Chapter 5

Distinguishing Films by Type: Genres and Style

In This Chapter

Classifying movies into genres, modes and cycles

Understanding why genres exist and how they function in society

Analysing well-known genres from musicals to horror films

Genre is just French for ‘type’ (in this case, type of film). All film audiences have an instinctive understanding of genre, whether they speak French or not. You know that if you’re watching a movie and everyone’s wearing Stetsons and shooting at Native Americans, it’s a western. If the cast is wearing space helmets and shooting at aliens, it’s science fiction (sci-fi). And if everybody suddenly stops shooting and bursts into song, it’s a musical. Or you really need to lay off the flu medication.

You can recognise genres from the specific films themselves because genres use conventions or codes, which become deeply ingrained in audiences over time and through repetition. If you watch enough horror movies, rom-coms or musicals, you know what to expect after about the first five minutes or so. But crucially, this familiarity doesn’t mean that genre films are boring – quite the opposite. As I describe in this chapter, which also guides you through some of the most popular genres, the play between repetition and variation is what keeps genres alive and kicking.

Every individual audience member (yes, even you) comes to genre with their own set of built-in responses, likes and dislikes, and even prejudices. For example, film fans today sometimes struggle with individual examples of genres which are no longer in common circulation, such as the western or the musical. They might then use this initial experience as an excuse to dismiss all westerns or all musicals. If you have a prejudice against a particular genre, try really hard to get through it. Watch some of the examples suggested in this chapter, and think about their conventions and contexts. And you just might find that you are a musicals fan after all.

Defining Genre

Like many major film studies terms, genre is a simple idea that gets extremely complicated as soon as you start to think about it. Although the French word is a fancy intellectual add-on, the concept of genre has been central to film-making ever since Hollywood stepped up a gear into an industrial mode of production. Producers and the industry use genre as a way of categorising and differentiating their products. Think of the physical shelves in a DVD store or a sub-menu on Netflix.

Consumer categories and genres aren’t necessarily the same thing. Is animation a genre? What about documentary? Film scholars sometimes call these overarching styles of film-making modes in order to separate them from the genres of fiction film. A mode such as documentary, however, can work just like a genre for audiences, because documentaries also use conventions built up over time by generations of film-makers. Chapters 6 and 8 dive deeper into animation and documentary, respectively.

Like all systems of categorisation, genre has benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, producers and cinema managers can use genre to make their products quickly attractive to the right kinds of audiences. They can precisely target marketing materials, such as posters and trailers, towards the fans of a specific genre. Just take a look at a few horror film posters of recent years and you see the same images recurring: masks, blood, saws, screaming girls and so on. I discuss these key images, or iconography, in ‘Seeing why westerns are westerns’ later in this chapter.

The major downside of genre as a classification system is that films are complex. Placing a film in one neat category or the next is often challenging. Try it yourself. Spend a rainy afternoon reorganising your DVD collection into genre categories. You’re sure to encounter many crossover cases, for example:

• Do you file Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) under ‘World Cinema’, ‘Action Films’ or ‘Historical Romance’?
• Is Pulp Fiction (1994) a comedy or a crime thriller?
• Does the fact that Marilyn Monroe sings several numbers in Some Like It Hot (1959) make it a musical?

The problem here is two-fold:

• The elements that qualify a film for one genre or another aren’t clearly defined or set in stone. Audience members have their own viewing history and therefore different sets of expectations around genre.
• Many (if not all) films use elements from different generic conventions (that is, established or agreed-upon aspects specific to a particular genre): most action films have a romantic subplot, for instance, and many comedies use elements of melodrama to provide light and shade. So decisions about where to place a particular film are essentially subjective and personal.

Banking on genre: The Hollywood Machine

Popular films need to be different enough from what has gone before to stand out as new and exciting for audiences – but not too different. They also need to be similar to previously successful films in order to minimise the risk of their expensive production costs. These contradictory economic imperatives are suitably reconciled within the idea of genre film-making.

The financial logic is undeniable. Genre film-making allows studios to produce films as cheaply as possible while ensuring that they make more hits than misses. Many histories of studio-era Hollywood (the period between 1930 and 1950 or so) stress the generic output of the major studios:

• MGM specialised in glossy musicals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Meet Me in St Louis (1944).
• Warner Bros. made gritty gangster films such as Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931).
• Universal made its reputation with the horror movies Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (also 1931, which was clearly a great year for genre films!).

But even these brief examples expose problems with a generic view of Hollywood history:

• Warner Bros. certainly enjoyed success with crime films, but it also produced the ground-breaking musical The Jazz Singer (1927), as well as films in many other genres.
• MGM’s high production values mattered more to it than the generic content. In 1939 they released both the fantasy musical The Wizard of Oz and the epic melodrama Gone with the Wind.
• Universal won Best Picture Oscar for the war movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) only a year before its successful horror cycle commenced.

Clearly no major studio could afford to specialise in only one genre and put all its eggs in one basket.

Don’t forget the differences between the biggest and the best films a studio releases – their ‘A-pictures’ – and their cheaper, less challenging ‘B-movies’. Studios produced B-movies quickly with a great deal of stylistic cost-saving, such as recycling sets, and these films were often generic. Meanwhile A-pictures needed broad appeal across several genres. For example, The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy adventure, a family film and a musical partly because it cost so much to produce.

Enjoying repetition – up to a point

Repetition is a key feature of genre. Did I mention that repetition was a key feature of genre? Good, because repetition is a key feature of genre.

As all children know, if a story is good first time round, it’s even better second, third and fiftieth time around. Yes, audiences like suspense and surprises, but they also love the cosy familiarity of knowing exactly what to expect. Time and time again.

During the early 20th century, literary theorists noticed the strong similarities between the types of stories that people have told each other over time. They began to wonder whether certain fundamental elements, or myths, exist across human civilisation. This notion is the basis of structuralism, which argues that essential (and irresolvable) human conflicts cause these similarities (see Chapter 13 for more on structuralism).

Thomas Schatz extends structuralism from literature to film by suggesting that film genres work in one of two ways: leading towards social order (westerns, crime films) or social integration (musicals, comedies). Genres humanise opposing value systems and conflicts between good guys and bad guys, and romantic couplings signify temporary resolutions. Therefore film genres are like modern-day rituals, performed to help people make sense of society.

Structuralists may offer attractive explanations for the power of genre, but by emphasising universality their methods obviously have to downplay historical context and change over time. In response, several contrasting theories about the development of genres have emerged, including the evolutionary model, which sets out the following stages:

1. Artistic innovation creates a genre, which finds favour from audiences who happily soak up its conventions through repetition.
2. Over-familiarity eventually causes audiences to tire of the conventions, and genres become self-referential (about themselves) or parodies of themselves.
3. Self-referentiality diverts audiences only for so long before they demand wholesale renewal of conventions or dismiss the genre altogether.

The teen-slasher film offers a good example of evolutionary development, because it’s a sub-genre of the horror film (flip nervously to ‘Lurking in the Shadows: Horror’ later for more on this genre). After the success of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) came endless sequels and imitations, until the heavily self-conscious Scream (1996) franchise renewed the genre, albeit temporarily. Teen-slasher films have since (arguably) been replaced by supernatural horror and so-called torture porn films such as Saw (2004) and its sequels.

Bending genres

Other ways of thinking about the way genres develop and change tend to stress their amazing adaptability and ability to absorb ideas from different film-making traditions or national cinemas. Most film industries around the world have developed their own distinctive variations on Hollywood genres. Some of the better-known examples include:

• So-called spaghetti westerns made largely in Italy and Spain, such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
• Yakuza films, crime thrillers about the Japanese mafia, such as Sonatine (1993).
• The literate, period-drama-style Hammer Horror films produced in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, including The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

Genres are never static: in fact the best way to think of them is as a process rather than as a noun. For example, genre films that travel internationally often go on to influence Hollywood in return. Probably the most obvious example of this cross-fertilisation is Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films which borrow/steal from many international genres, including Hong Kong martial arts films.

For more high-brow film critics, genre cinema and art cinema are considered polar opposites: the former is seen as mindless repetitive pap and the other is clever, individual and ground-breaking. But this view is overly simplistic, because many European art-film directors have worked within genres, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder whose Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is a reworking of Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (1959). And Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) is as romantic and joyful as the greatest Hollywood musicals.

Some commentators believe that such formal experimentation and exchange has led to the collapsing of all generic boundaries to the extent that categories are now meaningless. The blending and mixing of genres is a key feature of postmodernism. (This period is post (or after) because the modernist period was about experimentation and playing with categories, whereas postmodernism appears to dissolve them completely. Check out Chapter 15 for many more deep thoughts.)

Right, now you know about the idea of genre itself you can move on to look at some examples. Too many genres and sub-genres exist to cover here in detail, so I’ve chosen examples which are useful for illustrating particular points about the look, meanings and feel of genre filmmaking as a whole. Each is also a type of film that has attracted a good deal of critical and scholarly attention. (I focus mainly on Hollywood genre films, so if you want to know more about Italian comedies or Japanese horror films, turn to Chapters 11 and 12.)

Appreciating What a Man’s Got to Do: Westerns

Surely no other genre is as instantly recognisable and as distinctly American as the western. Westerns have iconic scenery (such as the eerie landscape of Monument Valley), familiar costumes (Stetson hats, low-slung holsters and dust-covered boots) and defining themes (particularly civilisation versus the wilderness).

To understand the place of the western in contemporary American culture, take a look at Toy Story 2 (1999). In the second episode of Pixar’s poignant childhood fable, the central dilemma faces cowboy toy Woody (Tom Hanks), who must choose between everlasting life as a preserved classic toy – or temporary fun with his owner, Andy, and friends.

A pivotal moment comes when Woody discovers his origins as merchandise for a black-and-white TV show called Woody’s Roundup. Watching the show, Woody’s face is in awe, somewhat comically given the cheaply produced puppets on screen. No matter: the jolly fiddle music, cardboard cacti and swinging saloon doors instantly evoke the western genre, with its sense of adventure and legendary imaginative hold over boys and girls of all ages.

Linking westerns and the birth of Hollywood

Westerns have a special place in the hearts of many film studies scholars:

• They were the first genre of popular cinema, along with gangster films, that important film critics such as Andre Bazin took seriously, beginning in the 1950s.
• They have possibly the most obvious visual identity of all film genres and have been vital in establishing ideas of iconography (turn to the later section ‘Seeing why westerns are westerns’).
• Their essential relationship with American history and myth provide rich source material for ideological analysis.

The popularity of westerns throughout much of early Hollywood history has led some film historians to conclude that the genre is somehow fundamental to the development of American cinema. Most obviously, the relocation of the American film industry from its birth in New York to Southern California in the 1910s provided mythical echoes of the wild frontier, along with fantastic exterior locations in the desert.

The film most historians see as the first film western came very early, in 1903. The Great Train Robbery was an adaptation of a popular stage play and has bandits, guns and spectacular scenery captured through location shooting. Its sophisticated editing (something I discuss in Chapter 4) depicts events happening at the same time in different locales to create tension.

When it was first shown in cinemas, The Great Train Robbery came with an accompanying additional scene, which could be shown either at the beginning or at the end. As Figure 5-1 shows, this prologue/epilogue is a close-up of one of the bandits, who calmly raises a pistol, aims it at the screen and fires. Twice. Legend has it that audience members seeing the film for the first time ducked – or even fired back at the screen in self-defence.

This startling moment feels more like an avant-garde film than a crowd-pleasing thriller. It’s a vivid reminder of what film scholar Tom Gunning called ‘the cinema of attractions’ (see Chapter 4). Many early films are like the fairgrounds in which they were often shown – confrontational, sensational and designed to provoke an immediate sensual response in viewers. Later westerns may have more sophisticated stories than The Great Train Robbery, but at their best they retain its thrill of immediacy.

Seeing why westerns are westerns

Although a musical or a comedy can be set just about anywhere, in any time period and with mise-en-scène in any style (check out Chapter 4 where I define this term), a western just isn’t a western without most of these key ingredients:

• Cowboys: Preferably wearing chaps, spurs and Stetson hats.
• Desert setting: Complete with cacti, canyons and log cabins.
• Horses: Pulling stagecoaches, galloping and tipping their riders to the ground when shot at.
• Pistols and rifles: For cowboys to shoot each other and Native Americans.
• Wild-west saloon: Don’t forget the frequent fist-fights.

Film studies groups together these remarkably consistent images, settings and props as iconography. This idea stems from visual arts criticism, where certain objects depicted in paintings are invested with special symbolic meaning. For example, in religious art, doves are sometimes used to represent the Holy Spirit. When applied to films, iconography is useful to describe generic conventions in visual, rather than narrative, terms.

As an example, consider the iconography of the pistol within film westerns. As indicated by the closing shot of The Great Train Robbery in the preceding section, the display of weaponry is a key feature of the genre. Notably:

• Guns are explosive, providing visual spectacle in and of themselves. The firing of a gun was – and sometimes still is – a potent special effect.
• The cowboy’s pistol often contrasts with the spear or bow of the Native Americans, symbolising the pioneers’ pursuit of progress and mastery of the environment through technology.
• Guns are (how to put this politely?) intimate symbols of masculinity. A guy can measure his status and his power by the size of his pistol.

Thus, in the wild uncivilised west, the gun is the rule of law, a physical symbol of patriarchal (that is, male-dominated) authority. The famous gun shootouts of High Noon (1952) and many other westerns offer loving close-ups of polished pistols that fetishise the weapons, lending them supernatural and sexual power. Put it away, Mr Wayne; you’ll have someone’s eye out.

Pitting two sides against each other

In a famous breakdown of the western genre in 1969, film scholar Jim Kitses proposes that cowboy films function on the basis of binary oppositions including:

• Civilisation versus the wilderness
• Community versus individualism
• Freedom versus responsibility
• Settling versus nomadic wandering
• Tradition versus change

The list can go on and on. The western continues to resonate because these conflicts are common human experiences across history and cultures.

Take another look at this list of binary oppositions, and consider it in relation to two common gender stereotypes of the western: the restless wandering hero and the domesticated, stay-at-home wife/girlfriend/sister. It’s not difficult to read each pair of conflicting values as gendered in some way, with the hero standing for freedom, individualism and change, and the wife for responsibility, community and tradition. In this sense, binary oppositions such as those identified by Kitses always have implications for readings of genre in terms of political or social issues of gender, class and race.

This analysis becomes all the more interesting when you consider the position of Native Americans. In the major opposition between civilisation and the wilderness, Native Americans are clearly allied with the wild, untamed country. They’re represented as deeply traditional and resistant to change, often violently so. Plus, they’re a very strong community, usually appearing on screen as a tribe rather than as individual characters within the drama. In some ways, although they’re traditionally the ‘bad guys’ within the western narrative, they’re less like the wandering, individualistic cowboy and more like an inversion of the townsfolk whom the cowboy rides in to protect.

In John Ford’s (and John Wayne’s) Stagecoach (1939), one of the first westerns to be released as an A-picture, the representation of Native Americans is a notable blind spot of Ford’s otherwise humanist approach. The Apaches who attack the isolated stagecoach of the title are clearly savages, and as they appear to be winning the battle, one of the white male passengers threatens to shoot a woman travelling with them to save her from a fate worse than death at their hands.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941) takes a problematic historical incident – the Battle of Little Bighorn and a famous defeat for General Custer and his Yankee army – as its subject. The film falls in line with history (as ever, written by the victors) by treating Custer’s defeat as a noble victory for his values. The film does, however, include signs of a more progressive approach to Native Americans, with Custer’s widow Libby arguing that the Indians must be protected ‘in their own country’.

By 1990, few westerns were being released. One notable exception was Kevin Costner’s directorial debut, Dances With Wolves, which tells the story of John Dunbar (Costner), an exiled Civil War soldier who ‘goes native’ and lives within a Sioux tribe for several years. Going against the Hollywood tradition of casting actors from other ethnic groups (notably Latinos) as ‘Indians’, Costner cast Native American actors (and non-actors) and featured dialogue in the Lakota language, translated in subtitles. Costner was rewarded for his liberal approach with several Oscars.

Letting Yourself Go: Musicals

Music and cinema have always been great together. Even though pre-recorded synchronised sound on film wasn’t widespread until the late 1920s, the early days of cinema were never truly ‘silent’. The first films shown in fairgrounds or popular theatre venues generally had musical accompaniment of some kind, and when purpose-built cinemas appeared they had space in front of the screen for at least a piano and sometimes full orchestras.

So put on a CD of show tunes as accompaniment, as I take you on a tour of the musical’s origins, its defining attributes and the reasons for its popularity.

Showcasing fantastic performers

The close association between popular theatre and early cinema meant that many performers moved between the two media. The great novelty of moving pictures was their motion, and so dancing was a natural fit for the new medium. In addition, films featuring dance stars were a useful way for mass audiences to access the greatest contemporary performers such as prima ballerina Anna Pavlova or jazz star Josephine Baker.

The route into film for singing stars of the stage was blown wide open by the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927. Al Jolson’s exuberant singing style and lively ragtime piano playing had already made him a huge star on Broadway and across the US. Experiments with film sound occurred throughout the 1920s, but not until Warner Bros. took a risk with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and brought Jolson on board did the format – and the screen musical – really take off.

The film musical quickly became the perfect vehicle to bring musical performance to the widest possible audience:

• Many theatrical singers followed Jolson’s lead, notably Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and John Travolta (seriously).
• Dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse were all theatre trained before becoming Hollywood legends.
• Elvis Presley starred in a staggering 31 musical films in 13 years, 19 of which had bestselling soundtrack albums. Thankyouverymuch!
• Pop musicians since the 1970s have had limited success in the musical genre. David Bowie flopped in Absolute Beginners (1986); Madonna’s only acclaimed vocal performance was in Evita (1996); Mariah Carey’s Glitter (2001) is awful. The nearby sidebar ‘Video killed the musical star?’ ponders this trend.

Integrating numbers with plot

The presence of musical performances defines the musical genre as a whole, and so you can further classify musicals depending on the relationship between those numbers and the rest of the film.

Backstage musicals

A large section of musicals qualify as the so-called backstage variety, whereby the musical numbers are justified because the entire film is set in a theatre or similar performance space. (The nearby sidebar ‘But nobody bursts into song in real life!’ seeks to explain all that singing and dancing.)

For a great example of an early backstage musical, try 42nd Street (1933), a film that sets out many conventions of the genre. It has a slight but diverting plot, largely about the financial shenanigans behind a Broadway show, but its most significant narrative device is the rags-to-riches plot – the sudden rise to stardom of the understudy when the star falls ill.

The numbers in 42nd Street may be ‘realistically’ motivated in that they’re part of the stage show, but they also take on an increasingly excessive and spectacular nature to the point where space and time begin to stretch in impossible ways. The rendition of the title tune begins with Ruby Keeler alone on stage against a painted backdrop, and then cuts to a much larger soundstage filled with dozens of people, cars and even a police horse.

A much more recent, but surprisingly faithful example of the backstage genre, is 8 Mile (2002), starring abrasive rapper Eminem. This film may be a gritty portrayal of life on the streets of Detroit, but at its heart it’s also a rags-to-riches tale about a talented performer overcoming the odds to make it in show business. Its numbers are semi-improvised rap battles rather than show tunes, but they’re as vocally impressive as many Judy Garland standards. If you’re still not convinced, you could also count the scandalously sexy Cabaret (1972) or the gritty disco classic Saturday Night Fever (1977) as backstage musicals.

Integrated musicals

Musicals set in other environments where the stars nonetheless burst into song at the drop of a hat are sometimes called integrated musicals, in that the songs are in some way integral to the plot and help move the story along. The songs also tend to help define or expand the characters on screen, and certainly heighten audience identification with them. Here are a few classic integrated musicals:

• Easter Parade (1948) stars film’s greatest dancer, Fred Astaire, with probably its greatest singer, Judy Garland. Garland’s character professes her love by singing ‘It Only Happens when I Dance with You’. Indeed, Fred’s got the moves.
• The Sound of Music (1965), the megahit musical starring Julie Andrews, includes numerous songs that are life-lessons for its characters. In ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ and ‘I Have Confidence’, characters sing and dance as a natural extension to their emotions.
• Grease (1978) revived the high-school movie with added rock and roll songs that express the vigour of youth and its heightened emotional states. The ‘Summer Nights’ number does essential narrative work by setting up the central love story, and Stockard Channing’s rendition of ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ adds a surprisingly adult note.

Feeling better through musicals

All right, in this section things are about to get heady in happy-go-lucky musical land. Because the numbers in integrated musicals often happen in everyday settings, such as schools or convents, the films’ choreographers and set designers have to be creative in terms of dance steps and props. These inventive moments led to the convention of bricolage, whereby characters grab whatever is around them and dance or create music with it. Think Gene Kelly dancing with his trusty umbrella in Singin’ in the Rain (1952).

You can think of using bricolage to integrate the environment into entertainment as a nostalgic reminder of folk-art traditions within a carefully constructed industrial product.

Critic Richard Dyer points to elements of musicals as offering utopian visions of society that are pleasurable for audiences.

Utopia is a vision of an ideal world where all the typical problems of society are solved. Although musicals don’t tend to offer fully realised imaginative worlds (unlike sci-fi, for example), they’re very good at creating the sensation of utopia, what it may feel like.

Musicals offer utopian solutions to all sorts of everyday problems:

• Energy and exuberance through exceptional performances counters the exhaustion and blandness of everyday life.
• Abundance and sensual spectacle in the form of fine costumes, rich orchestrations and luxurious settings corrects poverty and wealth inequality.
• Intense emotions conveyed in song and dance contrasts with dreary, predictable jobs and relationships.
• Emotionally transparent and spontaneous characters combat feelings that media, advertising, corporations or governments are manipulating modern life.
• Being part of a strong community via group singing or dancing alleviates contemporary feelings of fragmentation and loneliness.

Admittedly, Dyer’s analysis works best within the period known as Hollywood’s Golden Age (that is, the 1930s to the 1950s), when movies were the dominant form of popular entertainment, and audiences were by and large working class. But certain pleasures of the musical genre – such as the transcendent performances of Judy Garland or Fred Astaire – are as powerful for audiences now as they have ever been.

Lurking in the Shadows: Horror

One of the most satisfying and logical ways of classifying genre is to group films according to how they make you feel: comedies are ‘feel-good films’, melodramas are ‘weepies’ and suspense films are ‘thrillers’. But of the widely accepted and discussed film genres, only one is exclusively defined in emotional terms: horror.

Given this core emotional purpose – to induce fear and disgust in the audience – the horror genre has proved particularly fertile for psychological analysis. Issues of gender representation are also vital, because threats to life are often mixed up with sexuality in fascinating and disturbing ways. These universal human responses mean that horror is a truly international genre, with lively traditions in many different cultural contexts.

Read this section through the gaps between your fingers as I cover the history of horror’s granddaddy, Dracula, the psychology of being terrified and why cinematic horror is so popular across the globe.

Drawing first blood

The history of the horror film can be traced through the movies featuring its most famous monster: the vampire, and in particular the Lord of the Undead, Count Dracula himself. The modern vampire legend has its roots in fiction, with Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker appearing almost simultaneously with the invention of cinema. Crucially, this timing meant the novel was still in copyright for the first few decades of the film industry.

Stoker’s estate refused to grant FW Murnau the rights to adapt the novel, but few audiences are fooled by the simple change of name from Dracula to Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922). As part of the movement later called German Expressionism, Nosferatu benefits from truly weird visuals and extraordinary make-up and sets (see ‘Sharing the nightmares from Elm Street and elsewhere’ later for more on Expressionism). Max Schreck’s vampire is completely unlike the suave gentleman of later adaptations, being deformed and bestial – kind of like a really evil mole.

A few years later, Universal Studios acquired the rights to the Dracula character by adapting a 1924 stage play that had been endorsed by Stoker’s estate. Originally planned as a grand epic on the scale of hits such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the film was scaled down as the Great Depression hit. The eventual result is a claustrophobic, if rather stagey, version of the novel.

On stage the Count had been played by unknown Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, who (being cheap to hire) reprised the role on film despite the producer’s misgivings. Lugosi’s distinctive Eastern European accent is now forever associated with the role. Audiences were terrified of his performance, with newspaper reports of people fainting from fear providing useful publicity. Universal’s Dracula (1931) was a gamble, but it repaid its modest investment handsomely, instigating a profitable cycle of horror films at the studio.

The next major reincarnation of the Count came from the unlikely source of the British film industry. Hammer Horror’s 1958 version starring Christopher Lee was more literary, with careful period detail, and much more bloody, with colour photography ably enhancing the disgusting gore.

After Hammer bled the Count dry, more recent adaptations have attempted to render a more sympathetic version of the character. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Gary Oldman’s performance provokes pathos as well as fear. Dracula is recast as a tragic figure, doomed to unrequited love for all eternity. The recent Twilight franchise capitalised upon this romantic potential of the vampire to hugely profitable effect.

Of course, Dracula is by no means the only recurring nightmare in the history of horror on screen. That other great invention of Gothic literature, Frankenstein’s monster comes back to life again and again, most recently as an unlikely action hero in I, Frankenstein (2014). And the rotting, decomposed figure of the zombie is currently more popular than ever, thanks to the straight-forwardly terrifying 28 Days Later (2002) and the tongue-in-blistered-cheek Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Facing your inner demons

Horror films regularly present unpleasant, disgusting or deeply disturbing images or ideas, and yet audiences can’t help but ignore the warning embodied in the title of Nicolas Roeg’s horror film Don’t Look Now (1973). Even if you’re peeking from behind a cushion, you have to watch.

So why do people enjoy being scared? Answering this and similar questions is what psychoanalytical film theory was made for. Sigmund Freud, the grandfather of modern psychoanalysis, had plenty of ideas about fear and pleasure, and scholars have applied many of these to the cinema, especially to horror films.

Crucially, Freud considered the human psyche to be split into a relatively small conscious mind, over which you have control, and a much larger, darker subconscious containing your primitive urges, including violence and sexual desire. The conscious mind must constantly keep the subconscious in check in order to maintain the facade of civilisation. Repression is the key idea here; people have to bottle up things in order to try and avoid becoming raving lunatics. But what you repress always returns in one form or another.

In the earlier ‘Enjoying repetition – up to a point’ section, I discuss the theory that genre films act as rituals that serve a social purpose. In this light, horror films are a safe way in which the repressed can return from your subconscious, be faced by your conscious mind and be temporarily neutralised. Movie monsters therefore symbolise things that society chooses to repress – but can’t properly keep a lid on.

In the contemporary Western context, these threats extend beyond the safety of the soul and the body to anything that threatens heterosexual marriage and the family. This reason is why so many classic horror films have monsters that are children, for example The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973), or childlike in some way, such as Michael Myers from the Halloween films. These characters terrify because deep down you know that all humans were monstrous creatures of unregulated desire as infants, and had to go through the painful process of becoming adults by repressing those desires. Bet you never look at the knife-wielding Chucky doll from the Child’s Play films in quite the same way again!

Having nightmares on Elm Street and elsewhere

Horror films travel surprisingly well. Think about it. In Bram Stoker’s novel and several film versions, Count Dracula starts as a distant foreign threat and then spreads, like a sickness, until he’s uncomfortably close to home. Similarly, horror films produced across the world slip much more easily across national and linguistic boundaries than films made in other genres.

Several factors help horror films to cross cultures:

• Flexibility: The horror genre is incredibly broad in terms of subject matter and style, unlike, say, the western. Horror has dozens of sub-genres and has gone through numerous production cycles. The genre responds well to new ideas from other cultures.
• Primarily visual: Horror films rely on visual elements to achieve their emotional impact. Therefore, unlike for example comedies, their power is less likely to be lost in translation.
• Strength of the ‘other’ to terrify: Despite the apparent similarities between what scares people across the world, cultural differences do exist in how horror is manifest. As a result, various culture-specific incarnations can seem even stranger to international audiences.

The films collectively known as German Expressionism emerged from a distinctive cultural moment in 1920s Weimar Germany (flip to Chapter 11 for details). Their legacy for horror film aesthetics lies in their use of chiaroscuro lighting techniques, which create extreme contrast between bright pools of light and deep black shade. These films also use skewed camera angles to suggest fear and madness, a technique that has returned to the forefront with the recent wave of handheld ‘found footage’ horror (The Blair Witch Project (1999)).

Italian giallo (yellow) films of the 1960s and beyond were potboiler thrillers, which cover several sub-genres including murder mysteries. Their name comes from the yellow covers of pulp novels published by Mondadori. Later gialli developed into experimental horror films courtesy of directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who poured buckets of gore and stylised visuals into the generic mix. These films are often discussed as influences upon the American slasher film of the late 1970s and 80s.

The continued strength of the horror genre lies in its ability to refresh itself by absorbing offshoots such as giallo films back into the mainstream. The most obvious incarnation of this phenomenon is Hollywood’s habit of remaking successful horror films from other national contexts. The Japanese ghost story Ringu (1998), the Nordic vampire film Let the Right One In (2008) and even South Korean ‘extreme cinema’ such as Oldboy (2003) have all recently received the Hollywood treatment.

Voyaging Beyond: Sci-Fi

The very term science fiction (sci-fi) is a fascinating contradiction. On the one hand, science suggests objectivity, truth and evidence; on the other hand, fiction is pure imagination with no rational basis. But bring the two together and you start to realise that maybe they’re not so different. Fundamentally, both are means to satisfy human curiosity about the world and people themselves.

Science fiction is often about the relationship between humans and technology, which makes it a perfect genre for the mechanical, chemical and now digital medium of film. Whether you believe that technology is bringing society to a higher, enlightened state, or that it will lead ultimately to destruction, sci-fi allows audiences to play out both these eventualities, and to imagine worlds on other planets or other moments in time.

In this section, I travel to the planet Sci-Fi to discuss the past of a genre so often concerned with the future, as well as imaginary worlds and what it means to be human in the face of technological progress.

Rocketing to the moon

As the nearest and most easily observable extra-terrestrial object, the moon has always been the subject of speculation, myth and legend. During the 20th century the satellite was brought tantalisingly within human reach thanks to the international space race, triggering fantasies of space exploration in the young (and not so young) the world over. In this sense, the astro/cosmonaut of sci-fi isn’t so different from the pioneering cowboy of the western genre (check out the earlier section ‘Appreciating What a Man’s Got to Do: Westerns’ for more about life on the range).

Fittingly the subject of the first significant science fiction film was a trip to the moon. Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) is one of the most enduringly popular films of early cinema due to its striking and playful images and its technical prowess. Méliès used lavish, moveable sets, extravagant costumes and visual effects such as the stop trick, where shooting pauses for a moment, making objects seem to disappear. The celluloid was also hand-painted for added visual spectacle.

By the time of Destination Moon (1950), the US was about to engage in a space race with Cold War rival the Soviet Union. A propaganda agenda was certainly operating here, with scientists educating and persuading doubters in the best way they knew how – with a Woody Woodpecker cartoon! Just fire up YouTube to watch Woody learn about jet propulsion and gravitational fields; you too may begin to believe the authoritative narrator who states that ‘the moon is a great deal easier to reach than you realise’.

Although released just a few months before the US actually reached the moon, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has a loftier agenda. This is epic sci-fi that aims to explore the place of humans in the universe. The moon features here as a mere stop-off point on the way to farther destinations, including an enigmatic lesson for humanity in the shape of a huge black monolith. Kubrick’s meticulous direction brought a new realism to the special effects, introducing front projection (a sophisticated way to combine actors with moving backdrops) and detailed miniature work.

By the 1990s the Cold War had thawed and the huge cost of the space programme was becoming unsustainable. The Challenger disaster of 1986, in which seven astronauts died on take-off, was a horrific demonstration of the dangers of space travel. In this context, Apollo 13 (1995) retells the events of the near disastrous space mission of 1970 as a tense thriller starring Tom Hanks. Zero-gravity scenes were shot inside the freefalling aeroplanes used to train astronauts, known as ‘vomit comets’. Houston, we have a problem.

Exploring imaginary worlds

Film scholar Vivian Sobchack argues that science fiction relies upon the collision of real and imaginary worlds to create its impact. The much-discussed ending of The Planet of the Apes (1968) is the perfect example, as Charlton Heston’s astronaut realises that the planet run by apes upon which he thought he was ‘shipwrecked’ is, in fact, Earth. ‘You maniacs!’ he cries. ‘You blew it up! Damn you all to hell.’

You can make the distinction between science fiction, which presents events that may be possible given current scientific knowledge, and science fantasy, in which you stop caring about the story’s basis in reality and simply suspend disbelief. But this separation is difficult to sustain in the face of films that are realistic in tone but set in the future (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey), resulting in fun but ultimately pointless arguments about whether sci-fi gurus such as Arthur C Clarke accurately predicted the future.

All cinematic imaginary worlds, whether scientifically plausible or not, must contain familiar reference points to allow audiences to engage with the stories. This necessity leads to the widely accepted convention that aliens in the far reaches of the universe are often ‘humanoid’ and speak English with an American accent. The pre-eminent example here is, of course, Star Wars (1977) and its sequels and prequels. And pre-sequels. Or something.

The universe of Star Wars is so familiar to audiences the world over, and so heavily invested with fan debate, that stepping back and thinking about its significance can be tricky. But its huge popularity and influence are exactly why you need to try to understand this phenomenon. Here are a few frameworks you can use to explore the Star Wars universe (Chapters 13 and 14 contain more on these approaches):

• Psychoanalysis: The Oedipal conflict between father (Darth Vader) and son (Luke Skywalker) is almost too obvious. What about seeing the relationship between the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO as one that mirrors the human psyche? R2-D2 is instinctive id and C-3PO rational superego.
• Representation: Many aliens are given traits (and even accents) associated with ethnic minorities on Earth. Jar Jar Binks is the most discussed (and disliked) example of creating a borderline racist ‘other’ figure.
• Semiotics: You can break down the conflicts between characters into oppositions, such as human/alien, order/chaos, democracy/dictatorship and so on. This approach strips away the imaginary world and exposes the symbolic tensions behind all those rubber alien masks.

All of these different approaches are reminders that – despite its somewhat geeky reputation – sci-fi does deserve to be taken seriously. You just need to look beyond the spectacular special effects and thrilling zero-gravity fight sequences. After all, imaginary worlds are effectively just different ways of looking at our own.

Dreaming of electric sheep and mechanical men

If a key question of the western (mosey along to the earlier ‘Appreciating What a Man’s Got to Do: Westerns’ section) is what it means to be a man, sci-fi likes to go one better and think about what it means to be human. Of course that’s mainly because it’s the only film genre that regularly features non-human characters. Well, that and children’s animated features, weirdly enough.

Forget about aliens for a moment and focus on the figures that best represent the intersection of technology and humanity: robots, androids, or even better, cyborgs who’re literally combinations of (wo)man and machine.

The idea of a mechanical person, or at least one constructed by another person (rather than by God), is what animates Frankenstein’s monster. The terrifying potential in this character crosses the boundaries between sci-fi and horror. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is often read as symptomatic of popular fears around the advances of science in the 19th century, and you can also apply this concept to the more obviously fabricated robots of 20th century sci-fi cinema.

A Frankenstein-style mad professor also features in one of the earliest sci-fi films: Fritz Lang’s extravagant and spectacular Metropolis (1927). For various complicated and not entirely clear reasons, the scientist is called upon to create a robot double of an innocent female character, Maria. Brigitte Helm’s performance in the dual role is truly something to behold: as Maria she simpers and cowers, as her mechanical double she’s a hyper animated floozy. The disturbing sexuality of female robots is also an idea explored in many later films such as Blade Runner (1982).

The 1980s and 1990s produced a distinctive cycle of sci-fi films featuring robots, androids and cyborgs. They’re often violent action films such as The Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987), where mechanical killers hunt remarkably squishy humans. Both these films clearly play with computer-age anxieties about technology replacing humanity, particularly in The Terminator’s apocalyptic vision of sentient, war-mongering machines.

The notion of so-called virtual reality, which became common currency in the early 1990s, provoked fictions that did away with the human altogether. One early example, The Lawnmower Man (1992), tells the story of a mentally disabled gardener who becomes an all-powerful superhero online and turns into a monster. The Matrix (1999) and its sequels took this one step further and imagined an entire universe created by computer, fed by energy from battery-farmed humans. At least you can someday learn kung fu by download. Or perhaps even film studies… .

Peering Through the Darkness: Film Noir

The scene is a darkened, smoky bar at midnight. A detective sits alone, shooting back bourbon. Raindrops sparkle on the window like diamonds and a neon sign blinks on and off. A woman dressed in black satin slinks over and sits next to him. He doesn’t blink. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ she purrs. She’s already smoking. ‘Mind if I drink?’ he replies, finishing the bottle.

The iconography of film noir is so instantly recognisable that evoking or parodying it is all too easy. But try to discuss film noir as a genre with consistent conventions and meanings and you soon find that it’s as slippery as its devious female characters. What makes film noir so interesting as a category is that, according to some film scholars, it doesn’t really qualify as a genre at all. And yet, you know film noir when you feel it.

So peer with me through the shadowy gloom as I attempt to shine a revealing spotlight on this most complex of genres, including its visual style and its protagonists.

Testing the limits of genre

Here’s a tricky question. If westerns and sci-fi are defined by their narrative setting and iconography, horror by its emotional effect and musicals by the fact that everyone suddenly bursts into song, what defines film noir? Its name, using yet another French word (meaning ‘black’) implies darkness, evil and despair. You can, indeed, find these tonal qualities in many of the films generally considered to be noirs, but of course such qualities aren’t exclusive to film noir.

Neither can you define which films count as noirs by looking at how the film industry or audiences discussed them at the time of release. During the 1940s and 50s, for example, the films that scholars consider to be classic film noirs were generally referred to as ‘crime thrillers’, ‘gangster films’ and ‘psychological dramas’. Their source material is sometimes drawn from ‘hardboiled’ detective writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but sometimes not.

The truth is that French film critics created film noir as a category by looking at a set of American movies several years after their initial releases. Few films were released in Europe during World War II, leaving a large backlog of American movies that hit after peace was restored. These films struck the French critics as being markedly different to what had come before. They looked and felt, how you say? Darker, non?

So historical coincidence caused a somewhat general impression that film critics solidified into a canon, or key group, of films. This group varies in size and scope but nearly always includes the following films:

• The Maltese Falcon (1941): A bafflingly complex detective yarn adapted from Dashiell Hammett and starring world-weary Humphrey Bogart.
• Double Indemnity (1944): A sordid tale of infidelity and double-crossing directed by Billy Wilder.
• Laura (1944): A murder mystery where the detective falls in love with the dead victim, discovers she’s still alive and then tries to kill her.

By defining a genre and then choosing a canon of films that qualify as belonging to it, critics are clearly in danger of tautology, or what’s sometimes called ‘the empiricist’s dilemma’. Tautology is a chicken-and-egg situation. What defines the category? The films. How do you choose the films? By those that fit into the category. See what I mean? Doesn’t really make sense does it?

Although the same logic can apply to all attempts to categorise genres, film noir suffers particularly from the empiricist’s dilemma because outside critics originally imposed the category, instead of industry insiders developing it. In a further twist to the tale, the more recent self-conscious incarnation – neo-noir – is an example of the film industry listening to critics and then making movies that fit the category (walk over to the mean streets of the nearby sidebar ‘From noir to neo-noir’). Confused yet?

Seeing noir as a style

If film noir struggles to qualify as a genre, perhaps it’s more a style of film-making or an aesthetic approach to a range of different subject matters. Obviously ‘noir-ish’ crime thrillers certainly exist, but can you equally imagine a noir-ish western, musical or comedy?

In order to answer this question, you need first to establish which stylistic elements make up a noir-ish approach. The films described as noir tend to be:

• Dark: Obviously. More specifically, most scenes take place at night and are lit with high contrast between dark and light.
• Narrated through voice-over: This convention can take you deeper into the protagonist’s inner psychology – or add further levels of deceit through the use of unreliable narration.
• Structured around oblique, diagonal lines: The classic example is angled lighting through venetian blinds, which casts oblique lines over characters faces, as if they’re behind prison bars.
• Wet: It’s usually raining, and when it’s not, the streets glisten nonetheless. Riverbanks and beaches at night provide additional inky backdrops.

These stylistic elements can appear in different types of films, and indeed they often are. You find them in productions as diverse as Hitchcock’s gothic women’s picture Rebecca (1940) and Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), a lavish romantic melodrama.

One of the best-known cinematographers of the noir period was John Alton, whose book Painting with Light (1949) remains a classic guide to the craft. Alton describes the techniques used in these films as ‘mystery lighting’ or ‘criminal lighting’, suggesting that they were already well-established conventions of genre film-making well before World War II. For example, the original version of Scarface from 1932 has several noir-ish sequences.

Detecting spider women and their prey

Whether film noir is a genre or a style, undeniably the films associated with the term present a highly pessimistic view of male–female relations. Basically, romance isn’t to be trusted, and love leads to disaster or even death. The male characters, often detectives or criminals, are either cynical and bitter or naive and stupid.

The source of this danger? Women, or more specifically (yet another French term) the femmes fatales. These ‘deadly women’ are beautiful and sexy and use their sexuality to nefarious ends:

• In Double Indemnity (1944), Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) lures insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) into a plot to kill her husband and claim on his life policy. She then seduces her daughter’s boyfriend in an attempt to get him to kill Neff. Naughty, naughty girl.
• In Out of the Past (1947), Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) abruptly settles a fist fight between two of her lovers by shooting one of them in the head.
• In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Cora Smith (Lana Turner) bewitches her older husband’s young employee to the extent that murder is practically foreplay.

As this short selection indicates, the femme fatale is often literally deadly for her husband or lover (or sometimes both). She’s positioned clearly as an object of physical desire for her male prey, with the camera lingering over her legs or lips as she smokes cigarettes or puts on lipstick. She wants money or power rather than romantic fulfilment. And she usually dies before the film’s climax, having nonetheless destroyed the life of the male protagonist.

Critical differences of opinion abound with regard to the femme fatale and her relationship to feminist film theory. In psychoanalytic theory (which explores the subconscious processes of cinema spectatorship – see Chapter 13), she’s the prime example of an objectified female who exists only to be looked at by other male characters and the audience. Her place in the narrative can be seen as a punishment of female transgression: the femme fatale who kills her husband invariably winds up dead herself, neutralising her threat to the nuclear family.

Although the femme fatale rarely goes unpunished in the films, her on-screen presence is often so potent as to render her ultimate fate irrelevant. American audiences during these films’ original releases were well used to the convention of last-minute moral readjustment, a requirement of the Hays Code (check out Chapter 9), and didn’t always take these endings seriously. Bearing this in mind, these women’s transgressions resonate as powerful stands against unhappy marriages and even against patriarchy as a whole.

For example, do audiences really buy the unconvincing ending of Gilda (1946), when Rita Hayworth’s eponymous femme fatale makes up with gangster Johnny (Glenn Ford)? No, they remember Hayworth’s incandescence, her outfits and hair, and the way she runs rings round the pathetic men in her orbit. And audience research, such as Jackie Stacy’s, has confirmed that female film fans often find portrayals of powerful women on screen liberating and pleasurable (as I describe in Chapter 3).

Watching Boy Meet Girl, Time and Again: Romantic Comedy

Scholars generally consider the romantic comedy to be a sub-genre of the larger field of comedy. But early definitions of comedy, such as those used to describe Shakespearean plays, stressed narrative elements related to male–female relationships (love and romance, marriage as conclusion) instead of humour or lightness of tone. In this sense, all comedies are romantic to a greater or lesser degree.

In the contemporary film industry, the romantic comedy (or rom-com) is a well-established genre. Familiar narrative patterns generally define these films: boy meets girl, boy hates girl, boy changes mind and wins girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back. These films are also commonly aimed at and marketed to female audiences. Hence another commonly used but less complimentary moniker: the ‘chick flick’.

In this section you get the chance, if you so desire, to go all gooey as the path of true love refuses to run smooth and gender roles are put through the wringer, but all’s well in the end.

Romancing the same old story

The rom-com relies on romance. Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But stop for a minute to think about what romance means. In contemporary usage, romance refers to a love story or courtship, generally between a man and a woman. It involves codes of behaviour (monogamy, for instance) and rituals (the first date, proposing marriage) that are specific to different cultures and different time periods.

Put simply, being romantic or behaving in a romantic way isn’t instinctive behaviour: you need to learn it. And you acquire and learn to navigate these codes through friends, family and popular culture – which is where rom-coms come in. In the 20th century, Hollywood movies became the perfect purveyors of ‘true love’ and ‘happy ever after’ romances.

Here are some examples of the movies that made audiences believe in Hollywood romance:

• Why Change Your Wife? (1920), an example of Cecil B. DeMille’s witty, society comedies of marriage, which were successful on both stage and screen.
• It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra, was a big hit and it set off a cycle of fast-talking, battle-of-the-sexes films or ‘screwball comedies’ such as The Philadelphia Story (1940).
• Pillow Talk (1959) is one of a series of films starring wholesome Doris Day and Rock Hudson that hinted towards sex without ever being explicit.
• Annie Hall (1977) is Woody Allen’s deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre that led to other so-called nervous romances of the 1970s.
• Pretty Woman (1990) represents a return to the genre’s traditional values. The film made a megastar of Julia Roberts.

Of course, Hollywood didn’t create the idea of romance. Many of its signs and codes were already well established, and so here the idea of discourse can be particularly useful. French philosopher Michel Foucault used the term discourse to describe the complex web of ideas, knowledge and communication that circulate around culture and together comprise ‘common knowledge’ on a particular subject (see Chapter 13).

Thinking of romance as a discourse highlights its nature as something society constructs, instead of it being seen as an essential human truth that simply exists. This construction is constantly evolving and balancing opposing ideas, known as dialectics. Crucially, discourses can evolve through the stories that society tells itself, such as film genres. In this sense, the romance narrative of the rom-com isn’t just a reflection of a discourse, it’s the discourse itself, living and breathing and full of contradictions.

Interestingly, one of the key elements of the romantic discourse in Hollywood rom-coms, which has been present from the earliest examples of the genre, is the explicit discussion of romance itself. Often one or both parts of the romantic coupling claim not to believe in true love or Hollywood clichés. For example:

• Friends With Benefits (2011): Jamie (Mila Kunis) and Dylan (Justin Timberlake) attempt to avoid romance by staying as friends who have sex. Of course this doesn’t work. At one point Jamie kicks a poster advertising another rom-com and screams ‘Shut up, Katherine Heigl! You stupid liar!’
• Sleepless in Seattle (1993): Sam (Tom Hanks) listens to his friend’s wife describe the plot of An Affair to Remember (1957) and become emotional to the point of tears, before smirking to his friend: ‘That’s a chick’s movie!’ Later he recreates the ‘chick’s movie’ climax with himself in the lead role.

These films attempt to be knowingly cynical about romance and overarchingly romantic at the same time, a desire that mirrors many reactions from audience members who often treat these films as ‘guilty pleasures’, wanting the kick of true love but being fully aware of the films’ artifice.

Digging deeper into chick flicks

The term chick flick is the cause of some debate in film studies. Some scholars see it as a patronising term that devalues female audiences and the pleasures they derive from cinema. If critics or commentators use ‘chick flick’ as a means of dismissing a film, then they are helping to maintain a long tradition of cultural distinctions that are gendered. Intellectual high art is masculine and important, while emotive popular culture is feminine and therefore less worthy. However some younger female audiences have co-opted, or taken back, the term, and now use it in an ironic or celebratory fashion.

Chick flicks aren’t necessarily frivolous rom-coms, however, they can also be:

• Buddy films: Such as Thelma and Louise (1991) or Ghost World (2001)
• Musicals or dance films: Such as Dirty Dancing (1987) or Mamma Mia! (2008)
• Period films: Such as Pride and Prejudice (2005) or Marie Antoinette (2006)
• Weepies: Such as the notorious tear-jerkers Beaches (1988) or The Notebook (2004)

This list features an incredibly diverse range of films. Of course, if you attempt to define a genre by the gender of those who enjoy it, don’t be surprised to find a wide variety of preferences and styles.

Feeling bromantic

Some scholars notice a significant gender shift going on in rom-com land. The recent films made by producer Judd Apatow (and imitators) have been described as male-centred romantic comedies. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007) and I Love You, Man (2009) all feature heterosexual romance in their plots, but each places equal (if not higher) value upon close male friendships. For this reason they’ve also been termed bromance movies.

In bromance movies, decidedly un-alpha males (played by ‘regular guy’ actors such as Seth Rogen and Jason Segel) form close friendships with other men to discuss their relationships with women. These discussions are often open and explicit, suggesting sexual confidence, but nonetheless anxious about sexual performance and other issues. Although the male friends are clearly presented as straight and involved in heterosexual pregnancies and marriages, they also become extremely close and often employ comic homoeroticism.

The bromance cycle can be read as a symptom of a crisis in modern heterosexual masculinity, triggered by factors such as the increased acceptance of homosexuality. Alternatively, some viewers have taken seriously the sexist values expressed ironically by the male characters, creating an unpleasant backlash against feminism and women’s increased power in society. Either way, this unexpected turn in the romantic comedy is evidence that genre remains significant and has plenty to say about gender relations, whether you like what’s said or not.