Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
card game for five or ten minutes of excruciating suspense, during which the audience is saying to the cardplayers, “Stop playing cards, there’s a bomb under your table!”
Conversely, if he did not show the bomb and it then exploded, it would produce a brief moment of shock and surprise.
Filmmakers use the elements of narrative structure to encourage the viewer’s active contribution. The action of the popular thriller The French Connection (1972) deals with a New York cop’s obsessive hunt for a powerful French drug smuggler. At the end of the film, the cop corners the smuggler in a warehouse. The cop chases him into a back room, but the camera stays outside the room, leaving both characters off-screen. After a pause, a gunshot is heard off-screen, and the image fades out. The film is over, and the viewer is left wondering who fired the shot and whether the cop got his man. As the end credits roll, that final gunshot reverberates in the viewer’s mind.
What did it mean, and why was it presented in such a mysterious way? How does the story end? Its structure challenges the viewer to make sense of the film’s puzzling conclusion, its final withholding of information, and its lack of explicit narrative closure.
As the ending of The French Connection illustrates, storytellers can hook the audience by deliberately omitting important pieces of story information. The audience infers and fills in this information as its contribution to the story, binding storyteller and audience in a close creative relationship. In a mystery film, viewers will try to guess the identity of the murderer before the detective or the narrative reveals it. The final shot of the ice pick under the bed in Basic Instinct (1992) teases the audience THE SIXTH SENSE (HOLLYWOOD PICTURES, 1999)
This uncommonly clever ghost story sprung an unforgettable twist ending on its viewers, many of whom felt compelled to return to the film for a second viewing to see how it was done. The story is psychologically rich and has a slow, meditative pacing. These are not the typical characteristics of a box-office blockbuster, and they demonstrate that the pleasures offered by a well-told story do not go out of fashion. Compositions showing Malcolm (Bruce Willis) and Cole (Haley Joel Osment) together in the frame are quite rare in the film. Most often they are framed in separate shots, a strategy director M. Night Shyamalan uses to subliminally suggest that the characters inhabit different realms—the living and the dead. Frame enlargement.
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with the possibility that the real killer in the narrative is still at large and may strike again.
The Sixth Sense (1999) vividly illustrates this storytelling partnership between filmmaker and audience. Its narrative is uncommonly clever, and in its closing moments, it springs a last-minute surprise on the viewer that completely changes everything the viewer has assumed about the characters and story. The film’s phenomenal box-office success was due to the pleasure that its remarkable twist gave viewers and to repeat business. Viewers came back to see the movie again, intrigued by its clever design, curious to see how the twist was accomplished and whether there were any clues to the ending that they had missed. The Others (2001), a ghost story starring Nicole Kidman, works in a similar fashion.
The viewer’s participation in a narrative activates a basic operational principle of the human mind—the search for pattern. Perception and interpretation are not mechanical responses to information but are active, goal-directed processes. Narrative activates these processes by inviting the audience to search for the overall pattern within a given narrative structure, the story to which the plot points. The desire to see the completed pattern is experienced by viewers as the need to find out “what happens next” in a story. The clear causality and motivation in a classical Hollywood narrative such as The Lord of the Rings stimulates this desire by organizing the story in a linear fashion that moves forward, with increasing momentum, toward its conclusion. The more fragmented structure of Memento or Last Tango in Paris stimulates this desire by burying the master pattern—the story—inside a narrative structure—a plot—that hides it. In each case, the act of storytelling binds the audience to the narrative as participant and co-creator, strengthening the bond between audience and storyteller as they both help create the story.
These considerations point to an important conclusion: Meaning is not in the film but is formed by the interaction of the film’s audiovisual and narrative design with the INCEPTION (WARNER BROS., 2010)
Meaning is not in a film but arises through the interaction of viewers with movies.
Inception capitalizes on this interaction by creating an ambiguous narrative that invites viewers to provide a resolution. The ending, for example, teases viewers by holding out two possibilities that are mutually exclusive. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) believes he has returned to reality from the dream-world that he has inhabited. But has he? The film’s ambiguous ending provokes viewers to interpret, and thereby to create, its meaning.
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viewer’s own horizon of perceptual and social experience—the viewer’s interpretive contribution. The implication of this is enormous. It means that filmmakers cannot control the meaning of their films because the experiences, values, and assumptions that viewers bring to those films and that establish their frameworks of interpretation are incredibly diverse and variable.
Obviously, viewers use a variety of criteria to evaluate the aesthetic qualities of a narrative. Is it coherent? Is it pleasurable? Is it convincing? Does it make sense? These are evaluations of narrative structure—how the story is aesthetically organized and told.
In a story where events are linked in a tight causal chain, with few digressions, viewers tend to expect an ending that ties up the loose ends by resolving all outstanding story issues. If they are given, instead, an ambiguous ending, as occurs in The French Connection (1972), some viewers may feel frustrated, whereas others find the ambiguity exciting and are stimulated to fill in the missing information. Viewers routinely evaluate how the story is told and whether, given the type of film it is, the story is told in a satisfying way.
Because so many movies establish screen worlds that are recognizably similar to their own, viewers also evaluate narratives using standards borrowed from personal and social experience. Here, it is not so much the narrative design that is evaluated as the way the narrative portrays people or situations. Arab-Americans protested the Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller True Lies (1994) because of its portrayal of Arabic groups as terrorists. Some African-Americans felt that the hyenas in Disney’s The Lion King (1994) were unpleasantly close to a caricature of black people. The mannerisms and Caribbean accent of Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace (1999) aroused similar complaints. Viewers assess the narrative portrayals against their own understanding of the issues, situations, or groups. Does the narrative square with their own sense of things, or does it seem unreasonably biased or distorted in a way that style cannot justify?
The standards viewers apply when evaluating narratives, then, are quite diverse, and they range from judgments about the artistic design of the story to judgments about its success in representing familiar things or people. Filmmakers can influence but they cannot control these evaluations. Filmmakers can control the audiovisual design of their films, but viewers are the essential co-creators of the meanings that arise from those designs.
FILM GENRES
Many popular films fall into genres , which are sets of interrelated stories and their associated images. The most popular and historically significant American film genres include the Western, the gangster film, the horror film, the musical, film noir, the war film, and the science fiction film. One of the most important characteristics of genres is that the stories are repeated again and again, with rules, or conventions , about what can happen within the genre. Moreover, many conventions are unique to a given genre. What viewers accept in a musical film might appear rid
iculous in a gangster film.
The repetition of story situations throughout a genre produces two effects: It enables viewers familiar with the genre to anticipate likely narrative developments and outcomes, and it enables filmmakers to achieve highly concentrated meanings within 257
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the genre. Consider these simple terms common to Westerns: gunfighter, Indian, cowboy. Each word conjures up a host of associated images and potential story situations for viewers who are familiar with the genre.
A viewer critical of genres, who objects that all Westerns or all horror films are the same, is missing the point. Film scholar Robert Warshow has pointed out that
“one does not want too much novelty” from a genre film. Fans of a genre derive pleasure from the small variations that are worked out within the pre-established order of story and setting. Repetition of familiar material is very important, and too much novelty or originality can place a film outside a genre’s framework.
The Western
The Western is one of the oldest screen genres. Indeed, the Western as a cultural category predates the cinema. It emerged near the end of the nineteenth century and was established in a variety of pre-cinematic forms: the dime novel, the Puritan captivity narratives, the Leatherstocking tales (1823–1841) of James Fenimore Cooper, theatrical plays and shows (e.g., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show), and painting (ethnographic studies of Indian cultures, as well as Frederic Remington’s action scenes).
The Western, then, already existed when the cinema was invented at the turn of the century. The cinema supplied movement and exciting visual images to flesh out existing cultural stories about westward expansion and conflict between settlers and Native Americans. The Western rapidly established its popularity in cinema. By 1910, 21 percent of all U.S. pictures were Westerns. During the next decades, Hollywood produced Westerns in great quantities, and many of the industry’s most popular stars were closely identified with the genre: Gary Cooper ( The Virginian, The Westerner, High Noon ), John Wayne ( Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Hondo ), Clint Eastwood ( High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven ). John Ford, perhaps the THE TOLL GATE (1920)
The Western is one of the old-
est screen genres and quickly
achieved enormous popularity.
William S. Hart was one of the
most popular Western stars in
the silent period. Hart aimed to
portray the West with realism
and with a serious, adult outlook
that contrasted with the adoles-
cent appeal of stars such as Tom
Mix. Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
finest director of the Hollywood period, made many of the genre’s enduring classics: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the genre’s popularity notably diminished, and since then, it has never recovered the close relationship with a mass audience that it once enjoyed. Important and fine Westerns continue to be made— Tombstone (1993), Unforgiven (1992), Open Range (2003)—but the genre’s high period of creativity and appeal to a wide audience seems to have ended. It remains, though, the quintessential American genre, the one most closely tied to the theme and mythology of the nation’s experience and identity.
The Western is defined by period, setting, and theme. The period is that interval of time between the Civil War and World War I, and the setting is west of the Mississippi River, on the plains or in the desert or the mountains. Films that fall outside these specifications may lie on the periphery of the genre, but they are not Westerns. This period and setting contain the great historical stories that have furnished the genre with its material: waves of migration via the overland trails, the Indian wars, the building of the railroads, the cattle drives, the gold rushes, the frontier marshals and town tamers, the gunfighters.
While the genre has many themes, the one at its heart is the conflict between cultural ideas about civilization and the wilderness in stories that explain why violence is necessary for the preservation of community. The theme is linked to an enduring pattern of imagery. In the highly conventionalized opening typical of many Westerns, the central character, a man of violence, rides in to a town or settlement from the wilderness. A narrative situation—the approach of a violent individual to a community—is linked to a particular setting and image, the wilderness of desert or mountain. The long shots integrate the character with the surrounding wilderness, and by showing how large and expansive the wilderness is, they stress the fragility and vulnerability of the settlement or community. The struggle between violence and law UNFORGIVEN (WARNER BROS., 1992)
Clint Eastwood is the Western’s last big star, and his work as director–producer demonstrates genuine mastery and feeling for the genre. In Unforgiven , he probes the destructive consequences of violence and offers a revisionist treatment of his star image.
Frame enlargement.
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is embodied in this visual contrast. As a figure of violence, the gunman comes from the wilderness to the community, and frequently at the end of the films, he must leave the settlement to return to the mountains or plains.
The Western is among the most rule-bound of film genres. It links specific story situations to particular settings. In many Westerns, the violent skills of the protagonist are tested in a public arena. This arena often is a saloon, where armed and violent confrontations occur in close proximity to the bar. The genre has coded this location for violence. By contrast, schoolrooms and churches are impermissible locations for violent confrontations. Gunfights or brawls almost never occur there.
The regularity of story in the Western is most apparent in the necessity for a gunfight at the conclusion of the film. The gunfight resolves the narrative conflicts by granting that at this moment of primitive social development, violence is needed on 3:10 TO YUMA (LIONSGATE, 2007) and THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES
BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (WARNER BROS., 2007)
Contemporary filmmakers continue to make Westerns, although production in the genre remains small. In his remake of 3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold used fast-paced action to give the genre a more contemporary feel. In contrast, The Assassination of Jesse James was slowly paced and more poetic, with Roger Deakins’ cinematography lending the film a very stylized and pictorial design, evident in the sepia tone and selective blurring of the frame found in this shot. Ford (Casey Affleck, center) gazes adoringly at Jesse (Brad Pitt, left), whom he is destined to kill. Frame enlargements.
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RED RIVER (UNITED ARTISTS,
1948)
The abrupt conclusion of Red
River , in which John Wayne and
Montgomery Clift trade punches
rather than bullets and then be-
come friends again, strikes many
viewers as an implausible turn
of events. The formulaic nature
of genre films, such as Westerns,
conditions viewers to expect
certain kinds of narrative events.
Because of this, genre film-
makers are often more tightly
bound in their work by what
an audience expects and what
a genre requires than are film-
makers whose work places them
outside genre boundaries. Frame
enlargement.
behalf of the community. Because genres are so rule-bound, too much variation from the formulas can produce deviant plot structures that viewers may deem unsatisfying. Howard Hawks’s 1948 production of Red River is a case in point. It deals with the first cattle drive over the Chisholm Trail. Tom Dunson (John Wayne) leads his cattle on this perilous trek, assisted by his adopted son, Matthew Gart
h (Montgomery Clift). During the drive, Dunson grows tyrannical and becomes a borderline psychopath obsessed with preventing cowboys from quitting the drive and threatening to hang those who do. Eventually, he becomes unbearable, and the men revolt. Matthew Garth takes the herd and leaves Dunson behind. Dunson swears revenge and tells Matt that he will kill him when they next meet.
The plot moves in traditional Western fashion toward the promise of a cli-
mactic gunfight. But it never occurs. Instead, a comical fistfight between Matt and Dunson leads to their reconciliation. Many viewers have felt somewhat cheated by this ending, which is at odds with the genre. (From the standpoint of the director’s other films, however, this ending seems less deviant because in most of his work Hawks tended to prefer comedy and comradeship over tragedy.)
The Western makes an excellent tool of study for students who wish to under-
stand how genre works. It has a long history, is extremely rule-bound and precise in the application of those rules, and yet it shows an impressive diversity of style and subject matter. This is the essential and fascinating aspect about a genre: It shows diversity within constraint, variations within an abiding master pattern.
The Gangster Film
The gangster film is nearly as old as the cinema, having clear precursors in the early silent era. The genre emerged as a powerful force in U.S. film, however, at the time of the Great Depression. In the years 1930–1932, three films— Little Caesar, The Public 261
The Nature of Narrative in Film
LITTLE CAESAR (WARNER BROS., 1931)
One of the biggest in a long line of movie gangsters, the snarling Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) in Little Caesar . Pictured here, he is at the height of his power and wealth, but in a classic rise-and-fall story, the gangster eventually must lose. Rico is so smug and self-centered that when death finally comes, he can scarcely believe it. Riddled by a police machine gun, he asks in disbelief if his life has reached its end. Frame enlargement.