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Functions of Popular Culture. HUM/COMM 4034 spring 2009 Neal King. Production of genre. Tuesday, February 24, 2009. Genre as business. Genre refers to a story with which producers and audiences become familiar by virtue of recognition and repetition.
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Functions of Popular Culture HUM/COMM 4034 spring 2009 Neal King
Production of genre Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Genre as business • Genre refers to a story with which producers and audiences become familiar by virtue of recognition and repetition. • Public recognition tends to begin with aspersions cast by bored critics, who label sets of retreads and knockoffs. • Audience loyalty requires a combination of: • minor variations in characterization and plotting that forestall a sense of being sold knockoffs, and • generic thrills in scenes that celebrate deviance, such as car chases, fights, sex scenes, or songs. • Genre production can reduce risk both for indies and for blockbusting majors, though in different ways.
Genre as business cycle • Realignments between different but interdependent sectors of the industry inspire indies and majors to produce copies. • For instance, competition between both kinds for distribution channels leads each to produce knockoffs of successes that originated in the other’s production. • Usually, this means that a low-budget, experimental film becomes a surprise hit and inspires majors to make bigger-budget knockoffs. • They use stars and special effects to raise the bar on audience attractions, raising the costs of production high enough to exclude independent producers.
Genre as business cycle of renewal • Agents and stars of high-end production demand more money, boosting the costs of star-driven films to the blockbuster realm. • Actors defer salaries for indie dramas that enhance reputations among their subcultures, but not in the case of major genre pictures. • Rising costs make producers conservative about other aspects of production, limiting experiment. • Indies come up with the next low-cost experiment, beginning the cycle all over again. • (Indies can also produce knock-offs of major hits that began with proprietary characters.)
Slasher integration and diversification • early, abortive tries include Black Christmas (1974) • the indie mother lode: Halloween (1978) • rush of knockoffs include major studio copycatting with high-end effects and stars: Alien, Dressed to Kill • early cycles: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepaway Camp • early notoriety: 1980 episode of Sneak Previews devoted to “women in danger” movies; protests in 1980 against Dressed to Kill.
Slasher integration and diversification • early 1980s integration with early labels: stalker, slasher • revival in the late 1990s by major studios’ indie divisions, after end of `hood cycle: Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend. • diversification by majors into star-driven knockoffs of low-cost, pre-sold stories from Japanese horror: The Grudge, The Ring • diversification by indies during wartime into torture porn: The Hills Have Eyes, Hostel, Saw
Car chase storytelling • Generic economy demands deviance: scenes of violent carnage in horror and war, or chases and races in action • Car provide signs of youthful rebellion that slashers supplied with parties: races, drive-ins • storytelling with car chases • suspense as to outcome of negotiation between characters and larger success of protagonist • character placement as engaging storytelling • subjective shots (including bumper cams) as identification with protagonist as well as spectacle
Car chase style • Rear-screen process to real-world car chase genre • Realism in cop movies, made possible by … • New technology: tough cars, nonvibrating lenses, tow-rigs, quiet cameras • … served many functions: • Discourage looking for stunt drivers • Differentiate from TV crap • Place characters more firmly in a spectacular section of the story
Car chase diversification • The car chase genre ended because: • comedy has little viewer-involving suspense, and • men’s heroism turned to fighting not driving. • Meanwhile, cop action had started because: • A young audience conditioned by social turmoil, Bonnie and Clyde, and Peckinpah movies; and westerns began to give way to urban cinematography, obscene dialogue, grim stories, and the use of cops as consultants and writers. • This story to be continued next Tuesday …
Conclusion • Though not a production of auteurist blockbuster production, we can understand the development of the car chase and slasher genres in terms of business practices between major studios and independent producers: Copying is life and diversification is rebirth. • Such group activities amount to more immediate causal factors than larger forms of Reaganite conservativism, anti-feminism, or Boomer or anti-authoritarian rebellion.
Mind Job production and interpretation Thursday, February 26, 2009
Mind-job study • Scenes of shocking violence suggest postmodern concerns with schizophrenia and machine invasions of the human body. • End-act transitions suggest matters of normalcy vs. a life of rebellious violence, in the context of confusion about the line between the two. • Could such stories hail a postmodern period? • They are not popular enough to justify structuralist attribution of mass concern with their tensions. • This suggests a look back at authorship, in particular the networks in which auteurs like Cronenberg make films and people read the stories of Philip Dick and Richard Burroughs.
Mind-job development • Stories originate with concerns about mind control and double-lives—with brainwashing and secret identities, that emerged during the Second World War and the Korean War. • Sci-fi readers absorbed Philip Dick’s stories of spies and assassins who had bought their own cover. • The genre allows for the vivid depiction of unusual bodily experiences, including violations that can symbolize the invasiveness of brainwashing. • It also allows for virtuosic storytelling, which tend to draw attention to auteurs who are forever in need of the next job in the Hollywood labor market.
Mind-job development • Technology: Prosthetics and animation compositing limited development during the 1980s but allowed more production by the late 1990s. • The failure of Blade Runner and other (expensive) sci-fi cop movies might have steered American filmmakers away. But Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall) was able to do more in the late 1980s. • Cronenberg did the most, drafting wife-killer stories Total Recall and the Burroughs homage Naked Lunch. • During the last decade, Philip Dick stories have flourished, in part with new effects technology to realize drug-laced hallucinations: Next, Imposter, A Scanner Darkly.
Mind-job development • Cyberpunk translation of Burroughs/Dick themes eventually resulted, during the late-1990s vogue in mind-job filmmaking, in Dark City and The Matrix • … which also benefit from the development of digital animation and compositing. • peripheral developments at the turn of the century: protagonists either hallucinate that they are agents when they’re not (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, A Beautiful Mind), or that they’re not when they are (Fight Club, Memento). • Such films, whether they make money upon initial release or not, can rocket authors to fame via celebration of mind-blowing plots and “distinctive” styles.
Mind-job structuralism • Structuralism 1.0 not only imputes large-scale demand for new stories by diagnosing social neuroses and tensions, but also suggests that films made in a postmodern period (now) are ambiguous in meaning as a result. • Thus, the films both depict schizophrenia and suffer from it. • This mimetic argument, that films reflect with their poor intelligibility the societies that they depict, holds that films both are and are not clear. • Structuralism 2.0 looks at the filmmaking routines that resulted in the stories: Low audience demand but high auteur payoff from clear stories about muddle protagonists.
interpretative problems • In the case of ambiguous meaning, what data does one need to draw a conclusion? • Filmmaker comments? • marketing rhetoric vs. veracity • Story structure? • initial goals and thematic oppositions vs. happy conclusions • Audience research? • dominant vs. resistant interpretations, initial success vs. cult discovery
How to settle questions? • Filmmakers • What are they actually accomplishing within their networks? Money? Bragging rights and auteurism? Earnest political expression? • Stories • How do their structural patterns contrast to other cycles/genres? • Audiences • How do they respond?
Functions of Popular Culture HUM/COMM 4034 spring 2009 Neal King