Filming Genre

21/10/2026

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The Incarcerated Spectator

Andrei Tarkovsky proposed that genre films are a tomb, but a better description might be that they are prisons, works contrary to those that allow what Jacques Ranciere called, in a very different context, the emancipated spectator. Instead, we have the incarcerated spectator, with the viewer serving their two-hour sentence, well-aware of what to expect from the experience. This isn’t quite the same as saying the films are predictable, but they will be conventional — there will be a set of tropes in place to remind us regularly that we are watching a western, a horror film or a musical. When a film breaks with the conventions, as  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Cabaret do, as well as The Wild Bunch and McCabe and Mrs Miller, and Psycho and The Shining, the films allow us all the more clearly to see what those conventions are, without the films themselves falling outside of the genre. We still regard them as musicals, westerns and horror films. In Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for example, all the words are sung, while in the typical musical, characters start singing in key moments and between general dialogue scenes. In Cabaret, all the songs are sung on stage, and the film becomes a relatively realistic depiction of Berlin in the thirties, with the film showing a clear division between the music and the characters’ lives.

In this sense, they transcend the generic, and often leave those who love a given genre disliking instances that retreat too far from its principles. John Wayne dismissed McCabe and Mrs Miller, calling it a corrupt film, while director Robert Altman simply said, “come and look out of my window: I see things the way they look from there.” (Il Cinema Ritrovato) Many horror aficionados found The Shining a disaster, including the writer of its source novel, Stephen King. Filippo Ulivieri says that King was “unremitting in his condemnation, King has criticised every element in the film, from the casting of the two leading actors to Kubrick’s direction.” (Senses of Cinema) While a film that stays too close to genre can arrive at the predictable, move too far away from it and the film becomes ostracised by fans and regular practitioners. There may be plenty of directors who see working within the framework of a genre as an opportunity to premise their film. But because the work doesn’t quite fall into genre, nobody need feel umbrage. Taxi Driver can be viewed as an urban western, A Clockwork Orange as a science fiction film and Apocalypse Now as a war film, but they don’t fit into a genre; they merely borrow aspects of it. Apocalypse Now is as much Heart of Darkness as it is They Died with Their Boots On. But to talk more specifically, we can keep in mind some key genres (including horror, the western and science fiction), and also films that conform to, or retreat from genre.

What can often make a genre novel, while remaining faithful to its key components, is to incorporate within it aspects of another. Blade Runner, Ex Machina and the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers all absorb elements of the detective film. Blade Runner is a thriller as Deckard (Harrison Ford) tries to track down various replicants who have gone rogue, and the film goes noirish when Deckard falls for one in female form who can seem very real indeed. Ex Machina pushes the noir aspect further, with plenty of critics name-checking the genre. Robert Alpert believed, for example, that “The film evokes such noir classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Out of the Past (1949) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) in its portrayal of the triangular drama of femme fatale, over-confident male and hapless fall guy.” (Jump Cut) In seeing one genre within another, this allows viewers to recognise generic tropes without being bored by their reiteration. If there are stock characters and stock situations, then relative innovation can come from one set of stock expectations finding their place in another genre altogether: Aliens, for example, takes action characters and puts them in space, while Seven puts buddy-movie characters into a serial-killer film. Sometimes the hybridity can be provocative, even troublesome. When Clint Eastwood appeared in Coogan’s Bluff, it played on a cowboy as a cop, using Eastwood’s persona as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns to show someone who acts in an urban environment (New York) as though he happened to be in the Wild West. It was directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Eastwood in Dirty Harry - a film that gave Eastwood another iconic character, led to several sequels, and to many a film where figures would take the law into their own hands: distrusting developed legal systems where criminals too often were released on technicalities. Death Wish was its nadir and Taxi Driver its high point — but many a seventies work blended a western character with an urban situation, as if revitalising genre while denigrating liberal society. It proved genre- bending wasn’t always innocuous and maybe part of Taxi Driver’s brilliance rested on its critique of the combination, all the better to leave the viewer troubled by the violence that permeates almost every aspect of New York, rather than left mollified by the bloodletting.

In this sense, Taxi Driver is a work emancipating the spectator, while Death Wish and Coogan’s Bluff would seem to incarcerate the viewer within the generic demand, and all the better to leave one oblivious to the socio-political implications of hybridity. Our claim isn’t at all the same as saying that genres have to acknowledge social relevance (that a western needs to recognise Indian land rights or play up ecological notions; a horror note gender biases and a romantic comedy that not all women are universally seeking a husband). That is their business — a film shouldn’t be compelled by various external imperatives. However, a work that wants to blend western hero with urban chaos and reckons the hero can resolve the problem as any number of liberal lawyers and do-good politicians cannot, has itself strayed into the socio-political —only to expect the viewer to be oblivious to its implications. When it is suggested criminals should all be sent to “concentration camps,” Vadim Razov notes, speaking of Death Wish, “…it’s the movie’s unsavory task to align Bronson and audiences with this unabashedly fascist point of view.” (AV Club) It doesn’t want us to interrogate its anti-liberal sentiment — it wants to position us in Bronson’s grief (his wife is murdered), all the better to side with that anti-liberalism.

Of course, central to Death Wish and others is updating elements of the western to comment on socio-political concerns even if they then obliviously (or at least un-self-critically) arrive at a narrative claim bordering on the dangerously right-wing. As critic Pauline Kael said on its release: “Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. If crime were caused by super-evil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo; we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.” (New Yorker) By using the moral dichotomy of the western and applying it to the action policier, the film offers simple political solutions while nevertheless invoking complex social problems taking place on the busy, urban streets of San Francisco. We might notice then that Dirty Harry, Death Wish and others don’t just absorb another genre like the western; they also insist on just enough realism to make clear the film is set in a particular social milieu. But often the genre film doesn’t wish to interrogate the environment; it wants chiefly a setting that can make the film feel modern. Out of this attention to detail comes an inattention to the moral problems, ones that are dealt with in horrifyingly simplistic terms.

In horror, The Omen is also milieu-specific, but it isn’t much interested in international diplomacy, though it does like the idea of the devil getting close to power. Damien is adopted at birth and lives with a diplomat and his wife in a vividly presented, luxurious 70s London. He causes havoc leading to his parents’ death and, at the end of the film, is a young boy attending the funeral next to the President of the US and the First Lady. It also suggests that horror could invade the middle and upper middle-classes: in different ways, many a 70s horror film took a well-off family and showed their nice lifestyles upset by terror in their midst: Jaws, Halloween, The Exorcist, The Omen and The Amityville Horror are all salubriously set films: The Amityville Horror, for example, is set on Long Island, Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard. Yet the movies aren’t especially examinations of class, and they fall into incarcerated spectatorship, rather than offering emancipated possibility.

However, this doesn’t mean a spectator won’t choose to emancipate themselves critically: an important development in modern critical theory is reading a text against the grain, seeing in a film a commentary that may not be its intention, but can be read as a symptomatic possibility. Some have read The Exorcist as a film about putting women back in their place at a time of women’s liberation. “As a conservative film”, Bianca Marcus says, “The Exorcist depicts rebellious women who transgress the boundaries of culturally-implemented gender roles and norms. Instead of uplifting Chris and Regan as positively independent, successful individuals, the film shows these women to be conduits of evil, responsible for upsetting the ‘natural’ order of female versus male roles in the nuclear family and society.” (Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies) This is unlikely to have been director William Friedkin’s take on the film, though probably quite close to Jane Fonda’s, surely the most famous radical feminist actress of the time. When Friedkin offered her the role, she replied: "Why would anyone want to make this piece of capitalist rip-off bullshit?” (NPR) If Fonda had taken it and insisted on changes, it may have become a work of emancipation rather than incarceration. The film might not have been any better, and almost certainly less commercially successful, but it could have called into question the viewer’s relationship with terror. Friedkin’s skilful work wanted a realistic upper-middle-class setting, showing the mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) as a woman well capable of making her own living. But it shied away from self-consciously acknowledging that this woman who has it all might just be going against the word of God (she is also an atheist), and needs to learn a few lessons.

The risk of a film absorbing the generic and simultaneously critiquing it can lead to bad faith, to a filmmaker thinking they are intervening in the genre while chiefly making money out of it. In very different ways, Robocop and Funny Games potentially fall into this category. Both directed by Europeans but made in Hollywood (with Funny Games a remake of the Austrian original), Robocop is a dystopian science fiction and Funny Games an intruder-in-the-house film. Paul Verhoeven pushes his movie into unequivocal satire, while Michael Haneke insists the viewer becomes aware of what they are watching, as he uses direct-to-camera address, rewound footage that appears to alter the diegesis, and an ending that categorically counters the usual revenge tale where the family manage to get one over their captors. Verhoeven critiques American society, seeing it as a capitalist wasteland obsessed with materialism, leading to numbed brains or bullet-ridden bodies, while Haneke chiefly criticises form, seeing in the tropes of many a thriller the docility of the genre fan. Tim Pelan wittily called Verhoeven’s film ‘trickle down robonomics’ (Cinephilia and Beyond), a play on President Reagan’s economic policies at the time. Verhoeven went on to become a Hollywood filmmaker after Robocop, and though Haneke returned to making European films after the Funny Games remake, some have seen cynicism and certainly haughtiness. It “…speaks to an astonishing artistic hubris” (Indiewire), Michael Koresky reckoned. The cost for the original German version was a third of the American budget, and Haneke acknowledged money isn’t irrelevant when dealing with Hollywood. Speaking of remaking another self-reflexive thriller he made, he said: "I’ve already been approached regarding Cache and my response was: I’m not going to do it. Apparently Ron Howard wants to and I’ve said fine, if they pay properly they can do it. They can rewrite it and do what they want with it. But then it has nothing to do with me.” (Cinema.com) We needn’t pretend money is irrelevant to filmmaking, and why, no matter how emancipated a spectator the filmmaker might seek to create, or how incarcerated, the viewer is paying for the experience.

Most films that make money are genre works. For many decades this has been cyclical, with westerns doing especially well for a time, then musicals or horror. In the fifties, heroic historical epics were very successful; more recently, superhero fantasy films. Some might see this as an intellectual decline; it is undeniably a shift of focus. In the ‘70s, horror films were much more commercially viable than in the ‘50s, while with musicals it was more the reverse. It would be a stretch to say films simply reflect their times, but who can deny that it makes sense the musical did especially well during an Eisenhower era of prosperity, and the horror during a despondent post-Nixon period? Jaws, Halloween, The Omen and The Amityville Horror all came out in the five years after Watergate. The successful 70s musical was usually absurdist or realist (Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Phantom of the Paradise; Cabaret, Saturday Night Fever) or combined both (Hair; All That Jazz). The most successful of all, though, invoked the fifties: Grease was set in 1958. It was idealistic because it could be nostalgic — the sixties assassinations and the seventies corruption were still to come.

This makes clear that while genre remains the most potent method of production in return for profit, this isn’t as straightforward as producers might wish. Keith Barry Grant notes it has always been the case that in “Hollywood's industrial mode of production, genre movies are dependable products.” (Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology) But the classical musical, western and gangster film would be unlikely to work so well in a post-classical era without the incorporation of immediate social realities and an acceptance of hybridity. In the context of social reality, when Brian De Palma remade Scarface in 1983, he didn’t make it about Italian immigrants but Cuban ones. Al Pacino wanted to make it as a prohibition story but realised it wasn’t working; instead, De Palma set it just after what was called the Mariel Boatlift, where many thousands were allowed to leave the country, and this included criminal elements who set up in Miami. It gave De Palma the premise he needed to remake Scarface, but more importantly, to update it. The film had immediate social pertinence. In contrast, Shaun of the Dead wasn’t a genre movie inflected by social change, but used the tropes of the zombie film with the timing of a comedy. Few watching wouldn’t have been unaware of zombie conventions, but the viewer wasn’t there chiefly to be scared by them, but knowingly amused by their use. English comedy meets American narrative expectation, and when Simon Pegg and his mate first come across a zombie, they don’t assume the worst but, with understandable English understatement, she is the worse for wear: she’s had a few too many.

In both instances, in the social reality of Scarface and the cross-pollination of genre in Shaun of the Dead, the films know that a genre is only as good as the tweaks demanded of it in one direction or the other. This has always been so, even if genres were much more contained under the classic studio system. The original Scarface still relied on an immigrant theme, and the sequel to Frankenstein (The Bride of Frankenstein) was more humorous than the original. Nevertheless, an attention to social reality, or a reflexive hybridity, isn’t quite going to create an emancipated spectator on Ranciere’s terms. Ranciere’s essay is chiefly on theatre, and he notes there has long been a problem with its perception as a passive medium, and one semi-resolved in the 20th century by Brecht and Artaud. “We acknowledge these two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theater and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. On the one hand the spectator must become more distant, on the other he must lose any distance.” (Art Forum) Brecht’s work, for all the feeling it generated, still nevertheless insisted on invoking distanciation, while Artaud’s demanded intensification, and we can see variations of this in generic cinema: between ironic aloofness and greater viscerality. But Ranciere also links the essay to education and, more broadly, perception versus action. The master and the pupil are not so far apart as one might assume, just as the filmmaker and genre viewer won’t be either. Ranciere says, “the master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers with what he already knows, and so on.” (Art Forum) The genre filmmaker often assumes great knowledge on the viewer’s part, well aware that the laugh the director seeks or the scream they hopes for will be based partly on the conventions he sets up and the viewer expects. Often when a genre incorporates the comedic, it wants that distance, and asks us to see the genre’s mechanics — as in Mel Brooks pastiches of the western (Blazing Saddles), horror (Young Frankenstein) (the horror) and the suspense thriller (High Anxiety). In contrast, when Alien includes horror in its science fiction, or when Cabaret adds historical drama to the musical, they want us to take the genre more seriously, creating an intensification that would have been ruined by self-reflexivity. It may want genre-consciousness, but it doesn’t need genre-knowingness.

However, maybe genre, with the odd exception, cannot create quite the emancipated spectator as Ranciere sees it, with Funny Games a rare example and an interesting one, because it insists on both distanciation and intensification: it wants us to be aware of the tropes and devastated by their deployment. How it achieves this is by also incorporating what we see as the most important invigoration of genre: a respect for the real out of which the generic comes. One of the problems with hybridity is that it can give genre a new angle, but allows it to remain ricocheting within predictable demand, and thus becomes a work of incarcerated spectatorship. Mel Brooks’ films can seem quickly comedically exhausting because the humour is so reliant on the tropes they mock; while the best Woody Allen works of the same period (Annie Hall; Manhattan, Stardust Memories) document New York in the seventies to draw out character types that aren’t exclusive to the movies. Equally, the best horror and science fiction films invoke either a social reality in their locations (like Jaws and The Exorcist), or a problem that seems pressing now but pushed into the future to exacerbate it: Her is a great example of a film that really does suggest people are in love with their phones.

What is the upshot of all this? Two things at least: one is that while hybridity can make genres novel and fresh, it won’t necessarily make them more broadly pertinent. Aliens is a very decent example of the action film meeting science fiction, though few would regard it as an examination of American life in the way that The Deer Hunter makes the war film seem all but hidden in the exploration of community and grief. Shaun of the Dead is a clever example of making the latent comedy in the zombie film apparent, but it can seem flippant next to David Cronenberg’s examination of bodies in Videodrome, Dead Ringers and The Fly. Cronenberg’s work is deemed philosophically significant enough for a collection of essays to appear called The Philosophy of David Cronenberg, with an essay, for example, by Colin McGinn looking at questions around disgust in the director’s The Fly. Blade Runner has often drawn philosophical interest, with J. Brad looking at the film through Sartre.

It seems engagement with the real as either problem or verisimilitude is what does the most to reinvigorate the generic, and which often allows genre to dissolve into a broader question. Her seems only secondarily a sci-fi film, and to call The Deer Hunter a war movie seems almost to create a category error. What genre can offer isn’t only a safe set of contained expectations: that a science fiction film will be set in the future, often offer a dystopian society or malfunctioning technology; a horror, things going bump in the night and werewolves, vampires and zombies; a western with a frontier demand or a gunslinger saving a town from bad elements. It can also use genre to interrogate the reality out of which the film comes or to see genre as metaphorically useful. Whether it is many a seventies western musing over the rough realities of frontier life (McCabe and Mrs Miller; Jeremiah Johnson) and the socio-historical specifics of the Native American (Little Big Man; Ulzana’s Raid) or futuristically suggestive (Videodrome; Her), this indicates the genre needn’t demand an emancipated spectator. But it perhaps instead indicates an incarcerated one who nevertheless resides in an open prison. In such works, genre can still have rules and regulations, but possess enough liberty for the viewer to believe they have a few freedoms of their own.  Genre, at its worst, at its most predictable, can feel like solitary confinement, and thus close to the tomb Tarkovsky invokes. But whether innovatively hybrid or, more importantly, socio-historically or philosophically incorporative, genre offers many opportunities to see conventions as starting points and not end goals.  

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Filming Genre

The Incarcerated Spectator

Andrei Tarkovsky proposed that genre films are a tomb, but a better description might be that they are prisons, works contrary to those that allow what Jacques Ranciere called, in a very different context, the emancipated spectator. Instead, we have the incarcerated spectator, with the viewer serving their two-hour sentence, well-aware of what to expect from the experience. This isn’t quite the same as saying the films are predictable, but they will be conventional — there will be a set of tropes in place to remind us regularly that we are watching a western, a horror film or a musical. When a film breaks with the conventions, as  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Cabaret do, as well as The Wild Bunch and McCabe and Mrs Miller, and Psycho and The Shining, the films allow us all the more clearly to see what those conventions are, without the films themselves falling outside of the genre. We still regard them as musicals, westerns and horror films. In Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for example, all the words are sung, while in the typical musical, characters start singing in key moments and between general dialogue scenes. In Cabaret, all the songs are sung on stage, and the film becomes a relatively realistic depiction of Berlin in the thirties, with the film showing a clear division between the music and the characters’ lives.

In this sense, they transcend the generic, and often leave those who love a given genre disliking instances that retreat too far from its principles. John Wayne dismissed McCabe and Mrs Miller, calling it a corrupt film, while director Robert Altman simply said, “come and look out of my window: I see things the way they look from there.” (Il Cinema Ritrovato) Many horror aficionados found The Shining a disaster, including the writer of its source novel, Stephen King. Filippo Ulivieri says that King was “unremitting in his condemnation, King has criticised every element in the film, from the casting of the two leading actors to Kubrick’s direction.” (Senses of Cinema) While a film that stays too close to genre can arrive at the predictable, move too far away from it and the film becomes ostracised by fans and regular practitioners. There may be plenty of directors who see working within the framework of a genre as an opportunity to premise their film. But because the work doesn’t quite fall into genre, nobody need feel umbrage. Taxi Driver can be viewed as an urban western, A Clockwork Orange as a science fiction film and Apocalypse Now as a war film, but they don’t fit into a genre; they merely borrow aspects of it. Apocalypse Now is as much Heart of Darkness as it is They Died with Their Boots On. But to talk more specifically, we can keep in mind some key genres (including horror, the western and science fiction), and also films that conform to, or retreat from genre.

What can often make a genre novel, while remaining faithful to its key components, is to incorporate within it aspects of another. Blade Runner, Ex Machina and the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers all absorb elements of the detective film. Blade Runner is a thriller as Deckard (Harrison Ford) tries to track down various replicants who have gone rogue, and the film goes noirish when Deckard falls for one in female form who can seem very real indeed. Ex Machina pushes the noir aspect further, with plenty of critics name-checking the genre. Robert Alpert believed, for example, that “The film evokes such noir classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Out of the Past (1949) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) in its portrayal of the triangular drama of femme fatale, over-confident male and hapless fall guy.” (Jump Cut) In seeing one genre within another, this allows viewers to recognise generic tropes without being bored by their reiteration. If there are stock characters and stock situations, then relative innovation can come from one set of stock expectations finding their place in another genre altogether: Aliens, for example, takes action characters and puts them in space, while Seven puts buddy-movie characters into a serial-killer film. Sometimes the hybridity can be provocative, even troublesome. When Clint Eastwood appeared in Coogan’s Bluff, it played on a cowboy as a cop, using Eastwood’s persona as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns to show someone who acts in an urban environment (New York) as though he happened to be in the Wild West. It was directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to direct Eastwood in Dirty Harry - a film that gave Eastwood another iconic character, led to several sequels, and to many a film where figures would take the law into their own hands: distrusting developed legal systems where criminals too often were released on technicalities. Death Wish was its nadir and Taxi Driver its high point — but many a seventies work blended a western character with an urban situation, as if revitalising genre while denigrating liberal society. It proved genre- bending wasn’t always innocuous and maybe part of Taxi Driver’s brilliance rested on its critique of the combination, all the better to leave the viewer troubled by the violence that permeates almost every aspect of New York, rather than left mollified by the bloodletting.

In this sense, Taxi Driver is a work emancipating the spectator, while Death Wish and Coogan’s Bluff would seem to incarcerate the viewer within the generic demand, and all the better to leave one oblivious to the socio-political implications of hybridity. Our claim isn’t at all the same as saying that genres have to acknowledge social relevance (that a western needs to recognise Indian land rights or play up ecological notions; a horror note gender biases and a romantic comedy that not all women are universally seeking a husband). That is their business — a film shouldn’t be compelled by various external imperatives. However, a work that wants to blend western hero with urban chaos and reckons the hero can resolve the problem as any number of liberal lawyers and do-good politicians cannot, has itself strayed into the socio-political —only to expect the viewer to be oblivious to its implications. When it is suggested criminals should all be sent to “concentration camps,” Vadim Razov notes, speaking of Death Wish, “…it’s the movie’s unsavory task to align Bronson and audiences with this unabashedly fascist point of view.” (AV Club) It doesn’t want us to interrogate its anti-liberal sentiment — it wants to position us in Bronson’s grief (his wife is murdered), all the better to side with that anti-liberalism.

Of course, central to Death Wish and others is updating elements of the western to comment on socio-political concerns even if they then obliviously (or at least un-self-critically) arrive at a narrative claim bordering on the dangerously right-wing. As critic Pauline Kael said on its release: “Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. If crime were caused by super-evil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo; we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.” (New Yorker) By using the moral dichotomy of the western and applying it to the action policier, the film offers simple political solutions while nevertheless invoking complex social problems taking place on the busy, urban streets of San Francisco. We might notice then that Dirty Harry, Death Wish and others don’t just absorb another genre like the western; they also insist on just enough realism to make clear the film is set in a particular social milieu. But often the genre film doesn’t wish to interrogate the environment; it wants chiefly a setting that can make the film feel modern. Out of this attention to detail comes an inattention to the moral problems, ones that are dealt with in horrifyingly simplistic terms.

In horror, The Omen is also milieu-specific, but it isn’t much interested in international diplomacy, though it does like the idea of the devil getting close to power. Damien is adopted at birth and lives with a diplomat and his wife in a vividly presented, luxurious 70s London. He causes havoc leading to his parents’ death and, at the end of the film, is a young boy attending the funeral next to the President of the US and the First Lady. It also suggests that horror could invade the middle and upper middle-classes: in different ways, many a 70s horror film took a well-off family and showed their nice lifestyles upset by terror in their midst: Jaws, Halloween, The Exorcist, The Omen and The Amityville Horror are all salubriously set films: The Amityville Horror, for example, is set on Long Island, Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard. Yet the movies aren’t especially examinations of class, and they fall into incarcerated spectatorship, rather than offering emancipated possibility.

However, this doesn’t mean a spectator won’t choose to emancipate themselves critically: an important development in modern critical theory is reading a text against the grain, seeing in a film a commentary that may not be its intention, but can be read as a symptomatic possibility. Some have read The Exorcist as a film about putting women back in their place at a time of women’s liberation. “As a conservative film”, Bianca Marcus says, “The Exorcist depicts rebellious women who transgress the boundaries of culturally-implemented gender roles and norms. Instead of uplifting Chris and Regan as positively independent, successful individuals, the film shows these women to be conduits of evil, responsible for upsetting the ‘natural’ order of female versus male roles in the nuclear family and society.” (Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies) This is unlikely to have been director William Friedkin’s take on the film, though probably quite close to Jane Fonda’s, surely the most famous radical feminist actress of the time. When Friedkin offered her the role, she replied: "Why would anyone want to make this piece of capitalist rip-off bullshit?” (NPR) If Fonda had taken it and insisted on changes, it may have become a work of emancipation rather than incarceration. The film might not have been any better, and almost certainly less commercially successful, but it could have called into question the viewer’s relationship with terror. Friedkin’s skilful work wanted a realistic upper-middle-class setting, showing the mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) as a woman well capable of making her own living. But it shied away from self-consciously acknowledging that this woman who has it all might just be going against the word of God (she is also an atheist), and needs to learn a few lessons.

The risk of a film absorbing the generic and simultaneously critiquing it can lead to bad faith, to a filmmaker thinking they are intervening in the genre while chiefly making money out of it. In very different ways, Robocop and Funny Games potentially fall into this category. Both directed by Europeans but made in Hollywood (with Funny Games a remake of the Austrian original), Robocop is a dystopian science fiction and Funny Games an intruder-in-the-house film. Paul Verhoeven pushes his movie into unequivocal satire, while Michael Haneke insists the viewer becomes aware of what they are watching, as he uses direct-to-camera address, rewound footage that appears to alter the diegesis, and an ending that categorically counters the usual revenge tale where the family manage to get one over their captors. Verhoeven critiques American society, seeing it as a capitalist wasteland obsessed with materialism, leading to numbed brains or bullet-ridden bodies, while Haneke chiefly criticises form, seeing in the tropes of many a thriller the docility of the genre fan. Tim Pelan wittily called Verhoeven’s film ‘trickle down robonomics’ (Cinephilia and Beyond), a play on President Reagan’s economic policies at the time. Verhoeven went on to become a Hollywood filmmaker after Robocop, and though Haneke returned to making European films after the Funny Games remake, some have seen cynicism and certainly haughtiness. It “…speaks to an astonishing artistic hubris” (Indiewire), Michael Koresky reckoned. The cost for the original German version was a third of the American budget, and Haneke acknowledged money isn’t irrelevant when dealing with Hollywood. Speaking of remaking another self-reflexive thriller he made, he said: "I’ve already been approached regarding Cache and my response was: I’m not going to do it. Apparently Ron Howard wants to and I’ve said fine, if they pay properly they can do it. They can rewrite it and do what they want with it. But then it has nothing to do with me.” (Cinema.com) We needn’t pretend money is irrelevant to filmmaking, and why, no matter how emancipated a spectator the filmmaker might seek to create, or how incarcerated, the viewer is paying for the experience.

Most films that make money are genre works. For many decades this has been cyclical, with westerns doing especially well for a time, then musicals or horror. In the fifties, heroic historical epics were very successful; more recently, superhero fantasy films. Some might see this as an intellectual decline; it is undeniably a shift of focus. In the ‘70s, horror films were much more commercially viable than in the ‘50s, while with musicals it was more the reverse. It would be a stretch to say films simply reflect their times, but who can deny that it makes sense the musical did especially well during an Eisenhower era of prosperity, and the horror during a despondent post-Nixon period? Jaws, Halloween, The Omen and The Amityville Horror all came out in the five years after Watergate. The successful 70s musical was usually absurdist or realist (Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Phantom of the Paradise; Cabaret, Saturday Night Fever) or combined both (Hair; All That Jazz). The most successful of all, though, invoked the fifties: Grease was set in 1958. It was idealistic because it could be nostalgic — the sixties assassinations and the seventies corruption were still to come.

This makes clear that while genre remains the most potent method of production in return for profit, this isn’t as straightforward as producers might wish. Keith Barry Grant notes it has always been the case that in “Hollywood's industrial mode of production, genre movies are dependable products.” (Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology) But the classical musical, western and gangster film would be unlikely to work so well in a post-classical era without the incorporation of immediate social realities and an acceptance of hybridity. In the context of social reality, when Brian De Palma remade Scarface in 1983, he didn’t make it about Italian immigrants but Cuban ones. Al Pacino wanted to make it as a prohibition story but realised it wasn’t working; instead, De Palma set it just after what was called the Mariel Boatlift, where many thousands were allowed to leave the country, and this included criminal elements who set up in Miami. It gave De Palma the premise he needed to remake Scarface, but more importantly, to update it. The film had immediate social pertinence. In contrast, Shaun of the Dead wasn’t a genre movie inflected by social change, but used the tropes of the zombie film with the timing of a comedy. Few watching wouldn’t have been unaware of zombie conventions, but the viewer wasn’t there chiefly to be scared by them, but knowingly amused by their use. English comedy meets American narrative expectation, and when Simon Pegg and his mate first come across a zombie, they don’t assume the worst but, with understandable English understatement, she is the worse for wear: she’s had a few too many.

In both instances, in the social reality of Scarface and the cross-pollination of genre in Shaun of the Dead, the films know that a genre is only as good as the tweaks demanded of it in one direction or the other. This has always been so, even if genres were much more contained under the classic studio system. The original Scarface still relied on an immigrant theme, and the sequel to Frankenstein (The Bride of Frankenstein) was more humorous than the original. Nevertheless, an attention to social reality, or a reflexive hybridity, isn’t quite going to create an emancipated spectator on Ranciere’s terms. Ranciere’s essay is chiefly on theatre, and he notes there has long been a problem with its perception as a passive medium, and one semi-resolved in the 20th century by Brecht and Artaud. “We acknowledge these two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theater and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. On the one hand the spectator must become more distant, on the other he must lose any distance.” (Art Forum) Brecht’s work, for all the feeling it generated, still nevertheless insisted on invoking distanciation, while Artaud’s demanded intensification, and we can see variations of this in generic cinema: between ironic aloofness and greater viscerality. But Ranciere also links the essay to education and, more broadly, perception versus action. The master and the pupil are not so far apart as one might assume, just as the filmmaker and genre viewer won’t be either. Ranciere says, “the master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers with what he already knows, and so on.” (Art Forum) The genre filmmaker often assumes great knowledge on the viewer’s part, well aware that the laugh the director seeks or the scream they hopes for will be based partly on the conventions he sets up and the viewer expects. Often when a genre incorporates the comedic, it wants that distance, and asks us to see the genre’s mechanics — as in Mel Brooks pastiches of the western (Blazing Saddles), horror (Young Frankenstein) (the horror) and the suspense thriller (High Anxiety). In contrast, when Alien includes horror in its science fiction, or when Cabaret adds historical drama to the musical, they want us to take the genre more seriously, creating an intensification that would have been ruined by self-reflexivity. It may want genre-consciousness, but it doesn’t need genre-knowingness.

However, maybe genre, with the odd exception, cannot create quite the emancipated spectator as Ranciere sees it, with Funny Games a rare example and an interesting one, because it insists on both distanciation and intensification: it wants us to be aware of the tropes and devastated by their deployment. How it achieves this is by also incorporating what we see as the most important invigoration of genre: a respect for the real out of which the generic comes. One of the problems with hybridity is that it can give genre a new angle, but allows it to remain ricocheting within predictable demand, and thus becomes a work of incarcerated spectatorship. Mel Brooks’ films can seem quickly comedically exhausting because the humour is so reliant on the tropes they mock; while the best Woody Allen works of the same period (Annie Hall; Manhattan, Stardust Memories) document New York in the seventies to draw out character types that aren’t exclusive to the movies. Equally, the best horror and science fiction films invoke either a social reality in their locations (like Jaws and The Exorcist), or a problem that seems pressing now but pushed into the future to exacerbate it: Her is a great example of a film that really does suggest people are in love with their phones.

What is the upshot of all this? Two things at least: one is that while hybridity can make genres novel and fresh, it won’t necessarily make them more broadly pertinent. Aliens is a very decent example of the action film meeting science fiction, though few would regard it as an examination of American life in the way that The Deer Hunter makes the war film seem all but hidden in the exploration of community and grief. Shaun of the Dead is a clever example of making the latent comedy in the zombie film apparent, but it can seem flippant next to David Cronenberg’s examination of bodies in Videodrome, Dead Ringers and The Fly. Cronenberg’s work is deemed philosophically significant enough for a collection of essays to appear called The Philosophy of David Cronenberg, with an essay, for example, by Colin McGinn looking at questions around disgust in the director’s The Fly. Blade Runner has often drawn philosophical interest, with J. Brad looking at the film through Sartre.

It seems engagement with the real as either problem or verisimilitude is what does the most to reinvigorate the generic, and which often allows genre to dissolve into a broader question. Her seems only secondarily a sci-fi film, and to call The Deer Hunter a war movie seems almost to create a category error. What genre can offer isn’t only a safe set of contained expectations: that a science fiction film will be set in the future, often offer a dystopian society or malfunctioning technology; a horror, things going bump in the night and werewolves, vampires and zombies; a western with a frontier demand or a gunslinger saving a town from bad elements. It can also use genre to interrogate the reality out of which the film comes or to see genre as metaphorically useful. Whether it is many a seventies western musing over the rough realities of frontier life (McCabe and Mrs Miller; Jeremiah Johnson) and the socio-historical specifics of the Native American (Little Big Man; Ulzana’s Raid) or futuristically suggestive (Videodrome; Her), this indicates the genre needn’t demand an emancipated spectator. But it perhaps instead indicates an incarcerated one who nevertheless resides in an open prison. In such works, genre can still have rules and regulations, but possess enough liberty for the viewer to believe they have a few freedoms of their own.  Genre, at its worst, at its most predictable, can feel like solitary confinement, and thus close to the tomb Tarkovsky invokes. But whether innovatively hybrid or, more importantly, socio-historically or philosophically incorporative, genre offers many opportunities to see conventions as starting points and not end goals.  

 


© Tony McKibbin