other side of the opposition is “family.”  Clearly Ma Powers is the strongest representative of this strain in the film, with her naive appraisal of her “good “ boy, her cooking and cleaning, her domestic house dress, and so on.  We’re also presented with two couples in the film, the straight arrow Mike Powers is presented as a weak character, identified with home, a “sucker” who volunteers to fight in the war and is injured.  But he’s paired with Molly Doyle, the sidekick gangster’s sister.  Slightly less identified with family and domesticty is Matt in his role as half of a couple with Mamie.  Yes, he’s a punk, but he at least has a girl. 

 

Then we have two of the women characters, whom I’ve placed towards but not within the “family” side of the opposition.  Kitty is the first girl that Tommy picks up.  She’s portrayed eventually as a whining, nagging wife-figure, portrayed at breakfast with Tom.  She’s rewarded for her “wifely” roll by getting a grapefruit in the face in one of the most famous scenes in American film!  Slightly less domestic is Jane, the older prostitute we encounter when Tom and Matt are hiding out from Schemer Burns.  It’s the way Jane talks to Tom that puts a woman like her, a prostitute, in this category: “You don’t need to be ashamed in front of me,” she says in her lilting motherly tone.  She has a motherly kiss “for a fine boy.”

 

Caught in the middle of this opposition is the hero, Tom Powers.  He wants to both remain loyal to his dear mother, to give her money and be her pal, yet be the independent tough guy who climbs the ladder of the gang’s business.  He wants to have it both ways, and the film finally tells us that he can’t.  You need only think of the Godfather series, where the Corleones run a “family business,” to see how this opposition plays out in a later film in the genre.  The Coreleones want to follow what we might label or mislabel “family values,” but at the same time they support this family through a business that’s as violent and corrupt as it is successful.  They want it both ways.

 

What’s more, and this is typical of the gangster genre, the gangster hero is ambivalent about sex.  To the gangster, a woman is nothing more than another possession to show off to his friends.  When Jane “takes advantage” of Tommy by having sex with him when he’s drunk, an act that could never have been suggested in a film after the Production Code came in force, Tommy is angry at her and hits her.  As the sexual siren Gwen asks Tommy, “Do you want to be different to please your boyfriends?”  In fact, the gangster’s first allegiance is to his fellow mobsters, not to his possession/girlfriends; women to the gangster are merely a sign of rising through the classes, like fancy clothes, hot cars, and the power of guns.

 

Gwen I place even more towards the middle on this scale.  She’s primarily a sexual being, and a possession of Tommy, yet she also treats him as a child, as I’ll show you in a clip from the film in a minute.

 

Here’s another, different way to think about the content of the film:

 

Fathers                                                           Mothers

 

punishing fathers                                             Ma Powers

Pa Powers (policeman, belt)                            Kitty

Putty Nose                                                      Gwen Allen

Schemer Burns                                                Jane, the “mothering” prostitute

Stuffed polar bear

shadow of cop

 

benevolent fathers

Paddy Ryan

“Nails” Nathan

 

 

This paradigm is something of a restatement of the business/family scheme.  Only here, we see fathers divided into those who punish Tom, which is most of them, and two who are more or less helpful to him (although those two are corrupt and unsympathetic in the eyes of the audience).  Note that I’m including here visual representations of “father” in the form of that polar bear Tom panics and shoots during the botched robbery, and the tall shadow of the cop Tom sees in the warehouse when he’s being pursued.  We’ll see that clip in a moment.

 

 

RISE AND FALL OF TOM POWERS

 

 

                                                GAINS WEALTH/CARS/WOMEN

                                                               ^                                   v                 

                                    strong arms speakeasy owners            angry at Jane/leaves rashly     

                                                   ^                                                               v

                        dressed as delivery men/beer in milk truck                 Matt is killed

                                      ^                                                                                v

            gets gun, but botches burglary                                                acts rashly to get revenge

               ^                                                                                                                   v

steals watches                                                                                                 shot by Burns gang                                                                                                                 tries to repent, but too

                                                                                                                                    late                                                                                                                                         

 

CLIP ONE – credits  (chapter one 0-1:00)

 

Even the music of the film supports the underlying business/family opposition.  We hear the “domestic” theme, when the music is a gentle waltz played by strings; but the rest of the time we hear the theme (“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”) cast in a minor key and played by brass in a more “masculine” minor key.

 

CLIP TWO  (chapter two 1:57-4:22; chapter three 5:06-7:21)

This opening montage sets the scene (“establishing shots”) by presenting us with the urban mileu that’s the home of the gangster.  We see factories, stockyards, crowded immigrant streets of a city we learn later is Chicago.  It’s stock footage, obviously, that the filmmaker has borrowed.  The function of the scene is to try to explain, however briefly, why the gangster has become what he has—that there is a societal responsibility for crime. 

 

Then we get the Salvation Army band marching through, representing religion and especially temperance, the “family” side of the business/family opposition.

 

The scene with Tommy as a boy again shows the roots of his miscreant behavior.  He calls Molly Doyle “only a girl” and tells Matt, “We got business,” and “That’s what you get for fooling around with women.”  He already is uncomfortable around women not his mother (and we hear the business/family opposition). 

 

 He’s told he’s “the meanest boy in town” after he trips Molly Doyle on her skates, and calls his brother Mike a “sissy.”  Then the camera dollies in with a high angle shot of the only scene in which the father appears.  He speaks no lines, but only administers his violent punishment.

 

 

CLIP THREE  (chapter 8,  24:00-25:00

Prohibition montage: A great bit!  Here we see “ordinary” people throwing flowers out of their van in order to fill it up with booze on the day before prohibition goes into effect.  We see people pushing a baby carriage full of booze bottles, corrupting the “family” symbol of the carriage for the purposes of the “business” of liquor.  We see the hypocricy of the society that enacts prohibition even though so many of its members want to drink (and note that many of these people seem by their dress to be in the upper class), and we learn again some of the reason behind Tom Powers becoming a gangster, especially in the next scene when Paddy Ryan says that booze will be valuable now that prohibition is here.

 

CLIP FOUR  & FIVE  (chapter 9 30:38, chapter 9 32:03

Note than when the gangsters move up in the world, the first thing they do is get fancy new clothes and a new car—these are the trappings, the ICONS we associate with the gangster hero and the gangster genre.  “Be careful” Tom tells the valet, “this ain’t no Ford.”  And then when Tom tries to pick up Kitty, he says, directly, “You’re a swell dish, I could go for you.”  Kitty is merely an accoutrement, another one of his gangster trappings, an object that indicates his status.

 

CLIP SIX  chapter 11 40:46- 43:02

Note how the keg of beer is visually obstructing our view and the characters’ views of each other—its prominence in the mise en scene.  Alcohol is the thing that’s dividing this family, and we see that visually represented here and at the end of the scene when Mike Powers throws the keg at the table.  Note too that even the home spun Ma Powers has a glass of beer.  The audience of the day, most of whom likely had not stopped drinking either, really do see Mike Powers as a “sissy,” don’t they?

 

CLIP SEVEN   chapter 12  45:52

Grapefruit in the face.  The gangster wants  a woman for sex and for the status she represents to him in the eyes of others, but when it comes to being in a domestic relationship and yielding power to a woman, no one can replace Mom and the gangster “moll” shouldn’t try.  This is one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history and it helped make Cagney a star.

 

CLIP EIGHT  chapter 17  58:47 -  1:01

Gwen Allen.  Note the relative size of the figures in the mise en scene.  Gwen is lying down seductively, while Tom is “erect” in the back, certainly suggestive.  But Gwen in the foreground is much larger in the mise en scne.  So who has the power in this shot??  Clearly the woman, through her sexual allure.  Look how the siren takes the passive, powerless Tommy to her breast, again like a mother.  “You’re a spoiled by, Tommy,”  Gwen says.  and “You’re my bashful boy.”  Again we have the conflation of the woman as mother and woman as sexual object.  We get similar dialogue when Jane, the older prostitute calls Tom Powers “A fine boy.” 

 

CLIP NINE  chapter 1  1:22:47 to end

Note the low angle shot and Tom, again pictured rigid and erect, falling flat on his face.  Another famous movie scene.

 

 

 

 

GANGSTER FILM

THE PUBLIC ENEMY (William Wellman, 1931)

"Simply  stated,  a  GENRE  film--whether   a Western,  musical,  film  noir,  or  gangster film--involves   familiar.  .  .   characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting." (Sobchack)

 

 

FORMULA “a pattern of dramatic actions or plot that becomes familiar as it is repeated with minor variations from film to film” (Sobchack).   

 

GANGSTER PLOT FORUMULA: the hero is an ambitious, independent young man, usually ethnically identified (Italian, Irish, Jewish) who comes from the lower classes in an urban setting.  He becomes part of a criminal gang, and by using violent means, he rises in wealth and power through the course of the film.  But it is inevitable that in the end of the film he will fall.

 

 

 

TYPICAL SETTING: the modern city

 

 

 

TYPICAL CHARACTERS:  side kick (as in the western), gang bosses and “soldiers,” police (sometimes corrupt), women as sexual objects, mother, or a father (who is either weak or dead). 

 

 

 

ICON as “an object, landscape, or performer who accrues symbolic as well as particular meaning and conveys that meaning through recurrence in a group of genre films.” (Sobchack)

 

ICONOGRAPHY OF GANGSTER GENRE: machine guns, fast black cars (from the 1930s), fancy clothes, women dressed in sexually provocative wear.  long guns, cigars as phallic symbols

 

 

 

VISUAL STYLE: much editing and camera movement, choppy rhythm, fragmented narrative.  obstructed view shots, dark frame. Crowded urban settings

 

Typical scenes: family dinner, a religious scene, gang hideout, shootout in an alley, police raid. 

 

Sounds: machine gun fire, screams, screeching tires

 

 

 

Note: the password for the readings GANGSTER READING and TOOTSIE READINGS on my website is

filmclass

 

 

TOOTSIE (Sydney Pollock, 1982)

"Simply  stated,  a  GENRE  film--whether   a Western,  musical,  film  noir,  or  gangster film--involves   familiar.  .  .   characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting." (Sobchack)

 

ROMANTIC COMEDY

 

TYPICAL SETTING: none

 

TYPICAL CHARACTERS:  male and female lead.  Other competing love interests

 

 

ICON as “an object, landscape, or performer who accrues symbolic as well as particular

meaning and conveys that meaning through recurrence in a group of genre films.” (Sobchack)

 

ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTIC COMEDY: none

 

CHARACTERISTIC VISUAL STYLE: none

 

FORMULA “a pattern of dramatic actions or plot that becomes familiar as it is repeated with minor variations from film to film” (Sobchack).   

 

ROMANTIC COMEDY is a genre identified most strongly by its plot formulas and its theme which according to Mark Rubinfield is typically “social regeneration through coupling”

 

TOOTSIE PLOT FORMULAS (Rubinfield):

 

Pursuit Plot (conventional in romantic comedies): “involves a ‘quest of conquest’ in which a hero is attracted to a heroine; courts her; encounters resistance from her; and, being a ‘real man,’ refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer.  Ultimately, the hero woos her, wows her, and wins her.”

 

Coldhearted Redemption Plot: “features a bitter hero who is incapable of love.  He is heartsick.  He is, also, too heartless to know he is heartsick…  What the hero most needs is a redemptive heroine.”

 

The Prick Foil Plot:  “The hero is depicted as a ‘regular sort of guy’ who although not always in the same social class as the heroine, genuinely loves her.  The prick foil, on the other hand, is typically depicted as a romantic rival who is economically and/or socially better positioned than the hero, knows it, and flaunts it.”

 

 

METHOD ACTING: “Acting in which the performer studies the background of a character in depth, immerses himself or herself in the role, and creates emotion in part by thinking of emotional situations from his or her own life that resemble those of the character.” (Phillips 636)

 

Depicted in the opening montage beneath the credits: Michael Dorsey and his acting students


 

 

Which interpretation of Tootsie do you find most convincing?

 

TOOTSIE IS PRO FEMINIST:

Dorothy's predicament-- how an actor can get a job as an actress, win the lady his male self desires and discourage the gentlemen his female surface attracts-- is food for comedy, but she herself is not a comic figure. The most important switch pulled in Tootsie is not in Michael/Dorothy's progression through gender but in the assumption that for a male to dress like a female is not, ipso facto, absurd. Not only is Dorothy a better man than Michael ever was, she is as well the woman of the year.

…Today's crop of [cross dressing] heroes/heroines--whatever their motives for cross-dressing--are mirroring contemporary sexual conflicts and attitudes. The recent plays and movies raise questions about what it means to be a woman, or a man, with some seriousness--even if the seriousness is served with a considerable admixture of mirth.

--Cantwell, Mary. “The Sexual Masquerade is Conveying a New Message,” New York Times. Jan 16, 1983.

 

TOOTSIE IS CONSERVATIVE, ANTI-FEMINIST:

It depicts women as weak, powerless, banal emotional blobs. They are saved only by a man's inspiring assertiveness in the guise of a soap-opera actress-heroine in designer blouses.

Dorothy is "unattractive." Dorothy is really a man. Obviously, then, the so-called "feminist message" dissolves into visual images that tell us the opposite: Dorothy is powerful in telling off Ron — Dorothy is homely. And the other women in the film are beautiful, powerless, and weak-willed. Thus, Tootsie perpetuates these unfortunate sexist stereotypes, as well as the antiquated assumptions about any connection between a woman's physical appearance and her intelligence. Finally, it must be remembered that the only person to successfully "call" Ron on his sexism is really a man. 

--Deborah H. Holdstein.   “Tootsie: Mixed messages.”  Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983.

 

 

 


 

 

PLOT FORMULAE (Rubinfield):

 

1.      Pursuit Plot (conventional in romantic comedies): “involves a ‘quest of conquest’ in which a hero is attracted to a heroine; courts her; encounters resistance from her; and, being a ‘real man,’ refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer.  Ultimately, the hero woos her, wows her, and wins her.”

 

2.      Coldhearted Redemption Plot: “features a bitter hero who is incapable of love.  He is heartsick.  He is, also, too heartless to know he is heartsick…  What the hero most needs is a redemptive heroine.”

 

The Broken-Hearted Redemption Plot: hero is “more loveless than heartless; his wounds stem from loneliness, not bitterness.”   Sleepless in Seattle

 

3.      The Prick Foil Plot:  “The hero is depicted as a ‘regular sort of guy’ who although not always in the same social class as the heroine, genuinely loves her.  The prick foil, on the other hand, is typically depicted as a romantic rival who is economically and/or socially better positioned than the hero, knows it, and flaunts it.”

 

The Dweeb Foil Plot: heroine’s choice is between the hero and a man “who is such a dweeb—such a pinhead—such a schmo—that the heroine’s choice is once again ‘no choice,” at least in the all knowing eye of the audience.  Sleepless in Seattle.

The Bitch Foil Plot: the hero must choose between the heroine and a bitch.  Jerry Maguire.

The Temptress Foil Plot: the hero must choose between the heroine and a seductive woman.  10.

4.      The Permission Plot: “depicts a romantically involved hero and heroine encountering resistance from a parent and/or authority figure who vehemently disapproves of their relationship.”  It Happened One Night (1934) Titanic.

 

  

 

TOOTSIE introduction

 

Our second week in the study of film genres will be given over to the Romantic Comedy and the film Tootsie, directed by Sydney Pollock in 1983.  Note that the film is ranked second only to Some Like it Hot by the American Film Institute in its list of 100 top American comedies.  In its day, Tootsie was nearly as well received as it is highly thought of today.  It was Oscar-nominated in ten categories, including best picture, and won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Jessica Lange (who, in my opinion, gives a rather flat performance in a role that was maybe the least interesting in the film—see what you think!) 

Equally important perhaps is that Tootsie was the top grossing comedy of all time up to 1982.  I say this because, as you remember from my talk last week, a genre film is important to us as film students because of what it tells us about the beliefs, the likes and dislikes, the culture, of the audience at the time of its production.   Being so wildly popular in its day, Tootsie must have struck a chord with its audience.  The question we can ask is why that was so.

I’ve given you again Thomas Sobchack’s definition of a genre film: “Simply stated, a genre film--whether a Western, musical, film noir, or  gangster film--involves familiar.  .  .  characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting." 

The Romantic Comedy is unusual as a genre because, as you see from my overhead, there is no particular setting typical of the genre.  The films can be set in New York, Seattle, or in the countryside.  There are really not typical characters in the genre, beyond of course the romantic leads.  And unlike the gangster film with its machine guns, fast cars, and stylish clothes; or the Western with its six guns, horses, and broad vistas of the American West, there is no iconography identified with the Romantic Comedy.  Nor is there a characteristic visual style.

Instead, the Romantic Comedy is defined almost exclusively by its plot formulas and its themes, so that is what I’ll be talking about after the film.  The conventional theme of the Romantic Comedy is, according to Mark Rubinfield in his book Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre, and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy, “social regeneration through coupling.”  That is, we know at the beginning of the film that in a conventional Romantic Comedy the male and female lead will end up together; our interest is merely in seeing how they’ll get there.  What’s more we in the audience see this coupling as natural, as supporting the social order, the way things ought to be.  The Musical is another genre that usually offers this kind of pro-social, pro-status quo resolution.

Many film scholars have tried to describe and categorize the many variations in the plot formula of the Romantic Comedy.  I’ll talk a little more about that after the film, but for now, here are the descriptions of three of those categories that Rubinfield feels apply to Tootsie.  Note that he posits that each individual film will usually follow more than one formula.

Pursuit Plot (conventional in romantic comedies): “involves a ‘quest of conquest’ in which a hero is attracted to a heroine; courts her; encounters resistance from her; and, being a ‘real man,’ refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer.  Ultimately, the hero woos her, wows her, and wins her.” (4)

 

Coldhearted Redemption Plot: “features a bitter hero who is incapable of love.  He is heartsick.  He is, also, too heartless to know he is heartsick…  What the hero most needs is a redemptive heroine.” (13)

 

The Prick Foil Plot:  “The hero is depicted as a ‘regular sort of guy’ who although not always in the same social class as the heroine, genuinely loves her.  The prick foil, on the other hand, is typically depicted as a romantic rival who is economically and/or socially better positioned than the hero, knows it, and flaunts it.”  (34)

 

As you watch the film, see if you agree that it fits into Rubinfield’s template.

*** 

In your reading for this week I had you look at two articles from the time of the film’s release that presented opposing views of Tootsie.  Clearly a mainstream Romantic Comedy made in 1983 that takes as its subject a man cross dressing as a woman is going to initiate a discussion of gender.  Keep in mind the currents of the times of the film’s production: The Equal Rights Amendment has only recently failed to win ratification in enough state legislatures to become the law of the land  (The ERA read simply, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”)    Ronald Reagan has been elected president two years before, signaling a turn in a socially conservative direction in the country.  And what had been known popularly as “women’s liberation” in the 1970s is coming to be known as “feminism” in the popular mindset.  Issues of gender identity and equality are on everyone’s mind.

            Perhaps viewing Tootsie with twenty five years’ hindsight, we’re tempted see the issues that the film brings up as long settled, as dated.  The general social consensus now is that women should be treated fairly and equally in the workplace.  The politics of relationships seems to have struck more of a balance than it perhaps did in the early 80s.  And we are a culture today more accepting of all kinds of difference, including gender difference—though how much more accepting we are remains open to debate. 

            But viewing the film as a product of its time, which of the following interpretations of the film do you see as more accurate?  These excerpts are drawn from your reading for this week:

 

TOOTSIE IS PRO FEMINIST:

Dorothy's predicament-- how an actor can get a job as an actress, win the lady his male self desires and discourage the gentlemen his female surface attracts-- is food for comedy, but she herself is not a comic figure. The most important switch pulled in Tootsie is not in Michael/Dorothy's progression through gender but in the assumption that for a male to dress like a female is not, ipso facto, absurd. Not only is Dorothy a better man than Michael ever was, she is as well the woman of the year.

…Today's crop of [cross dressing] heroes/heroines--whatever their motives for cross-dressing--are mirroring contemporary sexual conflicts and attitudes. The recent plays and movies raise questions about what it means to be a woman, or a man, with some seriousness--even if the seriousness is served with a considerable admixture of mirth.

--Cantwell, Mary. “The Sexual Masquerade is Conveying a New Message,” New York Times. Jan 16, 1983.

 

TOOTSIE IS CONSERVATIVE, ANTI-FEMINIST:

It depicts women as weak, powerless, banal emotional blobs. They are saved only by a man's inspiring assertiveness in the guise of a soap-opera actress-heroine in designer blouses.

Dorothy is "unattractive." Dorothy is really a man. Obviously, then, the so-called "feminist message" dissolves into visual images that tell us the opposite: Dorothy is powerful in telling off Ron — Dorothy is homely. And the other women in the film are beautiful, powerless, and weak-willed. Thus, Tootsie perpetuates these unfortunate sexist stereotypes, as well as the antiquated assumptions about any connection between a woman's physical appearance and her intelligence. Finally, it must be remembered that the only person to successfully "call" Ron on his sexism is really a man.  

--Deborah H. Holdstein.   “Tootsie: Mixed messages.”  Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983.

 

Finally, a footnote: I had you for this week look at the pages in your text that describe Method Acting.  Your text defines it as follows:

METHOD ACTING: “Acting in which the performer studies the background of a character in depth, immerses himself or herself in the role, and creates emotion in part by thinking of emotional situations from his or her own life that resemble those of the character.” (Phillips 636)

 

We won’t really see a good example of method acting this semester (such as in the work of Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and others).  Neither are Dustin Hoffman or Jessica Lange or others in the cast of Tootsie known as Method Actors. 

 

However, depicted in the film’s opening montage, beneath the credits, you’ll see Michael Dorsey teaching an acting class to his students.  The exercises they’re doing are probably drawn from the method actor’s playbook.

 

 

AFTER THE FILM LECTURE

 

First, let me present Mark Rubinfield’s classification system of plot formulae in the Romantic Comedy and note the way that Tootsie does or does not follow the various formulae.

 

THE FOUR HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORIES

 

1.       Pursuit Plot (conventional in romantic comedies): “involves a ‘quest of conquest’ in which a hero is attracted to a heroine; courts her; encounters resistance from her; and, being a ‘real man,’ refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer.  Ultimately, the hero woos her, wows her, and wins her.”

 

[Tootsie: While Michael Dorsey does not set out from the beginning of the film to “win” Julie’s heart, it’s clear that soon after they’ve met this becomes his goal, and a goal that has transcended and surpassed his goal of success as an actor.  From his discovery of his affection for Julie at Les’s farm, to his unmasking himself, to the last scene of the film, he clearly “won’t take no for an answer.”]

 

2a. Coldhearted Redemption Plot: “features a bitter hero who is incapable of love.  He is heartsick.  He is, also, too heartless to know he is heartsick…  What the hero most needs is a redemptive heroine.”

 

[Tootsie: Michael’s bitterness seems to be related more to his failures as an actor than his inability to find a partner.  Note, though, that early in the film, at his birthday party, we see him use every insincere pick up line imaginable on the women there.  We also learn that most of the people at the party he didn’t know: Michael is not a popular guy!  Meeting Julie “redeems” Michael in that not only does he become capable of romantic love, we assume he’s not going to be a jerk anymore in other areas of his life as well.  In seeing the world from a women’s perspective, he has now become a “better man as a woman.”]

 

 

3a. The Prick Foil Plot:  “The hero is depicted as a ‘regular sort of guy’ who although not always in the same social class as the heroine, genuinely loves her.  The prick foil, on the other hand, is typically depicted as a romantic rival who is economically and/or socially better positioned than the hero, knows it, and flaunts it.”

 

[Tootsie:  A “foil” is a character in a narrative, usually a secondary character, who is set up in contrast to the hero.  The Prick Foil in this film is Ron.  He’s clearly unlikable, and he qualifies as being “economically and socially better positioned” than the professional outcast/loser Michael.  Is Michael a “regular sort of guy”?  In some ways, maybe.  But Dustin Hoffman’s persona and appeal as an actor has been in playing “regular guy” sort of roles, to his generation of actors what Henry Fonda perhaps was to a previous generation.  Social class is less important here than in many romantic comedies, especially earlier ones.  But one difference between the two leads is Julie’s apparent success in the profession and Michael’s failure.]

 

Keep in mind that Rubinfield wrote these definitions of the formulae without Tootsie particularly in mind.  They apply to many romantic comedies.  Thus we see, upon closer examination, just how very similar films within a genre are to one another, and how powerful to us as audience these formulae must be.

What about the other plot formulae that Tootsie does not follow?

2b. The Broken-Hearted Redemption Plot: is similar to the Cold Hearted Redemption plot, the difference being that the hero is “more loveless than heartless; his wounds stem from loneliness, not bitterness.” (27)   The film you may know best that fits in to this category is Sleepless in Seattle, in which the Tom Hanks character is heartbroken at the death of his wife, until he meets Meg Ryan.

3b. The Dweeb Foil Plot: similar to the Prick Foil Plot except that the heroine’s choice is not between the hero and a prick, but between the hero and a man “who is such a dweeb—such a pinhead—such a schmo—that the heroine’s choice is once again ‘no choice,’” (45) at least in the all knowing eye of the audience.  Sleepless in Seattle follows this plot, when at the outset of the film Meg Ryan is engaged to Walter, who is unexciting, unromantic, and allergic to everything.

3c. The Bitch Foil Plot (49): is the inverse of the above two, in that here it is the hero who must choose between the heroine and a bitch.  Jerry Maguire is perhaps the film you know best that follows this formula, when Tom Cruise is initially aligned with Kelly Preston.

3d. The Temptress Foil Plot (55): is also the inverse of the first two, except the hero must choose between the heroine and a seductive woman.  In 10, for instance, Dudley Moore must choose between Julie Andrews and Bo Derek.

4. The Permission Plot: “depicts a romantically involved hero and heroine encountering resistance from a parent and/or authority figure who vehemently disapproves of their relationship.”  (63)It shows up primarily in older Romantic Comedies like It Happened One Night (1934), but a more recent example, though not a comedy, would be Titanic.

 

***

Next, a few words about the history and development of the Romantic Comedy genre in film.  In a recent article in the New York Times, film critic A. O. Scott decries what he sees as the dumbing down of the genre.  He observes that every year in late winter and early spring Hollywood approaches its

“…designated season of mediocrity, a time for predictable, unchallenging genre movies. Horror and action for the teenagers, sappy family comedies for the kids, and, for grown women and their companions, stories of dating and mating decked out with tame Mars-and-Venus jokes and preordained happy endings...

Does that sound cynical? Perhaps, but I don’t think the cynicism is mine...  The dispiriting, uninspired sameness of romantic comedy strikes me as something of a scandal…. If you have seen 27 Dresses — or last year’s Because I Said So, let’s say, or the other Mandy Moore wedding-theme comedy that came out in 2007, or any of the dozens like them disgorged by the studios in the past decade or so — you will know what I mean. How did this genre fall so far, from one that reliably deployed the talents of the movie industry’s best writers, top directors and biggest stars to a source of lazy commercial fodder?”

 

If you’re a romantic comedy fan, you might not like or agree with his appraisal.  But if you are a fan of the genre, I would suggest seeing some earlier romantic comedies to see if you think today’s offerings measure up or if you perhaps agree with Scott that the genre has gone downhill.

 

The golden age of the romantic comedy was the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the “Screwball Comedy” became popular.  These films such as It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, and Ball of Fire (to mention a few of my own favorites) are interesting to many film scholars today because they tended to feature a woman as the main character, and an independent woman at that.  This is unusual in that most genres—western, gangster, sci fi, horror, even the musical,--more often offer us a male hero.  We thus think of genre films more often than not as a conservative, pro-social force that tends to support the status quo—which is to say genre films support patriarchy and the traditional idea that the woman’s place is in the home.

 

Mark Rubinfield argues that in order to be considered a Screwball Comedy (rather than merely a romantic comedy), a film must meet all five of these requirements:

 

1)      frenetic action and pacing

2)      verbal sniping between the hero and heroine symbolizing the war of the sexes

3)      mistaken identities, including confused, and/or ambiguous sexual identities or gender roles

4)      a love story

5)      a caper plot  (which he defines as a “wily heroine using her brains (and sometimes her brawn) to outwit a villain or villains (usually, but not always, male)”)  (100)

 

(Interestingly, Tootsie easily meets requirements 3 and 4.  And if you consider Dorothy as a woman rather than a man, then it meets #5 as well.  But missing is the verbal sniping between the male and female leads, and the pacing of the film is more deliberate than those in the Screwball genre.  Again, I suggest you check out these lively films if you like, perhaps as the basis of your extra credit insurance paper.)

As times goes on, films in any genre must change to meet the changing demands on an audience.  Viewers still want to recognize the conventions of the gangster film, western, or romantic comedy, but at the same time they want to see variations in the formulae of the films that seem to speak to their lives today.

Thus by the 1960s and 1970s, times of social unrest and the rise of the women’s movement, the romantic comedy was beginning to reflect the trends of the day.   Instead of “social regeneration through coupling,” in the words of Rubinfield, we began to see “self actualization through uncoupling.”  In other words we began to see films in which the romantic couple did not end up together at the end of the film!  Titles that you may recognize which fit this description of theme include Annie Hall, Manhattan, Carnal Knowledge, An Unmarried Woman, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Shampoo.

That brings us up to 1983 and Tootsie.  Clearly the cross dressing in the plot makes this a different flavor of Romantic Comedy, one that at least attempts to speak to the issues of the day in regards to gender and women’s roles in romantic relationships and in the workplace.  How well does it do this and what position does it finally support? 

I can safely say that I’m not entirely sure, which keeps the film interesting for me on repeated viewings.

Cantwell argues that Tootsie asks its audience to consider the questions basic to the feminism of its day, questions of gender identity, and thus its message is pro feminist:

“What, besides the obvious, … is a male? A female? What constitutes "masculine" or "feminine" behavior? Is anyone wholly feminine or masculine, or are we all at different points on a continuum? It is a revolution that was spawned a vastly greater tolerance for unconventional sexual behavior than was imaginable 20 years ago.”

Indeed, the plot of the film offers a great deal to support Cantwell’s position.  From her first audition, Dorothy is a mouthpiece for the liberating rhetoric of the day.  “You want some gross caricature of a woman,” she tells Ron, the sexist director of Southwest General, “to prove some idiot point like power makes women masculine, or masculine women are ugly.”  And later she insists that he “stop thinking of me as a woman, and start thinking of me as a person.”  And of course there is Dorothy’s insistence that her name isn’t Tootsie or Honey or Sweetheart, but Dorothy.

In the course of shooting the soap opera, Michael (or is it Dorothy?) decides to take Sandi’s advice and start making up her own lines.  This too allows the film to make stronger “women’s liberation” statements, as, for instance, when Dorothy tells the woman in the hospital bed that a woman with two children should not go back to the husband who beat her and get therapy herself.  Instead she should get mad and, as Dorothy does, throw a flower pot against the wall.  Dorothy vows to give every nurse a cattle prod to zap the philandering Dr, X “in his bedubies.”  We learn that women all over the country, including the Agent’s secretary, take the independent Dorothy as a hero and role model.

Fine, Deborah Holdstein might say in response to Cantwell, in the other article I asked you to read for this week, “Tootsie: Mixed Messages.”  Fine, except that Dustin Hoffman/Michael Dorsey…is a man!  It’s hard to argue that the comic figure of Sandi is not the “weak, powerless,  banal emotional blob” that Holdstein describes.  Michael is four hours late for a dinner date, and Sandi is the one who feels she must apologize.  Sandi can’t work up enough anger to audition for the part in Southwest General without having Michael there to foment it.  Once she finally does get mad at the two timing Michael, she says “She doesn’t take this kind of shit from friends…only from lovers.”  And the beautiful but misguided Julie, though less comic of a character, is not much stronger, being used as she is by the sexist prick Ron, whom the audience can see through right from the start of the film.

These women, Holdstein argues, “are saved only by a man's inspiring assertiveness in the guise of a soap-opera actress-heroine in designer blouses.”  In other words, in the world of the film, it takes a man to be the best possible woman.  Michael Dorsey truly is, in the words of his agent, “making a fool out of millions of American women” who have come to idolize him.

And while Dorothy may rant against what she perceives as Ron’s wanting her to be a power hungry and thus unattractive woman, the fact is that the film does make Dorothy a sexually unattractive figure, with her high necked, out of style dresses and elaborately overdone hair and makeup, outfits that Stella Bruzzi in Undressing Cinema calls “excessively prudish and unrevealing.”  What’s more, Bruzzi points out, Hoffman is in the film set against “the more conventionally attractive femininity of Jessica Lange and Geena Davis” (who plays the other nurse in the soap).

Rubinfield argues that the plot of Tootsie is as unsympathetic to women and feminism as are the visuals.  He cites the last shot of the film, a freeze frame, in which we see Julie put her arm around Michael as the walk off together, presumably to begin a relationship.  Yes, they’re talking about dresses, “girl talk” if you will, but Rubinfield notes that this gesture “closes out the coldhearted redemption plot from the male point of view.”  In other words, Michael had been unable to love, but now through the actions of a redeeming female, he is able to love.  This last scene, says Rubinfield, “reinforces the female’s role in patriarchy to forgive.”  In other words, Julie is the one who must give in.  Michael gets his way.

Which critic, then, is right?  To me, Hodlstein’s argument that the film is essentially conservative and supporting patriarchy, is inescapable.  Popular Hollywood films, especially genre films, tend to co-opt the issues of the day, tweak the conventions of genre and the expectations of the audience, but in the end produce a homogenized, middle-of the road product acceptable to a wide range of people.  The reason for that?  A film that takes this approach simply is more likely to make a lot of money, sell more tickets.  And Tootsie sold a lot of tickets. It didn’t do that by depicting Dorothy kissing Julie, or by Les kissing Dorothy.  It didn’t sell tickets by having Julie tell not only Ron to buzz off, but by telling Michael to get lost as well.  Michael, after all, was doing many of the same things to his purported girlfriend Sandi that Ron was doing to Julie.  Michael wasn’t straight with Julie initially any more than he was with any other women he’d met. 

Any of these things might have happened in “real life,” and a film that wanted to deal ( even comedically) with gender issues could have depicted such events.

Still, it seems to me that both writers could be correct in their assessments (and I don’t mean that as a copout).  Looking back on Tootsie with the hindsight of 25 years, it seems to me that the film does have feminist import, despite its insistence on a Hollywood ending.   The language of the genre insists that the “boy and girl” end up together.  But within the confines of the genre, the characters do change.  Julie, for instance, rightly punches Michael in the stomach when he reveals himself as not being Dorothy (though granted she has the inexplicable change of heart in their last scene together, that “Hollywood ending” that I talked about last week with The Public Enemy). 

Michael too changes.  In the most memorable line in a film full of quotable lines, he tells Julie, “I was a better man with you as a woman, than I ever was with a woman as a man.”  Even Les changes at the end of the film, saying that he’s going out “with a really nice woman now.”  So the experience with Dorothy has opened him up to other possibilities after years alone.

 

Are these last minute character changes improbable?  Of course they are.  That’s the nature of the genre film.  But I’m one who believes that the meanings of texts can change over time.  It’s not hard to analyze the film and see undeniably that patriarchy remains the order of the day at the final credits.  But it seems to me we can’t know for sure the effect that Tootsie might have had on the audience of 1983.   Perhaps the film, like most genre films, is more reflective of its times than it is persuasive to those in the audience that beliefs they have held should be changed.

 

If so, then this may be all we can ask of a commercial medium.  This may be what Schatz calls the genius of genre and the genius of the system.

 

Sources

Bruzzi, Stella.  Undressing Cinema.  New York: Routledge, 1997

Cantwell, Mary. “The Sexual Masquerade is Conveying a New Message,”in New York Times. Jan 16, 1983.

Holdstein, Deborah.  “Tootsie: Mixed messages” in  Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983.

Sobchack, Thomas and Vivan.  Introduction to Film.

Schatz, Thomas.  Hollywood Genres. Boston: McGraw Hill 1981

Rubinfield, Mark. Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre, and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy.  Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001

Scott, A.O. “A Fine Romance, My Friend, This Is,” in New York Times, February 3, 2008.

 

 

 

Unforgiven

 

After studying the gangster film and the romantic comedy you already have some idea of how genre films work in the culture.  Our approach to the western will be similar to our approach to the films of the last two weeks.  We will try to identify the plot formula, typical characters, and iconography of the genre.  And we will try to identify oppositions, or conflicts, typical of the genre and how those oppositions tell us something about American culture. 

 

Keep in mind that the Western is not historically accurate.  Rather, it’s typically an examination of American values and attitudes that surround the settling of the American West.  These values are the audience’s values at the time of the production of the film, not the real values that people held in the 19th century when the frontier was open and Indians were being displaced from their lands by white settlers.

 

The characters of the western are easy to identify—easier to see than those of the gangster film, and much easier than those of the romantic comedy. 

 

[see “Characteristics of the Western Genre” below]

 

Early westerns, and even many later ones, follow an even more distinct narrative pattern than the boy meets girl pattern of some romantic comedies, and the rise and fall pattern of the gangster hero:

 

[read “Hero/Plot Formula” below]

 

 

Just as the primary opposition in the gangster film was between business and family, so there is a primary opposition in the western, and that is between civilization and savagery.  This opposition, or conflict, is represented in the films in a number of ways (see overhead below):

 

East vs. West: In the Western, the east is the cradle of civilization and the West is savage: the “wild west.”

 

Garden vs. Desert: This is actually an opposition that existed in our culture even at the time of the westward movement.  At the same time that people thought of the west as a dry desert, a savage landscape, so they also thought of it as an Edenic paradise where a family could go and raise a bountiful harvest.  There was actually a theory at hand in the 19th century that “rain follows the plow,” stating that once homesteaders began to cultivate previously arid lands, rainfall would increase.  So the desert becomes a garden. 

 

Social Order vs. Anarchy: We have in American culture a desire for order, for “law and order,” as Republican political candidates like to frame the issue every few elections.  At the same time, as a people we believe that might makes right, that it’s necessary sometimes to go outside the law in order to do what’s right.  The end justifies the means, and the means are often violent.  Our involvement in Iraq, for instance, some people might characterize as using force, or anarchical means, to attempt to create social order.  The Bush administration went outside international law, which says no nation should commit aggression against another, in order, they claim, to bring democracy, or “social order” to Iraq.  This is a very important opposition (or contradiction) in our cultural values, and thus it’s an important opposition in the Western.

 

 technology vs. nature:  Basically, technology like the telegraph and the railroad is associated with the east, with our high American standard of living.  But we also hold nature in high esteem.  Nature we might associate with the west. 

 

community vs. individual: we believe in having a set of laws and acting in groups to create families and towns (values we associate with the East in this genre); the church is to have a central role in this community; we also believe the individual must sometimes act alone: “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” (very much a Western value).

 

town vs. wilderness: in the western, the town usually represents safety, law, security, a place where you can raise a family and attend church; the wilderness, though, is where true freedom lies, but it’s also a place of danger.  Note how Unforgiven challenges these notions!

 

cowboy vs. Indian: The cowboy, savage as he may seem in his methods, still represents the eastern value of civilization, of settlement.  The Indian (in the genre’s stereotype) represents savagery.  Not present in this film, but in many.

 

schoolmarm vs. dance hall girl: in the simplistic world of this genre, women are viewed either as civilizing influences (representing education and the one room schoolhouse, and also family and children), or as sexually licentious “savages.”  The existence of the dance hall girl in the western, by the way, probably came about partly because the Hollywood production code in effect from the early 30’s through the late 60’s prohibited the depiction of a woman as a prostitute.  It forbade even the mention of the word “prostitute,” thus the euphemism of the “dance hall girl” comes about.

 

 

Of course, not all of these oppositions appear in every Western.  But the oppositions of “Community vs. Individual” and East vs. West, as well as the overarching “Civilzation vs. Savagery” will be central, and you should think about them as you watch.  Women also play important roles in the narrative and in the meaning of the film.

 

Later genre films, like Unforgiven, often will subvert the genre.  That is, they work against the audience’s expectations of what the genre should be.  As your textbook puts it on page 297, “Since about 1950, most Westerns have been revisionist: they ignore or challenge the fundamental traditions of the western film.  Films may be revisionist because the times change and the films reflect those changes or because the filmmakers deliberately reject major conventions of the genre.” 

 

Unforgiven, having been made in 1992, would be considered a “late” western.  Consider that one of the widely popular first narrative films made in America, was The Great Train Robbery, released in 1902!  So the genre had been evolving in the American consciousness for almost a hundred years by the time Clint Eastwood made what is considered one of the two or three greatest westerns ever.  Thus you should think very carefully about how Unforgiven goes against your expectations for a Western, how it subverts the genre, how it suprises you.

 

So Look for how Unforgiven subverts the genre in regard to the following:

 

--the hero

--the conventional narrative of the western

--the character of the sheriff and the “initiate hero” and the “Eastern” character of English

 Bob (east vs. west opposition)

--the community (community vs. individual opposition)

--the film’s attitude toward violence

--the film’s portrayal of women (school marm vs. dance hall girl opposition)

 

--Ways in which the film demythologizes the Western (that is, questions whether we

should believe in the lessons the wetern teaches), only to remythologize it again.

 

 

Unforgiven as a “professional western”: a variation, common in later westerns, in which the hero acts not out of a “code of the West,” but for money.  He’s a “professional.”

 

 

AFTER FILM LECTURE

 

My first point is to remind you that the western is not historically accurate.  Because Unforgiven is a more recent film, and thus a film probably more to your liking than The Public Enemy, the temptation is to conclude that this film somehow “got it right,” that other, earlier westerns are naïve and corny, and this one, because it’s newer, is more “realistic.”  This is probably not the case at all.  More likely, this film merely reflects the cultural beliefs and values of the 90’s the way The Public Enemy did the cultural beliefs and values of the 30’s.  Neither film is more historically accurate than the other.  Someday, I’m sure, audiences will laugh at certain parts of Unforgiven the way we laughed at certain scenes of The Pubic Enemy two weeks ago.  Most popular art, in time, becomes corny.

 

I’ve already mentioned that later films in a genre will often parody genre conventions, or even subvert or reverse the conventions of a genre.  Unforgiven is such a late genre film.  We don’t see too many westerns made anymore, and when we do see them we have come to expect to see some kind of radical alteration in the genre.  We expect to see something that is on the one hand still clearly a western and takes up a western’s traditional concerns, but at the same time we expect to see something different.  Unforgiven did this successfully enough to be a very popular and financially successful film in 1992, as well as to win several Oscars that year, including Best Picture.

 

Let’s look at how Unforgiven does, and especially how it does not comply with our description of the narrative formula for the western.

 

(read narrative forumula overhead)

 

Unforgiven goes against our expectations in many ways.  We can see that Will Munny lives outside of the community, but in this case he’s trying to live a “civilized” or domesticated life as a farmer.  In Unforgiven it’s the community, not the hero, that’s “savage” at the outset: the town consists of bars and a whorehouse and a corrupt, violent sheriff.  The posse in Unforgiven won’t work until they’re given feed for their horses!  English Bob, the figure that represents the East (you can’t get much farther east nor much more civilized than jolly old aristocratic England) is a card cheat and a murderer.  He kills, but he doesn’t kill people of stature—only cowboys and Chinamen.  Thus the east is shown to be not civil and civilized, but corrupt in a racist and classist way.  But even the scoundrel English Bob recognizes the moral bankruptcy of the town in Unforgiven: “You’re all a bunch of savages,” he says as he’s leaving on the stagecoach.

 

The Western hero himself in Unforgiven is the opposite of what we might expect: it’s true he has respect for women, which the community in this case lacks.  In the corrupt town, women are mere property: whores to be bought and sold, kept almost as slaves by Smiley.  Will Munny, on the other hand, won’t take a “free one” from one of the prostitutes on account of the promise he made to his late wife. Will’s revenge is motivated partly by money  (this is what we mean by a “professional western.”  And note the pun on the hero’s name: Will MUNNY acts for MONEY).  But the other factor motivating Will, the factor that finally gets him to take on the job of killing the cowhands, is that they cut up women.  This is against the code of the west, and even a degenerate hero like Will Munny must take action when he’s told the nature of the cowhands’ crime.

 

In most ways, however, Will is an atypical hero.  What of his special skills?  At the onset of the film, he can’t shoot straight (so much so that he uses a shotgun to blast away at the bottles he’s set up for target practice), and he can’t ride his horse without falling off, or sleep on the ground without getting sore.  He’s tried to be a “good” domesticated man (though note that he’s failing at that).  He is, as the Kid calls him, “just a broken down pig farmer.”  He’s a long way from John Wayne or Gary Cooper or even the Clint Eastwood of earlier westerns.

 

But Will also differs from a traditional Western hero because in his past (and again by the end of the film) he’s a cold blooded murderer.  In his past life, before being domesticated by his late wife, he apparently had no sense of fair play or justice.  He didn’t fight according to rules or a code.  He was a drunken animal, and by the end of Unforgiven he’s become one again. And we like him for that reason, don’t we!  Which seems to argue that the Western hero, and violence, and the “savage” speak to some deep seeded need in us as an audience and as Americans and maybe as humans.

 

Our hero takes with him an ethnically marked “sidekick,” a western convention, in the figure of Ned.  While the Lone Ranger had Tonto, Will has a black, not an Indian companion.  Ned is almost as domesticated as Will Munny is, again a reversal on genre convention, which would say that the sidekick should be nearly as heroic as the hero.  And unlike the conventional sidekick, Ned is killed. 

 

In Unforgiven, the hero comes to the aid of a community that’s too weak to defend itself, as the narrative formula dictates.  But in this case the community he’s defending is the community not of churchgoing ladies and storekeepers and children and peace loving farmers.  It’s a community of prostitutes.  Here perhaps is one clear way that Unforgiven is a product of its times.  These women here do not serve to mediate the school marm/dance hall girl opposition typical of the western.  These women are fighting to be liberated: they are fighting against the patriarchy that makes them into property for the sexual fulfillment of men.  These women are business people, putting aside some cash for themselves, and wanting to buy justice. 

 

These women reflect the early 1990’s, the time at which the film was made. America has just gone through the Reagan years.  Enlightened self interest, capitalism, free marketeering is thought to be an unquestionable good of the highest order.  We’re also in 1992 in a period we might call “post feminist.”  The consensus in our culture, as it remains today, is that women should be the legal equivalent of men.  And so the movie reflects that by having the women characters, formerly just property, step forward to take action.

 

Typically, the other half of the opposition that describes women in the western is the role of the “school marm”: the domesticating, civilizing partner that brings the “east” to the west (a figure closer to Ma Powers in The Public Enemy). Unforgiven’s vision here could be said once again to be cynical or at least ironic.  The principle domesticating female figure is Will Munny’s wife, and she’s dead.  The other wife in the film is Ned’s wife.  And she’s an Indian, certainly a reversal of convention in the genre.  Most Westerns would find nothing whatsoever “domestic” or “civilized” about a marriage with an Indian, the classic western being essentially a racist genre reflecting the racism of its times. A third domesticating figure might be Delilah, the whore who is “cut up.”   She is a sympathetic character, but cast as the victim of male sexual violence.

 

Your textbook suggests on page 494 that Unforgiven also is reflective of the time of its production in the way it depicts the character of Ned.  While there is not a word mentioned of his race, his whipping at the hands of Little Bill suggests slavery to the audience.  And your text points out that the film was released just after American television audiences has seen over and over again the beating of Rodney King by police officers in LA.  Americans attitudes toward the police and potential police abuse was not yet the admiration for police that would emerge in our culture after 9/11.

 

I think that Unforgiven also presents us with some of our cynicism since the 90’s in other ways as well, and our cynicism about the conventional western.  The community and sheriff in Unforgiven, the social order, are corrupt.  Despicable really   The book that W.W. Beauchamp has written about English Bob is made up of lies and exaggeration: Little Bill demythologizes English Bob for us and tells Beauchamp of his errors in writing his book.  Heroes are not really heroes, the film seems to say.  It’s all a lie, a gimmick or promotion to make money for someone (Maybe something like professional wrestling).  It’s not just the hero in Unforgiven who is “professional,” who is in it for the money. Everyone is in it for the money: the heroes, the prostitutes, the owner of the whorehouse, the writer Beauchamp (who may represent the 1990’s cynicism about newspapers and the media, which continues to the current day). 

 

Note too that in Unforgiven, violence is as random as it seems to be at Littleton High School or Crandon Wisconsin. “You kicked the shit out of innocent man,” Little Bill is told.  “Innocent of what?” Bill asks flatly.  For in the world of this film, all are guilty.   The  Schofield Kid, shaken after murdering the cowboy in the outhouse, says, “Well, I reckon he had it comin’” to which Will Munny replies, “We all have it comin’, kid.”  And when Little Bill is pinned on the floor looking up the barrel of Will Munny’s shotgun, he weakly protests, “I don’t deserve this,” Will’s reply is, “Deserve’s got nothin to do with it.”

 

My personal favorite lines in a screenply that’s loaded with quotable lines like this is what follows in that scene.  “I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.”  And Munny replies simply, “Yeah” and blows Little Bill’s head off.

 

The film’s vision here, it seems to me, is almost Old Testament Christian.  The community is not representative of social order and civilization, as it’s supposed to be in the Western; it is an embodiment of inevitable sin and must be punished by a wrathful God.  We are all guilty, we are none of us above suspicion, we are all self concerned and materialistic, and in such a world any of us can be the target of random and senseless violence.  We are all, it seems, like Will Munny and English Bob and Little Bill, unforgiven.  Maybe this is a world view and a western that could only come out of the 1990’s or our own time fifteen years later.

 

(It is interesting to note, too, that this corrupt “savage” sheriff is trying to join the social order, trying to “settle down” and be domesticated—almost like Will has tried.  Little Bill is building a house on which he can watch the sunset from his front porch.  How quaint!  The problem is, as we see, Little Bill is a lousy carpenter.  He will never be able to leave the violent anarchic life, any more than Will Munny is able to: once a killer, always a killer, the film seems to say).

 

Unforgiven also subverts or demythologizes another important convention of the western genre: the convention of the painless, bloodless, easy shooting.  If the Indians and bad guys seem to die with ease and without blood or guts in earlier westerns, in Unforgiven, killing is truly horrible.  Note the emotional breakdown of the Schofield kid after his murder in the outhouse, or earlier the fact that Ned the faithful sidekick simply is unable to kill the first cowhand.  Note the graphic suffering of the cowhand shot in the guts by Will during that ambush.  “Give him a drink of water, goddamn it,” Will implores.  It truly is a sickening scene and we in the audience are meant to feel sickened by the violence, a killing that’s graphic and drawn out and not at all what we expect in a Western.

 

When he’s sick with fever, Will admits, “I’m scared of dyin,” hardly typical of the tough western hero.  “It ain’t so easy to shoot a man,” Little Bill tells Beauchamp the writer.  And Will to the Schofield Kid: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man.  You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”  In the traditional western the hero uses violence to protect the community and that’s all well and good with us; Unforgiven makes us come to terms with the reality of the violence that in the traditional western is only myth, only make believe.  And I think that Unforgiven asks us to consider the violence in our own culture today that in part is the result of our belief in the myth of the western: our cultural belief that might makes right, our cultural belief in settling scores through aggression, our belief that sometimes it’s good and necessary for individuals to act outside the law.  Again, as I mentioned last week, consider recent American foreign policy.  How much of it has been made possible by what the Western has taught us our whole lives?

 

In fact, we might say that finally the hero in Unforgiven protects the community not from outside threats, as in the traditional western, but from itself.  He protects the people in the community by threatening them with his violent return: "Bury Ned right,” he says.  “And don’t go cuttin up no women.  Or I’ll come back and kill all you sonsabitches.” (And as Eastwood recites these lines, an American flag is visible in the background),   Unforgiven seems to say that we still need the savage western hero, not only to rid the community of danger, but to remind us that we’re all sinners, all unforgiven, and we need to fear damnation.

 

In this and with the last scene of Will’s killing and escape from town, I think that Unforgiven re-mythologizes the western again!  We in the audience believe the improbable scene in which Will is able to kill five men who are shooting at him point blank, and he escapes unmarked.  It’s not realistic, is it?  It’s a genre film, Hollywood ending. But we love it!  And we believe in this new, cynical, flawed, broken, and evil western hero. We believe that somehow, through the actions of the hero, the opposition between civilization and savagery has been mediated. We believe that Will has risen from almost from the dead after three days.   We believe that through his violence, the community is saved and protected.    After the film first made us skeptical about western heroes—showing them as rundown and drunk and evil and old—in the end we’re made to believe once again in the myth of the western—that the hero can save us through violence.

 

 

 

 


 

 

WESTERNS

 

 

The WESTERN is not historically accurate, but rather it's an examination of  the  American values  and attitudes that surround the  settling of the American west.


 

CONVENTIONS OF THE WESTERN GENRE

 

ICONOGRAPHY:  six guns, telegraph, stagecoach, railroad, horses  (technology); boots, black and  white hats, etc. (dress)

 

SETTINGS:  West of 1865-1900.  Desert, town, fort, saloon, jail, ranch or homestead

 

PLOT CONVENTIONS: gunfight, Indian attack, bank robbery

 

TYPICAL CHARACTERS:   hero, gunfighter, sheriff, "sidekick," doctor, saloon girl (prostitute), cavalryman, settler or townspeople, Southern gentleman, Indian "savages," Eastern “dude.”

 

ICONIC ACTORS: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood

 

 

OPPOSITIONS/CONFLICTS IN THE WESTERN

 

CIVILIZATION VS. SAVAGERY

EAST VS. WEST

GARDEN VS. DESERT

SOCIAL ORDER VS. ANARCHY

TECHNOLOGY VS. NATURE

COMMUNITY VS. INDIVIDUAL

TOWN VS. WILDERNESS

COWBOY VS. INDIAN

SCHOOLMARM VS. DANCEHALL GIRL

 

 

HERO/PLOT FORMULA

 

In the standard Western, the hero is an individual who lives outside the community, though he shares some of the values of the community (justice,  strength, respect for women).   He possesses some special skills (knowledge of nature, gunfighting).  When the community is threatened and is too weak to defend itself, the hero uses his special skills, always including violence, to protect the community.  But the hero is not accepted by the community, and at the end of the film leaves it again.

 

Revenge plot: a typical variation on the above formula in which the hero (or perhaps the villain) is seeking revenge for some misdeed done to him, to someone in his gang, or to someone in the community.


 

 

UNFORGIVEN (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

 

 

How does the film "subvert" the western genre?

(And in what ways does it remain typical of the western?)

 

--Western Hero

--Conventional Narrative of the western

--Characters:                Sheriff

                                    English Bob (“Eastern” character)

--portrayal of the Community  (“community vs. individual”

            opposition)

--The film’s attitude toward violence

--The film’s portrayal of women (“school marm vs. dancehall

 girl” opposition)

 

 

 

 

PROFESSIONAL WESTERN: A variation, common in later westerns, in which the hero acts not out of a code, but for money

 

How does the film's narrative seem to reflect the time in which it was made, 1992    (as opposed to 1956)?

 

Ways in which the film DEMYTHOLOGIZES the Western (that is, questions whether we should believe in the lessons the western teaches), only to REMYTHOLOGIZE it again.

 

 


 

 

Later genre films, like Unforgiven, often will subvert the genre. 

 

“Since about 1950, most Westerns have been revisionist: they ignore or challenge the fundamental traditions of the western film.  Films may be revisionist because the times change and the films reflect those changes or because the filmmakers deliberately reject major conventions of the genre.” 

 

(Phillips 297)