Genre and the Genre System

"Genre" is a French word that refers to a kind, type, or category of aparticular phenomenon or thing. In the cinema, genre is a term that isused to designate various categories of motion picture production. Majormovie genres include such broad types of films as musicals, comedies,action and adventure films, Westerns, crime and detective films,melodramas, science fiction and horror films, gangster films, war films,suspense thrillers, epics, and disaster films.

These genres can frequently be broken down into subgenres, orsubdivisions of the major genre. Thus, horror films can be subdividedinto specific types such as vampire, mad doctor, demon-seed/ evil-child,splatter, or slasher films. Comedies can be categorized as slapstick,romantic, screwball, and so on.

Genres serve to stabilize an otherwise unstable film industry. Motionpicture production is extremely expensive. In 2007,for example, theaverage negative cost (that is, the amount of money it cost to producea finished negative of the film before prints were made or costlyadvertising and distribution expenses were incurred) was $70.8million.(Bycomparison, in 1950,average negative costs were approximately$1.1million, which translates into $8.4million in today's dollars.)Marketing, advertising, and print costs in 2007averaged an additional$35.9million. Industry analysts estimate that, for any film to break even(whether it was made in 1950or 2007), it would have to earn roughly2 to 2l1z times its negative costs.

Given these costs, motion picture producers face tremendous riskseach time they make a film. These risks are increased by the very natureof the motion picture product. Unlike other consumer products-suchas cars, household appliances, and fashions, which rely on brand-namerecognition for much of their market appeal-motion pictures areessentially one-of-a-kind products. Each film is necessarily different fromevery other film, featuring a story and a cast that are unique. Each film

is thus an unknown quantity; its producer has no assurance that it willmake a profit at the box officebecause, unlike other consumer items, ithas no brand-name status in the marketplace. The star system and thegenre system attempt to compensate for the dangers involved in thisprocess. They serve to hedge producers' bets against the unknowns andvariables that underlie the production of every film.

Unlike cars and other merchandise, movies are not durable goods.They have no physical existence; they are not objects that can be bought,taken home, and used. They are, of course, consumed, but the consumerhas little or nothing to show for that consumption. Audiences takehome no tangible product but only the memory of an entertainmentexperience. The genre system that structures the American film industryrepresents an attempt by the film industry to control the entertainmentmarketplace in a way that is similar to the control over the consumers ofdurable goods exerted by brand-name products.

Genres result from the proven success of one-of-a-kind films in themarketplace. The box-office fortune of one particular kind of film resultsin the production of another film that resembles it in terms of plot andcharacter type. The film industry assumes that the audience that cameto the earlier hit will return to see a film similar in nature to it. This canbe seen most clearly in the proliferation of sequels (and prequels) thataccompany so many box-office hits of the 1960s,1970s,1980s,1990s,and 2000s.

Thus, the exceptional profits of the first James Bond film, Dr. No(1962),led to a succession of others. This also explains the string ofGodfather, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Superman, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, andother films of the 1970sand 1980s.

Films that belong to a specific genre draw from a fairly fixed bodyof character and story types, settings and situations, costumes andprops, thematic concerns and visual iconography, and conventionsthat are shared by other films in that particular genre. Westerns, forexample, regularly contain certain character types such as cowboys,town marshals, Indians, dance hall girls, schoolmarms, cavalry officers,saloon keepers, Indian agents, gamblers, and rustlers who are readilyidentifiable by the costumes they wear, the props they use, the thingsthey do, and the situations in which they find themselves. The filmsare set in the West and feature certain kinds of landscapes or settings,ranging from the vast stretches of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains,and barren deserts to cattle ranches, bunkhouses, and frontier towns.

Each new film in the genre banks on a number of familiar genreelements, motifs, and themes but combines them in a novel way. Theaudiences that go to genre films are lured to them by the promise ,of

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Theatrical melodrama, which began without a voice, perfected the craftof visual expression, translating thought and emotion into gesture, costume,decor, and other elements of mise-en-scene. It discovered how to say allwithout literally saying anything. Melodrama even developed its own signlanguage. Adapting acting techniques from classical theater, it produced asystem of gestures and hand movements, which were subsequently recordedand catalogued by a French scholar, Fran<;oisDelsarte. At the same time,melodrama manipulated traditional mise-en-scene in an attempt to wring evengreater expressiveness from it, freezing the action at particularly significantmoments into a tableau. In tableaus, which frequently came at act endings, theactors assumed particularly revealing and characteristic positions and then heldthem for several moments in an attempt to underscore or crystallize events,feelings, or ideas for the audience.

Melodrama works on a purely emotional level,rooting its drama in a commonbase of feeling that crosses over all linguistic barriers. In the science fictiontearjerker E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982),the heart of the film resides in E.T.'slarge, expressive eyes and poignant facial movements rather than in anythinganyone says. This is typical of contemporary film melodrama. In another StevenSpielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977),communication betweenhumans and aliens takes place on a purely affectivelevel-through five musicaltones. E.T. moves somewhat beyond that primitive stage, to speech. But whenwords are used, as in the phrase "E.T. phone home!" they tend to be minimaland rudimentary-almost nonverbal. E.T.'s speech ignores established linguisticconventions and grammatical rules; he/it speaks directly from the heart. Theexpressivenessof these semiarticulate statements derives, in large part, from theirchildlike simplicity-from the inability of the alien to express in language thecomplex longings behind the phrase. This is melodramatic speech.

Spielberg's fascination with the melodramatic resurfaces with a vengeancein A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).At the heart of his story is a boy robot, David(Haley Joel Osment), who has been programmed to love. Adopted by a familywhose child has been placed in suspended animation until a cure can be foundfor his terminal illness, David wins the love of his new mother, but, after herown child is restored to health, she abandons David in the woods. Neither henor we ever quite recover from this traumatic moment. A figure ofpure pathos,David then spends the remainder of the film looking for the Blue Fairy who, hehas been told, can make him human and thus enable him to win back the loveof his mother. As in E.T., Spielberg invests the alien other-here the machine,David-with a capacity for feeling and emotion that exceeds that of any of theactual human beings in the film. In A.I., the simulation of emotions becomesreal emotion.

The popularity of melodrama as a form of theater for the middle classesduring the nineteenth century, and its ability to convey crucial dramaticinformation visually, made it an ideal form for the silent cinema. Virtually everysilent film-including the slapstick comedies of Charles Chaplin and BusterKeaton-was, on one level or another, a melodrama. During the 1910s and

High melodrama for the new millennium: Monica (Frances O'Connor), the mother in A.I.: ArtificialIntelligence, abandons her unwanted cybernetic child, David (Haley Joel Osment> in the woods.

1920s,the trade press routinely described the majority of films as melodramas.There were romantic melodramas, domestic melodramas, rural melodramas,Western melodramas, sociological melodramas, crime melodramas, societymelodramas, mystery melodramas, underworld melodramas, and just plainmelodramas. If the story or situation was not rooted in melodrama, then at leastthe acting or mise-en-scene was. It had to be, to communicate ideas and feelingswithout dialogue. Although the film melodrama successfully navigated thetransition from silent to sound cinema in the late 1920s, silent melodrama,in many ways, represented the melodramatic impulse at its purest and mostpowerful.

there is a geme called "the melodrama" that features conventional charactertypes, such as heroes, heroines, and villains, as well as predictable plot elements,

such as improbable reversals of fortune, accidents, and last-minute rescues. Interms of its predictable or formulaic plot patterns, a typical melodrama mightbegin with the disruption or disturbance of an idealized emotional paradise bysome external force or act of villainy. A happy family in its home is threatenedwith eviction or its integrity is shattered by the abduction of one of its members;the blissful young lovers are separated or forced apart by those who wouldblock their marriage. Subsequent action presents the struggle of the hero orheroine to restore this initial state of affairs by reuniting the family or removingobstacles that separate the lovers-goals that are accomplished by the end ofthe narrative. The plot of Home Alone (1990),for example, is essentially that ofa melodrama: a child is accidentally separated from his parents; the home isthreatened by burglars; the child successfully defends the home against outsideattacks; and he is finally reunited with his parents.

However, the mode of Home Alone is more comic than melodramatic. Thechild is fairly well in control of things and actually enjoys his experience ofbeinghome alone. That is, the treatment of the situation is not overtly melodramatic;the filmmakers opted for comedy instead. As a mode, the melodrama-or, moreaccurately, the melodramatic-is less concerned with specific plot and charac-ter types than with the creation of a certain mood and a powerful emotionalresponse in the audience. In its status as a mode, melodrama resembles trag-edy and comedy in that, though possessing a structure and identifiable motifsand character types, it crosses over from one genre to another. Thus, Westernssuch as Duel in the Sun (1946),gangster films such as The Godfather (1972),actionfilms such as Spider-Man (2002,2004,2007),and fantasy films such as the HarryPotter series (2001,2002, 2004, 2005, 2007) are melodramatic. In other words,film melodrama exists primarily as an attitude or method of treatment-amelodrama is a film that features conventional character types and formulaicplot patterns presented in a melodramatic way.

Like Westerns or gangster films, melodramas can also be defined in terms oftheir milieu. Much as Westerns are set in the West and gangster films in anurban criminal underworld, melodramas tend to take place in the domesticspace of the family or in the private, intimate space of the romantic couple. Atthe core of melodrama, however, lies neither milieu nor plot but a certain modeof address to the spectator that is emotionalized by the use of melodramaticstylistic techniques. As a mode of address, the melodrama speaks to viewersin a way that is primarily emotional rather than logical. Indeed, one of theoppositions that characterizes traditional screen melodrama is that betweenemotion and reason. Characters in melodramas who are extremely articulate orpresented as intellectuals are often exposed either as phonies or as emotionalcripples who have lost touch with their feelings and need to be rescued fromthe paralyzing forces of rationality. The villain in Terms of Endearment (1983),for example, is predictably the college professor (JeffDaniels), who cheats on

his wife (Debra Winger) with one of his female graduate students. Glib men arejust not to be trusted in melodramas.

In its attempt to deal with emotional or spiritual experience, the melodramadraws on the affective power of images and music to render the emotionaldimensions of experience. That is, it attempts to depict those emotions thatcannot be rendered in words. In attempting to say what cannot be said, thefilm melodrama traditionally relies on stylistic excess-on an extreme cameraangle, an overstated set or costume design, a delirious camera movement, or anunusual color scheme-in an attempt to make visible that which is essentiallyinvisible. The moral forces of good and evil that lie beneath the surface ofexperience are pressured to the surface by melodrama's excesses and putinto relief. Melodrama reveals the structure of our experience of the world asa moral and emotional phenomenon, clarifying and working out in dramaticform the emotional and moral conflicts that take place within the individual. Inthis respect, it is an objective rendering of subjective inner experience.

Thus, in melodramas, children and animals often prove to be emotionaltouchstones-they are more capable of distinguishing good from bad and rightfrom wrong than are their elders. In E.T., the children intuitively understandthe alien from another world and prove more adept than adults when it comesto communicating with it. Family and feelings are the common denominatorto which all melodramas ultimately return. Melodrama is about the loss andrecovery of feelings (Awakenings, 1990), about lovers (Titanic, 1997; BrokebackMountain, 2005),about the restoration of the family unit (Ransom, 1996),aboutfathers and sons (Affliction, 1999), about mothers and daughters (Thirteen,2003), about brothers (Rain Man, 1988),about sisters (Little Women, 1996),andabout every other possible configuration of the family from those depicted inEdward Scissorhands (1990),The Prince of Tides (1991),Batman Returns (1992),andAmerican Beauty (1999)to those in Far from Heaven (2002),In America (2002),andThere Will Be Blood (2007).

The melodrama and the melodramatic-whether in the form of amelodramatic situation, gesture, element of mise-en-scene, line of dialogue, orbar of music-have tended to be regarded by critics as second-rate forms ofexpression and clearly inferior to the more aristocratic forms such as tragedyand the tragic. One definition of melodrama describes it as "domestic tragedy."Tragedy was understood (by Aristotle and others) as a serious drama consistingof events and characters of considerable magnitude. In other words, classicaltragedy from Aeschylus to Shakespeare dealt with kings, queens, princes, andother figures of social importance whose actions determined the fate of cities,principalities, kingdoms, and nations.

The realm of melodrama, by contrast, is limited to private as opposed topublic spheres. It concerns more or less ordinary characters whose actionsaffect the fortunes of much smaller social units; it focuses on the fate of~~I~~m! ~~~~Il·~·r i \ ,ommUilll AlthOT rrrrappealed to all classes, it emerged as the dramatic form par excellence of thenobility or social aristocracy in whose world it was situated. Melodrama, like

certain forms of comedy, gives expression to the concerns of the lower ranksof society. It is the genre of the "historically voiceless" (to borrow DavidGrimsted's term), and its popularity in the nineteenth century accompaniedthe emergence of a new social order to which it appealed-that of a middle-class mass society.

Nineteenth-century melodrama brought with it a new vision of the universeand of the individual's place in it. Much as the French Revolution overthrewthe traditional institutions of a supposedly divinely ordained, hierarchicalsociety-the church and the monarchy-in favor of a more democratic socialorder, so the melodrama supplanted the elitist vision of the tragedy with amore democratic worldview. Classical tragedy, which died in the seventeenthcentury with Racine, could be seen as elitist largely through its concern forthe fates of characters of a certain magnitude or social stature. But it was alsoaristocratic in its basic understanding of the essentially static relationship ofindividuals to the existing political and social order. The heroes and heroinesof tragedy struggled to maintain the natural order of things or to repair thatorder when it had become unnatural. Thus, Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Rexattempted to rid Thebes of the plague and restore it to health, much as Hamletin Shakespeare's play concerned himself with purging the state of Denmark ofsomething that was rotten. The heroes of tragedy sought to maintain or restorethe order of the world, but that order and that world was theirs. For them, whatwas natural was necessarily a reflection of the value system of their particularsocial class. Both Oedipus and Hamlet ended with the imposition of a new order,but that new order was merely a more benign form of the dominant social order(that is, monarchy) with which the drama began.

When characters in melodramas fought to maintain or repair the naturalorder of things, the values that informed their struggle were those of a differentsocial class: the middle class. The stature of a character in a melodrama was ameasure of his or her moral rather than social position. Virtue empowered itsheroes and heroines; evil, its villains. Virtue was not the exclusive property ofanyone class but was equally obtainable by all. The commoner had as muchaccess to the truth as the noble. Yet it was often easier for the lower classes todiscover truth and to achieve virtue or moral wisdom because simple peoplewere less burdened with artificial knowledge and distinctions than the nobility.But in tragedy, knowledge and truth tend to be the exclusive property of thearistocracy. As Grimsted argued, "the melodrama reflected and supportedwhat is perhaps the key element in democratic psychology: the sense whichindividual men have of their ability to decide, and hence of their right toparticipate vitally in the wielding of power."

Dozens of stage melodramas (primarily those of European origin) castthe conflict between good and evil in social terms, presenting it as a classwar in which the audience is encouraged to root for the underdog. Thus, the

villain, frequently a landlord, routinely demanded the hand of his tenant'sdaughter when the rent was unpaid. Scores of other melodramas, especiallythose set in contemporary (nineteenth-century) America, staged moral conflictsin terms of geography. These works explored a basic opposition between natureand culture, between the innocence of those who lived in the world of nature-in small towns or on farms in the country-and the corruption and decadence ofthose who lived in the city. For example, D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920),an adaptation of a popular stage melodrama, traces the journey of its innocentheroine from the small town where she lives with her mother to the big city,where she is seduced and abandoned by a member of the social aristocracy.The film concludes with her return to life in the country, where she finds a jobworking on a farm, and with her recovery of innocence through her contactwith the purifying world of nature.

Melodramas may work primarily on an emotional level, but they also dealwith ideas and social problems. In this way, they speak to the fundamentalinterests of "the people." Grimsted observes that these dramas frequentlydeal with social and economic issues that concern the middle and lowerclasses-with "the hard lot of the poor, the corrupt practices of the rich,the social threat of rapid urbanization, the evil of slavery, the injury of badfamily upbringing." Novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislaverynarrative Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was adapted for the stage shortly afterits publication in 1852and became "the greatest success in the history of theAmerican theatre," helped to transform the theater into a popular forum forthe discussion of social issues.

Melodramas also serve as tools for social reform, describing the evilsof middle- and lower-class vices such as gambling and alcohol. In one ofGriffith's Biograph shorts, A Drunkard's Reformation (1909), the hero attendsa play that dramatizes the disastrous consequences of drinking, and he vowsnever to touch alcohol again. Reformers praised melodramas because, as in ADrunkard's Reformation, they depicted the triumph of good over evil. Film ingeneral (and film melodrama, in particular) was seen in the United States as a"grand social worker" in that it lured working-class men away from saloonsand other forms of vice and promised, as Lary May points out, to teach"Anglo-Saxon ideals" to all, transforming all those who went to the movies

..~n~n~~rMelodramas dramatized the fears of Victorian America about the toll that

modernization and urbanization would take on the institution of the family.

Parodying a typical melodramatic

situation, Mack Sennett <right) ties

Mabel Normand to the railroad

track in Barney Oldfield's Race forLife (1913).

As Griffith suggested in the modern story of his four-story epic, Intolerance(1916), the anonymity of life in the city posed a danger to the traditionalvalues of family and community; fatherless daughters and husbandless wiveswould be pursued by immoral men. Greedy factory owners were shown to beanything but paternalistic; they ruthlessly exploited their workers. In otherfilms, the cliched image of a heroine tied to the railroad tracks gave voice to theparticular concerns of a new social order-to the fears of an emerging lower-and middle-class society caught up in the onrush of fast-paced technologicalchanges that threatened to overwhelm them. The average American wassuddenly in danger of being crushed by the forces of industry, symbolized bythe locomotive.

Though the melodrama was born in France, it adapted itself quite readilyto the needs and demands of American audiences. Theatrical melodramadominated the American stage in the late nineteenth century in the form ofbothEuropean imports adapted for American audiences, such as Dion Boucicault'sThe Poor of New York, and domestic originals, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin orAugustin Daly's Under the Gaslight. Popular melodrama helped to shapeAmerican character, expressing the American temperament, preaching Americanideologies, embodying American aesthetic principles. Daniel Gerould sees it ashaving been essentially egalitarian: "it was founded on a belief in opportunityfor all, and dedicated to getting ahead and making money." [Unlike tragedy,melodrama is] "totally devoid of fatality and inevitability. Contingency rules;things can and will be otherwise. The individual can make of himself what he

will. ... Each human being has the chance in a society unfettered by Old Worldhierarchies of class and profession." In this way, melodramas embodied theAmerican dream, offering success to anyone with the courage and strength topursue it.

Given its associations with the French Revolution and its popular appeal in theUnited States, the melodrama was often identified as a tool of revolutionarychange. Wylie Sypher argued that the genre conceived of things in terms ofdialectical opposition-in terms of good and bad-and thus reflected the sameworldview of inevitable class warfare and either/or ideology that informedKarl Marx's Das Kapital. Whether melodrama was a form of revolutionaryconsciousness or not, it nonetheless provided a way of looking at history thatproved compelling to filmmakers who occupied vastly different positions onthe political spectrum.

Griffith, for example, made melodramas that, on one hand, called forreform but that, on the other, also conveyed disturbing racial fears and a deepsuspicion of radical change. Griffith's melodramatic polarization of societyserved as a weapon against blacks in The Birth of a Nation (1915)and againstBolsheviks (communists) in Orphans of the Storm (1922).Griffith's melodramawas essentially populist in nature. It sought to restore an idealized, agrarianAmerica that had been destroyed by big business, industrialization, andurbanization.

Approaching the genre in another way, the Soviet director Sergei Eisensteininfused his melodramas with a Marxist vision. His hero was the masses, andhis villains consisted primarily of the czar and counterrevolutionary forces infilms such as Potemkin (1925)and October (1928).Though both Marxists such asEisenstein and populists such as Griffith used melodrama to speak out on behalfof the plain people, Marxists spoke in the language ofclass conflict-the capitalistexploitation of the working classes.Populists spoke in the language of universal,heartfelt truths that all Americans supposedly understood and respected.

The politics of American melodrama remained steadfastly populist; theywere driven by a desire for reform and never embraced the revolutionaryspirit of Marxism. But populism was not monolithic; it encompassed a broadspectrum of various grassroots political positions. Rural populists, for example,consisted largely of farmers, farm workers, and residents of small towns.They tended to be Protestants whose families had lived in the United Statesfor several generations. Urban populists were largely blue-collar laborers whoworked in steel mills and factories, or wage earners with jobs in departmentand retail stores. Many were recent immigrants who retained strong ties to anethnic community and tended to be non-Protestants, such as Catholics or Jews.

Both w;nr of the rrulist camr STrO'ted sodal 'efmm and sha'ed a dmtrust

of big business, industrialization, and the growth of impersonal corporationsthat threatened to swallow up the individual.

TWO FILM MELODRAMATISTS:GRIFFITH AND VIDOR

An Agrarian PastPopulism is neither monolithic nor static. It changes its point of view somewhatfrom decade to decade as the demographics of the American landscape change.It spoke, from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the perspective of the agrarianmajority. But in the 1920s,when the majority of Americans had moved fromrural farms to live and work in the cities, populist rhetoric more and more fre-quently began to address the concerns of the urban working class. In particular,it attempted to deal with the problems posed to middle-class Americans by theshift that took place in American identity as it was slowly forced to confront itsnew foundation in urban and industrial culture. In the past, American identityhad been tied to notions of individual success, which was understood to bedirectly related to one's character, energy, and enterprise. In the world of the1920s postindustrial mass society, the ability of the individual to realize theAmerican dream was seriously compromised by his or her powerlessness inthe face of the growing industrialization and corporatization of modern life.This shift can best be illustrated by comparing the different visions of societyand the individual's place in it in two silent film melodramas-Griffith's TheBirth of a Nation (1915)and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928).

Griffith's silent melodramas spoke on behalf of nineteenth-centuryagrarianism. His films looked back to an earlier, more utopian, preindustrialpast that was threatened by the forces of modernism. In A Corner in Wheat(1909),for example, the natural economy of the past is upset by the interventionof a greedy businessman. A farmer grows wheat out of which bread is made tofeed the city's poor. But a middleman, in the form of a speculator in the grainmarket, interferes with this process. The speculator buys up all the wheat, thenartificially drives up the price of flour to increase his profits, ignoring the plightof the urban poor who can no longer afford to buy a loaf of bread. Griffith'sromanticized portrait of the farmer is heightened by the latter's heroic refusalto admit defeat at the hands of the stock manipulator. The film ends with thefarmer replanting his field, but it has become clear by now that his success restsnot with his own efforts but in the hands of forces beyond his control.

A Corner in Wheat dealt with recent events-with the 1897-1898 attemptby a speculator to corner the wheat market on the Chicago Board of Trade(which provided, in turn, the basis for Frank Norris's novel The Pit, on whichthe Griffith film was partially based). The Birth of a Nation was made to celebratethe 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and was thus set in the muchearlier era of the war itself (1861-1865)and Reconstruction (1865-1877).Theworld of the antebellum South, which provided the primary perspective fromwhich Griffith viewed events, emerged as a paradise lost. In both the film andin popular mythology, the prewar agrarian South marked the final flowering

of an old world (aristocratic) pastoral ideal before it fell victim to an unwantedindustrialization externally imposed on it by the North.

History as Melodrama: The Binh of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation begins with an idyllic portrait of the southern Cameronfamily, whose happiness and tranquility is then disturbed by the war. Theirattempts to restore this paradise lost after the war are thwarted by abolitionistpoliticians, northern carpetbaggers, mulattoes, and renegade blacks. Inspiredby the traditions of his Anglo-Saxon (Scottish) heritage, Ben Cameron formsa modern-day clan-the Ku Klux Klan-to avenge the death of his sister andto protect southern womanhood from feared black rapists. After defeating theblack militia and putting an end to black rule, the Klan restores a utopian socialorder. The film ends with a millennial vision in which Christ returns to earth,puts an end to war, and presides over a "heavenly throng" who celebrate theregeneration of mankind and the return to the ultimate populist paradise-alatter-day Garden of Eden.

The Birth of a Nation renders American history as melodrama. The Civil Wartakes the form of a family melodrama with the role of the villain(s) played bynorthern abolitionists, mulattoes, and blacks. The chief villain, however, provesto be the black race. For Griffith, the issue of slavery, introduced in the film'sfirst shot of a slave market, leads to the outbreak of the war that then turnsbrother against brother. The northern Stonemans and the southern Camerons,once friends, are suddenly made unwilling enemies. The effects of the war are

I[ I(Lillian Gishl in The Birth of a

Nation.

presented in melodramatic terms as well. Northern and southern families areforced to sacrifice their sons to the war effort-one Stoneman boy and twoCamerons die in battle.

Given Griffith's racist scenario, the resolution of the conflictbetween Northand South and the restitution of unity can only come through the reunificationof the white race in the face of a common enemy-the black race. Near theconclusion of the film, the elder Camerons, their daughter, and the survivingStoneman son take refuge from the black militia in the shack of two formerUnion veterans. An intertitle explains the obvious symbolism of the moment:"The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defenceof their Aryan birthright."

The film's ultimate hero becomes the Ku KluxKlan,which rides to the rescueof the besieged whites. The film's ultimate solution becomes the transportationof blacks back to Africa. This action restores the purely white world that wasdisrupted at the beginning of the film when, as an intertitle claimed, "thebringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion." Indeed,historians note that the film originally ended with what Griffith describedas "Lincoln's solution"-the deportation of blacks to Africa. This scene wasapparently later cut from the final film. Griffith's melodramatic excess led tohis distortion of historical reality. His depiction of blacks and his ending of thefilm were pure fantasy-the product of a melodramatic imagination that hadput itself at the service of a racist agenda. The phenomenal success of the filmsuggests that it somehow spoke to the needs of a troubled America for a returnto a simpler past and to a simplified notion of American identity based onracial purity. It also reveals the negative aspects of the populist mythology-itsracism, its anti-intellectualism, its paranoia, its religious fundamentalism.

The Crowd deals with amore contemporary historical reality-the transformationof 1920sAmerica into an urbanized mass society. It follows its hero, John Sims(JamesMurray), from his birth in small-town America in 1900to New YorkCity,where he moves to live and work in the 1920s.The film shows his subsequentmarriage, the birth of his children, and his raising of a family, and concludesmore or less in the present (1928).

In the world of The Birth of a Nation, it was possible for its hero not onlyto control events around him but even to playa role in the shaping of history.Ben Cameron's life is spared by the intervention of Abraham Lincoln, "theGreat Heart," who pardons him when he is falsely charged with treason. AndCameron is, after all, the (fictionalized) founder of a powerful organization,the Ku Klux Klan. He possesses "agency," that is, he could do things that hadconsequence for others. The melodramatic action of The Crowd concerns thestruggles of a character who has little or no control over his own destiny, muchless that of the nation. John battles within a conformist culture to establish aunique identity, which is constantly threatened by the mundane realities of

::;E~ Everyman John Sims Uames

Murray> enjoys a day at the beach

with his wife (Eleanor Boardman>

and children in The Crowd (1928>.

day-to-day existence. He tries to assert his own unique identity amid thedrudgery of work in a large insurance office, the monotony of marriage, andthe despair of failure as an employee, husband, and father.

Vidor's hero is an everyman-a man in and of the crowd. Butas an everyman,he is also no man-a nobody whose identity, goals, and desires are given to himby others rather than stemming from his own inner needs. As a child, John isdriven by his father's ambitions for him. When he and his boyhood friends tellone another what they want to be when they grow up, John proudly boasts, "Mydad says I'm gonna be somebody big." Working for a large insurance companyin New York, John becomes one of the crowd, behaving like everyone else.On a double date with his friend Bert and two girls, John watches Bert kiss hisgirl, then John kisses his date, Mary. On the subway ride home, John looks at afurniture ad that says "You furnish the girl; we'll furnish the home." He thenturns to Mary, whom he has just met that night, and proposes to her.

Vidor presents John as the product of a world that lacks the romanticheroism of Ben Cameron's universe. In John's world, individual success is nottied to one's character, energy, or enterprise. Agency, the ability to shape one'sown fate, is only an illusion. John is the product of the age of advertising;commercials shape John's desires, and he becomes the perfect consumer ina mass society that is itself driven by the needs of a new, twentieth-centuryinstitution-mass consumption. In his spare time, John even writes copyI~[~~r[.~[ ~~~i~~I~lW'th~rte,t ,uccessill his lik when

he wins $500 for coming up with the catchy phrase: "Sleight o'Hand-The Magic Cleaner."

John's great fortune, however, is as unpredictable and uncontrollable as hismisfortune, which mounts toward the'end of the film, John does not distinguishhimself from the crowd at work, remaining a mere clerk while his friend Bertis promoted. Later, one of his children dies in a traffic accident, he loses his job,his wife threatens to leave him, and he contemplates suicide. Through no faultof his own, John has not only failed to become "somebody big" but he has losthis identity-along with his job, his wife, and his family, who provided the onlytangible signs of that identity for him. John's problems lay, in part, in his beliefin the nineteenth-century notions of individualism and agency that Griffithcelebrated in The Birth of a Nation and that John's father bequeathed to him onhis birth. Vidor's film suggests that this ideology, or system of beliefs, no longerhad any connection to contemporary social and economic reality. The film'shero is forced to recognize his own relative powerlessness as an individual andcome to terms with his new status as one of the crowd. At the very end of thefilm, John recovers his identity as father, husband, and workingman and rejoinsthe crowd from which he earlier tried to remove himself. He discovers that acrucial aspect of his identity depends on his identification with the crowd-thathe cannot exist apart from, but must be a part of, mass society.

Home as "Seventh Heaven"

In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith implicitly rejected the modern in favor of amythic past. In The Crowd, Vidor demonstrated the need for the creation of anew model for understanding the relation of the individual to the world of1920sAmerica. In general, the film melodrama conveyed either open hostility orprofound ambivalence toward modern times. In films such as Frank Borzage'sAcademy Award-winning Seventh Heaven (1927), it became something totranscend. Borzage's hero and heroine defy the original sins of contemporarymass society-despair and cynicism. They overcome the anonymity andheartlessness of the city and create a refuge or "seventh heaven" within it.("Seventh heaven" refers to their apartment, which is on the seventh [and top]floor of an apartment house in Paris, and thus closer to the heavens than thestreets below where they are first introduced.)

They are subsequently separated by the world's first truly modern war-World War I. Both remain steadfastly loyal to one another, communicatingthrough a quasi-spiritual ceremony they perform every day at 11 a.m. Evenafter the film's hero, Chico (Charles Farrell), dies in combat, the heroine, Diane(Janet Gaynor), continues to be faithful to him, refusing a wealthy suitor. Atthe end of the film, Chico miraculously returns from the dead, and Diane,somehow sensing that he is still alive, rushes to him. The film's fairy tale ending

Diane Uanet Gaynor) and Chico (Charles Farrell)

find a refuge from the outside world in their

Seventh Heaven (1927),

firmly plants it within the world of melodramatic wish fulfillment, which canovercome all the obstacles that mundane twentieth-century life places in thepaths of young lovers.

The seventh heaven that the lovers create for themselves serves as a secularGarden of Eden amid the turmoil of modern times. It is an idealized space thatvirtually every melodrama-before and since-has sought to establish andprotect from the outside world. The threats to this domestic space come, moreoften than not, from forces that are produced, in large part, by an increasinglyimpersonal and hostile urban mass society. In A Man's Castle (1933), a smallwooden shack in a New York City "Hooverville," which has been built bythose made homeless by the Great Depression, serves as a "safety zone" againsteconomic despair. In Since You Went Away (1944), the home is described asthe "fortress of the American family" and comes to symbolize the spirit of thehomefront effort in World War II.

More recently, the home functions as a space that men have also begun todefend against urban corruption, crime, and violence. In Fatal Attraction (1987),Glenn Close repeatedly violates the space of the family as she attempts to win

. .... . nn:'VPllt

his family from learning of his affair with Close, then struggles to defend themagainst her increasingly violent attacks on the home (though it is only with the

aid of his wife, played by Anne Archer, that he finally succeeds in warding offhis demented stalker). And in Ghost (1990),Patrick Swayze comes back fromthe dead to protect his girlfriend, played by Demi Moore, from harm. At theend of the film, he quite literally defends their space as a couple, grapplingwith the film's treacherous villain who has invaded their newly renovatedloft. The loft remains their space and clearly serves as a seventh heaven forthe 1990s.In Signs (2002),Rev. Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) defends his homeand family from invading aliens, taking refuge in the basement during a massattack and then finishing off the random alien who remained behind after theothers had left.

The Lure of the City: SunriseIn F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927),a rural family (husband, wife, and child) isthreatened by a woman who has journeyed from the city to the country and(apparently) seduced the husband. During a late-night rendezvous in theswamp with the man, she entices him with images of life in the city and thentries to encourage him to murder his wife, sell his farm, and come back withher to the city. This woman, a prototype for the Glenn Close character in FatalAttraction, plays the role of villain, as does the city itself, which seems to bethe source of her destructive power. She is also a product of the times-sheis a "new woman." She has a short, mannish haircut; she smokes; she dresseslike a flapper; she is sexually liberated; and she assumes an aggressive role inher relationships with men. The man's young wife, on the other hand, looks(although pretty) like an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century "old woman," inother words, like a European hausfrau. Shewears a peasant-style dress, and herhair, unlike that of the woman from the city, is long and blonde. Crosscuttingbetween her with her child and the woman from the city embracing her husbandemphasizes their status as moral opposites. The wife is associated with homeand family; the woman from the city with the swamp and adultery.

However, the simple moral opposition between nature and culture, or thecountry and the city, is more complex than it initially appears. The womanfrom the city is associated with the country-in particular, with the swamp.The regeneration of the marriage between the husband and the wife takes placein the city, where they symbolically renew their marriage vows (at the marriageof another couple), formalize their relationship with a posed photograph, andcelebrate their reunion with a peasant dance, which they perform before anaudience of city dwellers.

Though Murnau's film seems to present a negative view of urbanizationand industrialization, it undercuts its critique of the city with a suggestion thatthe experiences of its rural characters in the city provide a valuable perspectiveon their prior relationship that ultimately restores them to one another. Yet,the final reconciliation of the couple takes place in the country, in the domesticspace of their bedroom, as the woman from the city returns to the city. In thisway, Sunrise captures the ambivalence of an America that was negotiating a

The woman from the city (Margaret Livingston) seduces the husband (George O'Brien) in the

swamp in Sunrise (1927).

dramatic change in its identity from an agrarian to an urban base. The dramaticaction of the film suggests that the innately natural values of the country canbe renewed by contact with the city-that is, that the threats of an urbanized,industrialized America can be contained. Modernity will not destroy thevalues that inform American identity, but will test and prove their strength,guaranteeing the continuity of the experience of America as it evolved from anagrarian to an industrial society.

The coming of sound, which took place between 1926and 1929, transformedthe melodrama from the format or mode in which most films were made intoone genre among many. Sound brought about changes in acting style, making itno longer necessary (or even desirable) to say everything with the body instead

. .. Urn A~mham Lincoln 1930 Griffith attem ted

to stylize dialogue in order to suit it to the emotionalized atmosphere of themelodrama, much as he had earlier stylized his actors' performances. He hired

the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, to write the script andto turn the dialogue into poeticized speech. But Griffith's melodramatization ofdialogue remains an isolated experiment in an industry that regarded sound asa crucial step forward in the medium's quest for greater and greater realism. Inthis context, that which was melodramatic was looked on as old-fashioned or,because of its overt interest in the world of emotion, as somehow appropriateonly for women's pictures. Formerly a universal cinematic language,melodramatic style was suddenly demoted to an inferior dialect within a new,more realistic system of communication and signification.

Melodramas thrived during the sound era. Several of these "women'spictures," such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), not onlyappealed to a general audience but also won Academy Awards, providingadded prestige for the genre. The melodrama and the melodramatic continuedto satisfy basic needs of audiences for certain kinds of characters, situations,and stories. But the sound melodrama necessarily distinguished itself from thesilent melodrama, which was so closely identified with the silent film itself.The tradition of the theatrical melodrama-which began in France in the 1770s,dominated the nineteenth-century American stage, and provided an expressivelanguage for early film directors such as Griffith-ended with the coming ofsound. Although the theatrical melodrama died, its power to address humanfeelings lives on in the melodramatic, in an emotionalized way of telling storiesthat continues to move audiences, as the astounding successes of E.T. andTitanic at the box office demonstrates.

,

••• SELECT FILMOGRAPHY

A Drunkard's Reformation (1909)The Birth of a Nation (1915)Way Down East (1920)Orphans of the Storm (1922)The Big Parade (1925)Seventh Heaven (1927)

Sunrise (1927)The Crowd (1928)A Man's Castle (1933)Since You Went Away (1944)E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)A.I.:Artificial Intelligence (2001)