I submitted this essay as an answer to the following question:
In Classical Hollywood, genre was understood primarily as production category as studies determined what types (and how many of each type) of movie they would make to fulfill the diverse needs of the market. Discuss the role of genre in Hollywood filmmaking since 1960. Has the shift to blockbuster filmmaking (and the more recent emphasis on expanded universe and serial cinema) changed the role of Hollywood genres? What is the contemporary role of genre as a production, consumption, or critical category? Your answer should include discussion of at least three theorists of who have written about contemporary genres. Although you should discuss genre filmmaking as a whole, you may also focus part of your answer on the changes in the horror genre since 1960.
I've made some very slight revisions to this answer before posting but there is one specific addition I want to make involving the opening quote and his work with genre and the notes I received from my head (favorite) professor, Ofer. Looks like I've got some Jameson to choke-down/read!
“Genres arise as the means of resolving, or at least coding, the concrete experiences and ideologies of their particular historical moments, as genres survive the moment of their fashioning, they survive by carrying within themselves, as a sort of ghostly aftereffect, the signature ideologies of their formative moments, which they then rewrite onto the subsequent historical moments in which they are deployed.” (19)
From Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Captial, Slavery and the Philosophy of History
Genre, generally speaking, creates a shortcut to understanding cinema. As scholars and critics, genre has the ability to cast blanket statements for an entire type of film, a preconceived notion, almost prejudice. For audiences, it is the best way to distinguish tastes and desires as to what is worth paying for and investing time in. For the film industry, genres compress and categorize how much money to spend for production and then how much money will be expected to return and also, simply put, a fusion of the scholar approach and the consumer’s. That said, the relationship between audiences and production studios has been an ongoing conversation. For the purposes of this study of genre evolution, since the 1960s, genre films and their production relies on several different factors, namely, understanding genre as a discursive entity.
Rick Altman poses the question: “What if genre were not the permanent product of a singular origin, but the temporary by-product of an ongoing process? (italics author’s own)” (54). Genre currently traces a history that includes many active participants, from the studios that produce films, to the marketing agencies that advertise films to the people that choose to see films. Use of the word “temporary” shows the ephemeral stability of genre. Genre blending, mixing, basically the making of a Hollywood Cocktail (Altman 132), now describes how films are made today. For example, comic books and their movies have permeated all aspects of contemporary popular culture. Calling attention to the the description “comic book movie” in itself shows genres’ evolution: (Melo)Drama → Action + ComedyScience Fiction → Blockbuster Assemblage = comic book movie. Each recognizable genre goes into the making of the comic book TYPE of movie while at the same time each genre that goes into the comic book type also possess flexible definitions (each respective genre draws a different crowd, thus enforcing a ‘cocktail’ of consumers and tastes). The assemblage at work is so seamless that there is now a separate and distinct type of movie we now call the ‘comic book movie’. Recall, how M. Night Shyamalan, a filmmaker that often employs the use of narratives twists, made Unbreakable a ‘drama’ whose narrative ‘twist’ was that we were watching a ‘comic book movie’ the whole time. Shyamalan’s knowledge of genre combined with the conversation audiences engage in while watching movies allowed for this genre ‘reveal’ to occur. Additionally, it is the conversation that allows genre to be ever-changing, a chameleon to the times, but eerily always familiar.
Altman posed a theory, one that the basis of his seminal text Film/Genre is based on (and continues his theory of reading genre through semiotics and syntax structures) : “genres increasingly make their meaning through secondary discursivity and lateral communication, thus providing a common focus for constellated communities” (195). In the examples above, genre’s function is traced both through practice and consumption. Each party is informed by the other’s engagement. In Film/Genre, Altman discusses the fall of the Universal ‘creature features’ and the “regenrification” of their most recent film The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Universal’s publicity department re-defined the film as a science fiction film (a rising popular genre of the time) to reignite audiences’ interest in seeing it! Universal’s publicity department not only regenrified Black Lagoon, but also applied the same “magic” to all of their monsters, from Frankenstein to The Mummy (78-79). To recognize the power of audiences over the film studios and vice versa predicts the future relationship that all parties have to genre and its shifting definitions. Furthermore, through different means of participation and consumption, audiences were able to become closer to the medium of film, for example the advent of home video.
Repeat viewings, rewinding and pausing of films in the hands of the consumer opened up a myriad of possibilities for up-and-coming filmmakers, critics and scholars alike (“secondary discursivity”). Although genres were processed through a multitude of strategies (Altman/Metz and semiotics, Genette and textuality, Levi-Strauss and folk narratives, et cetera), ultimately through the making of films and television do these systems get expanded, contracted and reconfigured (“lateral communication”). The horror genre, for example, from the (sci-fi?!) monsters of Universal to the heavily fantasy informed demogorgons of Stranger Things, this genre’s history exemplifies how malleable any genre can be. If one were to begin to look at the horror genre through the monsters of Universal, there would be danger in essentializing the genre. In Raphaëlle Moine’s Cinema Genre, she warns: “Indeed, models for the evolution of genres that postulate a period of decadence following a classical age often turn the classical one into a period in which one can isolate a pure form of the genre” (138). On one hand this statement illuminates the challenges of a historical tracing of genre, but on the other hand, there is a definitive break between films made before and after the 1960s: Hollywood Production Code. This code restricted a number of cinematic devices and narratives, namely, graphic or intense violence and overall social critique. Yes, Hollywood Production Codes officially ended way before the apex of Universal monsters, but looking at the genre in the 1950s (“classic”) versus the chaotic and violent evolution of the 1960s there lies a switch in the code.
Andrew Tudor clearly delineates: “The most prominent feature of post 1960s horror is the distinction between internal and external threats...the threat is unexplained, it is ‘internal’ in the sense that it emerges from the psyche and is located in an ordinary everyday world, and the boundary between ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ is not clearly marked” (108). This sort of unease and unclosed boundaries allows for not only the genre to expand, but also its output. Sequels, continuations, and serialization becomes standard with the horror genre. Even with seminal works that (essentially) begin the new era of horror like Night of the Living Dead, the structure of horror begin to repeat, restylize and eventually reflect/reflex in/of itself. Even the comic book movie borrows from this model of genrification through creating connected universes that generate an unending bank of material. 2003’s Freddy vs Jason poses as a contemporary Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. This hybridization also marks another way in which scholars have described horror in late twentieth century: postmodern. The condition of the postmodern horror film attempts to explain what happens in the genre after films like Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby restructuring the typically resolved narratives of pre-60s horror: “Though there were zombielike creatures and satanic cults in the movies before 1968, Romero and Polanski redefine the monstrous--thereby redefining the role of the hero and the victim as well--and situate horror in the everyday world of contemporary America” (Waller 4). The genre of horror has been well established by the 1960s, the semantics are recognizable to audience, critics and scholars alike and because of this grounded understanding, scholarship in turn begins to complicate this understanding. By attaching the term ‘postmodern’ on the horror genre, it illustrates just how malleable the genre can be. Horror had been mixed with other genres well before this moment of the “unstable” (Pinedo) postmodern film, however it is in this moment of acceptance of a genre that can simultaneously adhere to the rules while also distorting the same rules.
“Because of this, a genre cannot be considered a closed, static, and definitive collection; rather, it constitutes a point of equilibrium, a metastable state of a generic process,” Moine reminds us (206). Exploring the ways genre enables a conversation underlines how it lends itself to being an indicator for the expected but equally for the unforeseen.