Mainstream Media

Genre

John Keenan j.keenan@worc.ac.uk

Learning Outomes

•Understand what hegemony is

•Understand where hegemony is in film genre

•Understand ways in which film language communicates hegemony

Having sex with a goat

Smoking

Injecting heroin into eyeball

Unmarried sexDrinking alcohol

Eating horse

Eating pig

food

drugssex

clothes

Going to the office in underwear

Being on the beach in full suit

30 year old sex with a 13-year old

HEGEMONY

The mainstream media presume a hegemonyThe hegemony is in the genre

Genre – type

Genus – birth, or origins

Epic, tragedy, comedy, history

Early films

Why genre?

System of expectation – pleasure of fulfilmentUnderstanding – global film formUnique purchase of the filmPleasure of difference/familiarityGuaranteed audience

•power produces and maintains genre form

•genres can be changed and this changes the power-base

Genre is Political/Ideological

The stability and repeatability of that social situation lead to texts with a similar stability, with a marked conventionality, which in the end makes the text simply natural and makes its constructedness unnoticable’

Kress Gunther, 2003, Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge, p.27

1920s-40s

Studio SystemClassic Hollywood

MGM – melodramaParamount – westernWarner – gangsterUniversal - horror

How the Jews Created Hollywood

Texts are not transparent objects; they are highly coercive linguistic strategies, positioning readers in particular ways which have nothing to do with encouraging individuality and everything to do with reproducing a particular social formation’Cranny Francis, 2005, Multimedia Texts and Contexts, London: Sage, p.98

Western as American Ideology

‘The Westerns reflects ‘American’ dreams and values, its narratives are inextricably linked to the ‘American dream’, be that individualism, freedom, entrepreneurship, patriarchy, Protestantism and patriotism’

Chris Newbold, 1996, The Western as Text, Leicester: University of Leicester, p.135

Western Generic Conventions

PlotCharactersBody languageDressDialogueHistorical settingLocationIconography ThemesLocomotionMotifStars

Individualism

Me cultureEntrepreneur

Patriarcy

Whore or pure

‘Women are either floozies in the saloon, who are to be driven out of town (not until after good use however) or shot, or pure as the driven snow and totally vulnerable to marauding men and, of course, abducting Indians’Susan Hayward, 2002, Cinema Studies, London: Routledge, p.469

High Noon trailer Unforgiven

High Noon

White supremacy

Number of black cowboysEstimated 25%

Number of black cowboys in Westerns before 19600%

Symbolic annihilation – Gaye Tuchman

Indians

The right to bear arms

Shane Trailer

‘The concept of genre is not static but dynamic’

Hindmarsh J (1996) Genre and Narrative Analysis, Leicester: University of Leicester. Page 163

Genres change over time reflecting a new hegemony

Classical – 1930-55 Vengeance – 1950-60s Professional 1960-70s Postmodern 1980-present

Sub-genreSpaghettiCross genre

Midnight CowboyEasy RiderThelma and LouiseDie HardDirty HarryStar Wars

Brothers

Film

Later analyse for genre and hegemony