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GENRE

 

Genre or story form is the fourth layer of structure. As the container for the other levels, genre is both more recognizable to the audience and more critical for the writer looking for a connection with audience.

Genre as a way of understanding story evolved out of literary criticism, where the metacategories—comedy, tragedy, and romance—were used to understand the shape of stories as well as to be able to highlight the manner in which different writers brought their own particular insights to those forms. We've come far in our consideration of genre as it applies to screen stories. Screen stories evolving out of other dramatic forms—popular fiction, for example—has yielded the western, the gangster film and film noir, and the horror film. Vaudeville has yielded the character comedy, and traditional theater has added the situation comedy and the romantic comedy. Radio has contributed the melodrama, and more recently television, together with journalism, has contributed the docudrama. The spectrum of genres is wide, and we'll turn to it shortly.

To my mind consideration of genre should be useful to the writer. To be useful we have to be precise about genre. What is less useful is to include generic story frames such as the road film, the buddy film, or the stage play as genres. They are simply too general, and consequently their usefulness is limited. Rather than call Road Warrior (1981) a road movie, I'd call it an action-adventure. Rather than call Thelma and Louise (1991) a road-buddy movie, I'd call it a melodrama. Rather than call Four Weddings and a Funeral (1993) a filmed stage play, I'd call it a romantic comedy or situation comedy. Because a friendship is crucial to a story or a journey makes up the plot of a screen story, are not enough to identify the story form. Something more specific, such as the nature of the struggle and who is doing the struggling, will determine the genre of the screen story.

In order to understand genre and how it works, we will look at the role of character and of structure. What is striking about genre is that within a particular genre there are constants—specifically, the dramatic shape, and the nature of the protagonist-antagonist struggle that lies at the heart of each genre. There is of course some room for the writer's individuality as well as for fashion, the shifts in social values and interest. These attitudes will present themselves in genre films, and they will differ over time. But I am getting ahead of myself.

THE AUDIENCE

Film is a popular art, and in the popular arts, writers and directors ignore audience at their peril. Genre films have appealed to audiences since the beginning of filmic storytelling. When I speak of genre I'm talking about five groups of genres. They are:

Genres of Wish Fulfillment

1. Action-Adventure
2. The Musical
3. Science Fiction
4. The Western
5. The Historical Film

Genres between Wish Fulfillment and Realism

1. The Biographical Film
2. The Sports Film
3. The Romantic Comedy

Genres of Realism

1. The Melodrama
2. The Police Story
3. The Gangster Film
4. The War Story
5. The Situation Comedy
6. The Thriller

Genres between Realism and Fear (the Nightmare)

1. Farce
2. Satire
3. Hyperdrama (the adult moral fable)

Genres of the Nightmare

1. Film Noir
2. Screwball Comedy
3. The Horror Film

I cluster the genres in this manner because of audience. Audiences have differing goals when they see particular genres. Genres of wish fulfillment—action-adventure from Captain Blood (1935) to The Perfect Storm (2000)—have always been popular. They are plot-intensive screen stories where the main character will be a hero. He or she will achieve great feats, and that part of us that identifies with his or her achievements will feel rewarded. His or her heroism is our heroism. The audience for adventure films has not diminished in sixty-five years; if anything, it has grown.

There is another area of our lives, the darker area, where the nightmare dominates. Here our fears and fantasies meet and we anticipate the worst. The worst is what happens in the horror film. My point here is that different genres appeal to people for different reasons. And at different times in people's lives, and at different times in the life of a larger audience—societies and nations—different genres will have their appeal.

Writers and directors know this and adapt the form to the fashion of the day. The war film made during World War II, The Sands of Iwo jima (1949), for example, presents a heroic vision of the soldier, the main character, whereas the post-Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now (1979) is utterly ambivalent about the main character. The reasons have everything to do with the prevailing social attitudes toward war at the time each of these films was made. This element, too, is taken into account as a genre film is presented to an audience at a particular time.

And what of the issue of audience fragmentation? Not every segment of society is drawn to the same genre. Although two films may have as their subject matter crime in the African-American community, John Singleton uses the action-adventure story form in Shaft (2000) and Spike Lee opts for melodrama in Clockers (1995). Different treatments of similar subject matter will appeal to different audiences within the larger audience.

And what about the audience for realism? What I must say is that the realism-oriented genres—situation comedies, melodramas, and police stories—dominate television. They have also been enduring and ongoing in the feature film. They are not, however, as popular or as financially rewarded as the genres of wish fulfillment or of the nightmare. This has not discouraged writers and directors from making more realistic films.

Finally, the audience for genre films has been from the beginning international. Although the western was an American creation, German filmmakers have long had an attraction to the form and been prolific in the number of westerns they have made. So, too, the Italians. The French have been attracted to the gangster film. The Japanese pursued the horror film as aggressively as Indian film has pursued the musical.

ISSUES OF THE DAY

Issues of the day can be readily absorbed into the story form. Those issues can be social, political, or economic, or they can be less specific and essentially reflect the prevailing attitudes of the time. Whichever the choice, their absorption reflects the malleability of genre. It also reflects the level of desire to reach out and capture the audience.

When Hitchcock was making his 1930s thrillers 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), the films were entertainments, so their relationship to actual world events, particularly Germany's march toward primacy, albeit temporary, in Europe was more than elusive. These films about spying and British espionage in the middle of Europe were about as far from reality as they could be. At the end of the far less innocent 1960s, the thriller was the form of choice in Alan Pakula's The Parallax View (1974). Here the plots and schemes of the antagonists were as overstated as Hitchcock's plot and schemes of the relevant governments was understated. But this is in keeping with the views of politics and government in the sixties. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) are in line with Pakula's film.

Today technology has replaced government as the enemy that was pictured in the 1960s and early 1970s. Now the thriller is represented by films such as Irwin Winkler's The Net (1997) and Tony Scott's Enemy of the State (1999).

With respect to the western, the view of the genre echoes the changes in the thriller. The West in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and William Wyler's The Westerner (1940) is an environment where the moral high ground lives in the setting and in the behavior of its inhabitants, particularly the protagonist. This is not the case in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1967) or in Ralph Nelson's Blue (1969). Here the environment is violent and promotes violence in the characters who live in this land. The two later films reflect social attitudes prevailing during the Vietnam War. This unheroic, dark view overwhelms the essentially pastoral elements of the western genre. Even a more conservative western, such as Mark Rydell's The Cowboys (1972), reveals a darkness totally unexpected in the genre.

Moving ahead twenty-five years to the early 1990s, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) reflects the values and sentiments of the 1980s—every man for himself. No longer heroic, the main character is motivated by material necessity and is no longer noble. He is essentially a vindictive killer rather than “the Knight” so often echoed in the earlier westerns. The 1990s western is far from the morality play that is such an essential part of the classic western.

The gangster film has gone through parallel metamorphoses, from the portrait of ambitious immigrants in the 1930s films such as Howard Hawk's Scarface (1934), to the portrait of the gangster as an innocent, juvenile delinquent and a victim of the social and economic system in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and finally back to the criminal as psychopath in Brian di Palma's Scarface (1984) and The Untouchables (1988).

All genres have displayed this degree of malleability, but because of the deeper nature of genres and their meaning to the audience, particular genres have, from time to time, come to greater prominence while others have essentially gone into hiding. This, too, has everything to do with the society of the day. The 1990s, for example, were dominated by the action-adventure film in the area of wish fulfillment. Musicals and westerns were a rarity. And in the area of the nightmare, film noir and screwball comedy were rarely represented. Even the horror film was presented as a satire of the horror film—The Scream series being a good example—just as the Spaghettii westerns (take-offs of the western) came to great prominence in the 1960s. Why was the 1944–1955 period so powerfully dominated by film noir? Why was the 1934–1940 period so powerfully taken with the screwball comedy? Why were there so many musicals, made from 1935 to 1950? Why were so many of the great westerns made in the 1950s? The answers to all these questions lie in the nature of the society of each period. Whether it was the Depression and the need to escape that led to the explosion of the movie musical, or whether it was the loss of innocence that followed War War II and the Bomb that prompted the interest in film noir, society, its nature and its concerns, permeated the genres and contributes to the genres to which the public feel attracted in particular eras.

What is most important in this discussion is that genres are flexible to issues of the day and, where they are not, concerns of the day will create a demand for particular genres and inhibit the demand for those whose nature is out of sync with the ethos of the day.

THE ROLE OF CHARACTER IN GENRE

One of the defining characteristics of genre is the presentation of the main character and the presentation of the antagonist. In order to understand character in genre, it's best to capture the sense of the main character through his or her goal. And goals will differ in the different genres.

In the realistic genres, there are defined and expected roles for the main character and for the antagonist. In order to understand those roles, we have to link goals to the thematic core of the genre. The thematic core of the police story is that crime cannot go unpunished. Consequently, the main character of the police story, generally a policeman or a detective or an official investigator (such as a district attorney in the army in Simon West's The General's Daughter [1999]), has as his or her goal: the apprehension of the perpetrator of a crime. When we look to how the issues of the day have influenced the genre, the policeman in the 1930s police story was a hero. In the anti-authoritarian 1960s, he became the anti-authoritarian Dirty Harry (1972), who not only had to deal with the criminal but also with the interference from City Hall. By the 1980s, City Hall and corruption were the antagonists in Sydney Lumet's Q&A (1990), and by the 1990s, the police story became obsessed with the humanization of the all-too-human policeman (no longer the hero). Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991) is a good example of this trend. This does not detract, however, from the main character's goal: to catch the criminal. For the most part, that criminal is the antagonist in the police story.

Turning to the gangster film, this genre is essentially the story of unbridled ambition that sees as its goal the fulfillment of the American dream. In the early gangster films the gangster was an immigrant: Italian, Irish, or Jewish. More recent gangster films have added Cuban immigrants (Scarface [1983]), Russian immigrants (Little Odessa [1994]), and British visitors (The Limey [1999]) to the repertory. The most famous gangster film, The Godfather (1972), has added a generational feature, and we have watched three generations of the Corleone family fulfill their dreams. The antagonist in the gangster film is whoever stands in their way. It might be a rival gangster or a corrupt policeman, or it might be a family member. Thematically, however, the gangster film is consistently the story of characters seeking ways to improve their status materially, and the means of improvement are always illegal.

In the war film, the goal of the main character is to survive, and it is the enemy who is the antagonist. Although particular filmmakers such as Robert Aldrich have specialized in an antagonist that is a superior officer (Attack [1957]), a different class (The Dirty Dozen [1966]), or simply an ally (Too Late the Hero [1969]), most war films do focus on the enemy as the antagonist. Oliver Stone looks at the enemy both within and outside (Platoon [1986]), as does Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket [1987]). This only makes the goal of the main character, to survive, more unlikely.

The thriller presents the goal of the main character differently than the realistic genres to date in that the characters in the police story, the gangster film, and the war film have what I would call either a professional or a material goal. In the thriller, on the other hand, the character has a residual goal, arising out of the situation they find themselves in. They are in essence an ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances. They do not understand these circumstances, but if they don't take action, they will become a victim of those circumstances. It may have to do with their work in government intelligence as in Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1976). Or it may be a case of mistaken identity, as in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In either case, understanding those circumstances and developing a coping strategy, an escape, and a plan to find out who created the conflicting circumstances will lead to a solution and to the survival of the main characters. Their goal, then, is to survive, and their antagonist is whoever is chasing them.

The melodrama is different from the previous realistic genres in that the main characters have a particular kind of struggle that is generated out of their goal, which is to change their life circumstances or experiences. The problem is that they are powerless, in the sense that they are young or old or female or poor or a minority person within a powerful majority community or society that excludes them. They want to improve themselves, and the barrier to improvement is the power structure. The goal then is self-improvement, and the antagonist is the representative of the power structure that is a barrier to that self-improvement. Cider House Rules (1999), Character (1998), Sense and Sensibility (1997), and Erin Brockovich (2000) are all examples of melodramas that focus on the struggle for power—and, implicitly, happiness.

In genres of wish fulfillment, the goal of the character relates to an impossible task that, if achieved, will make the main character a hero. In the action-adventure, it may be the recovery of a lost ark (Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981]), or saving the world (Armageddon [1998]), or more simply saving a building full of hostages from a group of ruthless terrorists (Die Hard [1988]). In each case, the task is difficult, almost impossible, and the character who stands in the way, the antagonist, must be more than capable. The more powerful the antagonist, the more heroic the efforts and the accomplishments of the main character will be. Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader, at least in the action-adventure genre.

In the western, the goal of the character is also an external goal—to complete a cattle drive, avenge a family loss, or rid a town of its outlaws. But the struggle in the western is a struggle between opposing sets of values. The western hero represents moral values, pastoral values, and primitive values; and the antagonist represents civilization, materialism, and a loss of individuality. The antagonist in the western represents civilization—the sheriff in Unforgiven (1992), the banker in Stagecoach (1939), the outlaw brother in Winchester 73 (1950).

In all of the genres of wish fulfillment (except the musical) the main character is presented as “the knight” with a set of ideals that will carry him or her into ritual opposition and combat with the representative of the forces of the other side.

The struggle in science fiction is a variation on this struggle. Again the conflict is about values, but rather than primitivism versus civilization as in the western, the struggle in science fiction is between technology and humanity. The main character represents human values and the antagonist represents technology (or the byproduct of technology). As in the western, the goal of the main character is specific—to rescue humans from a distant planet in Aliens (1986), or to destroy rebellious replicants (humanlike robots) in Blade Runner (1981), or to prevent an invasion from outer space in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). But this goal, as in the western, is simply a pretext for the engagement in a struggle of values. By succeeding, the main character in science fiction is a hero, as in the western. The antagonist aligns with or misuses the forces or benefits of technology to undermine human values. And as with the western, the struggle proceeds in a ritualized fashion.

In genres of the nightmare, the goal of the character is far less noble than in the genres of wish fulfillment. In film noir, the main characters are at a particular point in their lives, a desperate point, and the only thing that will lift them out of despair is a relationship. Thus the goal becomes a relationship. In fact, they have judged poorly, blinded by desire or by a self-destructive impulse, and the person they have chosen destroys them. The antagonist, then, is the object of desire. The case of film noir, such as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), proceeds in this way, as does Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1942) (based on James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice), so the main character is in fact a victim of the lover-antagonist.

Just as the situation comedy is melodrama with laughs and a happy ending, screwball comedy is film noir with laughs (albeit nervous) and a happy ending. The goal of the main character is to avoid a relationship, and the goal of the antagonist is to have a relationship with the main character. The antagonist succeeds. Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941), Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972) are all examples of screwball comedy.

In the horror film, the main characters want normalcy, but they don't accept their dark side. In Brian Di Palma's Carrie (1976), it is the inner aggression of the main character that unleashes destruction. In Reuben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), it is drug-taking that unleashes the character's inner aggression. And in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), it is human disrespect for nature that unleashes the terror of the shark on a small town.

THE ROLE OF STRUCTURE IN GENRE

When we speak of structure in genre, implicitly the question devolves to plot or character layer or both, or to what proportion of each is appropriate in each genre. In order to understand structure in a meaningful way, it's best to link the issue of structure to the dramatic arc of a genre. To exemplify how this works the simplest genre to look at is the police story. The dramatic arc of the police story is crime-investigation-apprehension. This is essentially the plot layer of the police story. In order to deepen the police story, or to give it a modern spin or an old-fashioned spin, or an unusual point of view, a character layer is added. It's not necessary to add a character layer. Police stories such as Jules Dassin's Naked City (1948) and Peter Yates' Bullitt (1968) are effective police stories without benefit of a character layer. Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch over Me (1987) deepens the genre with its class-oriented character layers. Will the main character stay with his working-class wife or take up with the upper-class woman he has been assigned to guard? In Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, the character layer explores the premise of whether a female FBI detective will be a victim (like the victims of the serial killer Buffalo Bill), or whether she will be a victor (like Hannibal Lecter and Jack Crawford in the screen story)?

If a character layer is introduced to this plot-driven genre, what are the consequences? Will it enhance the film or will it slow down the advance of the plot? These are the structural issues. But what to hold on to is that the dramatic arc of the police story is crime-investigation-apprehension.

Turning now to the other realism-oriented genres, the gangster film follows a dramatic arc of a rise and fall. The plot follows the rise of a Tony Lamonte or Vito Corleone or Michael Cordone, and then their fall. Most gangster films do have a character layer, one which is always realistic: the family relationships of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the mother fixation of Cody Jarrett in Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949), the immature love of Clyde for Bonnie in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. Unlike the police story, the effectiveness of the gangster film seems to rely on the character layer, and consequently it is a genre that has and should have both plot and character layers. We turn now to a more detailed look at this dynamic.

THE CASE OF MICHAEL MANN'S HEAT

Michael Mann's Heat (1995) is actually a combination of two realistic genres—the police story and the gangster film. Both screen stories follow the classical plot of their respective genres. The police story follows Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) as he investigates a series of large-scale robberies. He is after “the crews” who are responsible, and in the end he will apprehend “the crew.” The gangster film's plot follows the rise and fall of “the crew,” particularly of its leader, Neil MacCauley (Robert de Niro). Both stories have a strong character layer that has to do with family and with relationships. Mann makes a point of not differentiating between the policeman and the gangster, in the sense that they both need relationships and that those relationships are complex. It is not the case that these men are as effective in their personal lives as they are in their professions. Quite the contrary, their personal lives are flawed.

The plot layers here are classic; they conform to the genre expectations. And the presence of strong character layers do not move us away from our experience of each genre. What is different in this film is the dramatic treatment of the protagonist-antagonist relationship. Our expectation is that the main character of the police story, Vincent Hanna, will have as his antagonist the gangster Neil MacCauley, and that conversely, the main character of the gangster film, Neil MacCauley, will have as his antagonist the policeman, Vincent Hanna. They are protagonist and antagonist, and yet the existence of the character layer in each humanizes these two rivals. And even though the plot dictates that Hanna kill MacCauley, we don't experience this resolution as a victory. The character layers in each make the two men human, complicated, and vulnerable. They point out their similarities rather than their differences, and in the end we view them as “brothers” rather than as antagonists. Circumstance has made them who they are. Both are professionals, habitual in their work, and society has determined that one operates within the law and the other outside the law. And so one has the power of the law on his side, while the other is a threat to the law. These men admire one another rather than despise one another. This is Mann's editorial position—that in the 1990s there's not much difference between the police and the criminals. Both are organized brotherhoods pitted against one another. This moral blurring is not untypical of the gangster film. We see it in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). We see it in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941). Nor is this the first all-too-human policeman we have experienced. Clint Eastwood's character in Richard Tuggle's Tightrope (1984) comes to mind. But Mann's notion of equivalence between policeman and gangster is the new perception, the 1990s perception.

The same is true for the war film. At its core, the dramatic arc of the war film relies less on plot and far more on the character layer. The plot is always centered on a battle, an incident within a battle, or even an entire war. But it is the character layer that yields meaning to the screen story. In Saving Private Ryan (1999), the issue for the captain, John Miller, the main character, is that there is duty and then there is the preservation of the lives of the men in his command. The implied goal is to save as many of his men as he can. But orders during a war, particularly on D-Day, mean death. The assignment that precipitates the main character's journey concerning the issue of the preservation of life versus duty is the assignment to save Private Ryan, a young man who is at the battlefront and who has lost his three brothers in the war.

In Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), the question in the character layer is whether any human values remain during the violence of war. The epitome of this notion is the murder of one American by another in the same outfit. Because of the outcome of the relationships in Platoon, war itself becomes “the antagonist,” because of the violent values it promotes.

The character layer in Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1999) presents us with the assertion that it is human life that you stamp out in war. Whatever the circumstances, whether they are heroic or cowardly, it's all about dying. This more philosophical position is less emotionalized than Oliver Stone's treatment of war in Platoon, but it is also powerful.

The dramatic arc in the thriller is a chase after the main character by the antagonist. This is principally the plot. Generally, the character layer in the thriller is modest and simply provides a humanization of the main character, as it does in Andrew Davis' The Package (1989). But it provides little more than coloration. The thriller is essentially a plot-driven genre.

The most complex of the realist genres is the melodrama. The dramatic arc of the melodrama is an interior journey around the issue of power and the place of the main character in the world of power. If the main character is a child, the arc tends to be either a loss of innocence or a coming of age. If the main character is a woman in the world of men, the arc is also a loss of innocence or a coming of age. In a sense, the same arc is the journey for a minority person in a majority culture, and for an elderly character in a culture obsessed with youth.

In terms of structure, melodramas tend to be principally dominated by the character layer. There are many melodramas that proceed with only a character layer. Truly, Madly, Deeply and Once Were Warriors are two examples, as I discussed in Chapter 2, “Character.” There are also melodramas that proceed with modest plots, in films such as Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955), and there are melodramas with significant plots, in films such as George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951). For the most part, however, the melodrama is dominated by its character layer.

It's important to note that melodrama and its reliance on the character layer forms a principal dimension of the sports film and of the biographical film. Think of the plot as the career of the sports or biographical figure, whether it be Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) or Robert Mulligan's Fear Strikes Out (1957), which dramatize the careers of boxer Jake LaMotta and baseball player Jim Piersall, respectively. The melodrama layer in Raging Bull has to do with LaMotta's personal relationships with his wives and his brother. The very quality that makes him a champion in the ring (aggression) is the same personal quality that destroys these personal relationships. In Fear Strikes Out, the instability of Piersall's personal life stems from his relationship with his father. In both cases, the characters are looking to strengthen or gain power in the world of personal relationships, but the challenge is formidable.

In the biographical film, the career is again the plot—the general in Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1969), the rebellion leader in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the painting career in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956). The melodrama layer is found in how the failure of relationships undermines or compromises the sense of achievement experienced by the subject. What makes all of these films unique is how the character layer humanizes all of these characters. Each had a talent, but not a very happy life.

In order to get a fuller sense of how the melodrama operates, we turn to the example of Michael Mann's The Insider (1999).

THE CASE OF MICHAEL MANN's THE INSIDER

Michael Mann's The Insider (1999) takes an unusual approach to the melodrama. Thematically, the dramatic arc remains the struggle of the powerless main character against the power structure. In this case, there are two main characters, a scientist, Dr. Jeffrey Wigand who has been dismissed from his position as Vice-President for Research at a major tobacco company, and a producer, Lowell Bergman, working on 60 Minutes at CBS. The power structure is corporate America as represented by the tobacco companies and the CBS corporate hierarchy. They provide the antagonists for the screen story.

How Mann's approach differs from traditional melodramas is in its structure. The traditional melodrama relies principally on its character layer, and it may or may not have a plot. Michael Mann treats this melodrama principally as a plot rather than a character-driven screen story. This has been done before. Euzhan Palcy treated her story of South African apartheid, A Dry White Season (1989), as a thriller, as did Christopher Morahan in his melodrama, Paper Mask (1991). By treating the story as a thriller, the plot layer becomes critical and the character layer lessens in importance. The dramatic arc in The Insider (1999) specifically becomes about the price the characters are willing to pay to tell the truth. The underlying assumption for both characters is that telling the truth is for the greater good of the society at large. The oppositional dynamic throughout becomes characters who want to tell the truth versus characters who willfully misstate, lie, or are a barrier to the truth.

The plot layer begins with Lowell Bergman, who is finding stories for 60 Minutes. That is his goal. Jeffrey Wigand is someone he approaches to be an expert witness. Consequent to his being fired by a tobacco company, Jeffrey Wigand has signed a confidentiality agreement and so resists talking to Lowell. But corporate, threatening behavior towards him and his family prompt Jeffrey Wigand to entertain speaking about what he knows.

The plot proceeds through threats about his interview and toward CBS, and on to his deposition by the state of Mississippi, who is filing a lawsuit against the tobacco companies. In the process he loses his family, only to learn that CBS no longer wants to broadcast the interview as shot for reasons of concern surrounding the imminent sale of CBS. The fear is that a company sued by big tobacco is a company worth less than a company with a clear profitability horizon. The threat from big tobacco has been effective. Betrayed, Lowell Bergman leaks the story to the New York Times and eventually the original interview is aired. Jeffrey Wigand's family life has been ruined and Lowell Bergman quits his job.

The sense of menace and powerlessness that pervades the Jeffrey Wigand story is paralleled by the sense of commitment and loss of confidence that underlies the Lowell Bergman story. What we are left with is that for the community to gain, individuals have to put everything at risk, yet inevitably they lose a great deal.

By presenting The Insider as a plot-driven story, Mann leaves only a small space for the character layer. Here the most crucial relationship is between the two main characters. They are the only ones who have been truthful with one another. Jeffrey Wigand loses his family. Lowell Bergman gives up his professional relationships with his colleagues—he cannot stay in a compromised situation.

By replacing the character layer with plot, Michael Mann has used the dynamic quality that the plot layer can yield to make the story of these two men larger. At one point, Lowell Bergman characterizes Jeffrey Wigand and his family as ordinary people under extraordinary pressure. Michael Mann puts extraordinary narrative pressure on the narrative by using plot rather than character. By doing so he raises this screen story to a melodrama of tragic proportions.

Turning now to the genres of wish fulfillment, I will focus on two genres where the dramatic arc is intriguing. I've already alluded to the struggle at the heart of the western—primitivism versus civilization. How does this polarity use structure to articulate this struggle?

THE CASE OF MICHAEL MANN'S THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

In Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992), the main character has a foot in both camps—primitivism and civilization. Hawkeye is a white man who was raised by the Mohican Chief, Chingachgook. The values he understands are both the primitive and the civilized. But he has a clear preference for the primitive. In the western, primitivism represents pastoral values, moral values, honesty, and individuality. Civilization represents materialism and organizational life with its hierarchies. Hawkeye, called Nathaniel in this version of the James Fenimore Cooper novel, embraces these pastoral values and lives by the moral code they imply. As with the classic western hero, Nathaniel is capable with weapons and has masterful survival skills. And as with the classical western screen story, the plot will unfold in a manner sufficiently ritualistic to give the screen story the moral message of the genre—that civilization is a threat to the virtues of primitivism, an ideology that thrives in an environment called the West.

The Last of the Mohicans has a structure dominated by plot. It is set during the Seven Years War (1756–1763) in Northern New York State, an area contested by the British and French and their respective Indian allies. The plot of the film revolves around the ongoing warfare and the efforts of Nathaniel and his Indian father and brother, the last two living members of their tribe, the Mohicans, to rescue two British women from being captured and killed by the enemy. The British officer who is escorting them also plays an important role in the plot. But it is the character layer that reveals the depth of the clash of values. Nathaniel has powerful and empathie relationships with his Indian family and with Cora, one of the British women. She embraces his values of individualism, morality, and freedom to choose. The other relationships, which relate to civilization, are represented by Major Hay ward, the escort, and by British Colonel Munro, Cora's father. Their authoritarian and imperial behavior is part and parcel of the values that have unleashed the Seven Years War and prompted the Indian allies such as the Hurons, particularly the bitter Magwa, to undertake vengeful action in response to the power politics (civilization) and the discontent it has unleashed in the Colonies.

The character layer, although not as prominent as the plot, is fully articulated to triangulate and fuel the plot. In this sense, The Last of the Mohicans, although made in 1994, clearly returns to the classic western form with its view of the main character as a knight-hero. The genre presentation is reminiscent of the presentation of earlier western heroes and their struggles to preserve primitive values. Cecil B. De Mule's The Plainsman (1936), William Wyler's The Westerner (1940), and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) come to mind.

THE CASE OF FRANKLIN SCHAFFNER'S PLANET OF THE APES

The dramatic arc of science fiction, technology versus humanity, goes to the core of Franklin Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968). Like the main character in Mimi Leder's Deep Impact and the main character in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), Taylor must choose between the values of technology or humanity. The plot of Planet of the Apes is straightforward. Taylor, a human astronaut, has crash-landed on a planet where human beings are treated like animals and where the masters are apes. The apes exhibit “human” behavior and the humans exhibit “animal” behavior. The plot involves the efforts of Taylor to escape from his captors. He does escape, only to learn that the planet he has landed on is actually Earth in the future. He makes this discovery when he finds a piece of the Statue of Liberty floating in the bay.

The character layer of the story has to do with Taylor's relationships with a few of his captors, who are very human, and with the leadership, who are very antagonistic—Taylor is a threat that must be eliminated. Because the leadership knows the truth about the human past, who destroyed the earth with their weapons of mass destruction, they believe they must suppress the humans' impulse to dominate, to oppress, and eventually to destroy.

Although the plot is dominant, the nature of the characters—animal and human—feed directly into the technology-humanity issue. Consequently, it is the character layer that articulates the fundamental struggle at the core of the science fiction film.

Turning now to the genres of the nightmare, we notice a schism between the structure of film noir and the structure of the horror film. The horror film is a genre in which the main characters are victims. Their humanity will not help them overcome their hubris, and consequently they face the ultimate punishment. The dramatic arc, essentially a chase, is plot-driven. Film noir, a genre in which the main characters are also victims, relies more on betrayal than pursuit, and consequently the path to destruction is more a character-driven path than a plot. But because the dramatic arc of destruction is so very different, let's examine the following two examples in detail.

THE CASE OF RIDLEY SCOTT'S BLADE RUNNER

Although Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1981) blends two genres, science fiction and film noir, it is the film noir layer that will be our focus here. Think of mixing genres as apportioning structure via genre. The science fiction layer in line with genre expectations fills out the plot, and the technology-versus-humanity struggle proceeds around the efforts of the main character, Deckard, to track down rebellious replicants (lifelike robots) here on earth. The film noir layer dominates the character layer of the structure. The dramatic arc in film noir is the effort by the main character to save himself through a relationship. The object of desire for Deckard is Rachel, a young woman who works closely with the scientist who is responsible for the creation of the replicants. Rachel is his latest model. She is a replicant who has been imbued with so many human qualities that she believes she is human.

Thus Deckard has chosen as the woman whom he believes can save him, a woman whose life span will be no more than a half-dozen years. The knowledge that he has made a limited choice introduces a dimension of consciousness into the usually less conscious self-destructive impulse of the film noir main character. But this only makes the nightmare worse. To proceed with the knowledge of the destruction of the one relationship that can give the main character hope, is torture indeed (unless Deckard himself is a replicant, as some versions and interpretations of the film have claimed). In either case, the dramatic arc conforms to the film noir expectations in spite of the more optimistic spin of the plot layer.

THE CASE OF JOHN FRANKENHEIMER'S SECONDS

In John Frankenheimer's Seconds, the main character, a middle-aged man, believes he can be reborn, as a younger man, and given a second chance at life. He is wrong, and in the end he is destroyed for the effort.

At its core the horror film is about pursuit. You can be chased by the devil (Rosemary's Baby [1968]). You can be chased by your own demons (The Shining [1979]). Or you can be chased by your overflowing desire (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1932]). In each case, the pursuit articulates itself in a plot-driven experience. But at its core, the dramatic arc of the horror film is about the unconscious—which we don't know, acknowledge, or accept, but which resides within us and needs to be suppressed. The goal of the character in the horror film is to taste the forbidden fruit, whatever it may be. And for doing so, the character is punished.

Is the horror film only a dream? Many will say that dream life is every bit as real as conscious life, and that in the dream world there is no judge and jury, just energy, desire, aggression, and sexuality. These are the forces unleashed in the horror film.

In Frankenheimer's Seconds, the main character, Arthur Hamilton, wants to be young again, to be reborn. The company that organizes his accidental death creates a new life for him. When he discovers that his new life as Tony Wilson is a “creation,” that its inhabitants are employees of the company or reborn like him-self, he demands to return to his old life. At last he understands there is no going back, and this time he will make his life count, he won't make the same mistakes. That's not how the company sees it, and they kill him to provide a corpse as a stand-in for the next reborn. He is killed because he had the hubris to believe in rebirth. He is a victim of his own desire.

Although relationships are developed in Seconds, all are in the company's interests and therefore they are part of the plot. Only the main character's relationship with his wife is part of the character layer. It is modest and empty and consequently acts only to illustrate how little he will give up if he agrees to be reborn. As his wife says in Act III to the main character reborn as Tony Wilson, “[My husband] was dead long before that fire in his hotel.”

WORKING WITH GENRE

What I hope I have conveyed is that genre is a very important tool for the writer. Genre provides a narrative shorthand for the audience. When they see a gangster film, they know it will have a rise and fall shape and that themarically it's about a character who wants to get ahead in the world. Genre also provides flexibility—to the issues of the day and to the writer's own viewpoint. Genres have story shapes that have appealed for deep reasons to their audiences over a long period of time. All of these points are advantages. Many filmmakers have been attracted to genre filmmaking. Joel and Ethan Coen have worked in the gangster film, film noir, the action-adventure film, and the police story. Steven Spielberg has worked in the action-adventure film, science fiction, the war film, melodrama, and the horror film. Brian De Palma, Michael Mann, Lawrence Kasdan, and Sydney Pollack, all have worked formally in classic genre films. All of this is preface to the notion that you have to know how to work with genre if you are going to work against genre, the subject to which we now turn.

WORKING AGAINST GENRE

When Michael Mann opted to use a plot layer over the character layer in his melodrama, The Insider, he was opting to work against genre. The result was a surprisingly fresh treatment of the genre. Essentially this is the purpose of working against genre—to freshen an old story or to make an old story frame new.

The choices when working against genre are to alter a motif of the genre—such as the nature of the main character, the nature of the main character's goal, the nature of the antagonist—or to alter the expected structure, as in The Insider, or to alter the tone. Any change will in a sense change the total experience. I will begin to detail these choices in the next paragraph. The second choice for the writer is to mix genres as Michael Mann did in Heat. Here too there are ramifications for our experience of the story.

The most obvious choice here is to work with the main character, particularly in the area of his or her goal. I've already mentioned the material goal of William Mooney in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). Another example is Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1985). The main character in the gangster film tends to be ambitious about fortune and possibly fame. George in Mona Lisa wants his family back. He's not materially driven, and the result is a very unusual narrative. In Bruce Beresford's western, Black Robe (1991), the main character is given a spiritual goal. As a result, he is at odds with the physicality of the primitive. In this sense, he becomes more antagonistic, the representative of civilization, than the hero, who identifies with the pastoral values (primitivism) of the West. As a result, we experience the film as a lament for what was lost as a result of the “Black Robes,” or the priests.

Another motif that can be altered is the structure. We have looked at the examples of a number of melodramas where plot superseded the character layer. In a film such as David Mamet's Homicide, a plot-driven police story is totally altered by a character layer about identity. The usual balance is reversed as the scale of the character layer overwhelms the police story.

Or you can simply alter the resolution from the expected one. Paul Schrader doesn't destroy the main character at the end of Light Sleeper (1991). In film noir, that destruction is expected; instead, the main character is redeemed, saved in a relationship. This altered experience introduces hope into one of the darkest genres, and again we experience the narrative in a surprising way.

Finally, the issue of tone, which we will discuss in detail in the next chapter. The expected tone in the gangster film is realism, but Steven Soderbergh introduces considerable irony in Out of Sight (1998), just as Barry Sonnenfeld did in Get Shorty (1997). Perhaps the most extreme example of altering expectations with respect to tone is Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996). In the police story, the tone tends to be realistic, but in Fargo the humor and the use of irony distance us emotionally from the pregnant sheriff as she proceeds to solve the crime of kidnapping and murder.

The larger-scale alteration of genre is to actually mix two genres. This works best when one genre occupies the plot layer and the other genre occupies the character layer. We've already looked at the example of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Other examples include Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1995), with the war against the Jews as the war film, and Schindler's effort to save the Jews as the layer of melodrama. Another example is John Sayles' Lone Star, with a police story as plot and melodrama as the character layer. A fourth example would be Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), with a plot-driven melodrama and a character-driven situation comedy.

The challenge with a film that mixes two genres is that each genre has to be set up, and that takes time. Will the audience have the patience for the additional story? Will it confuse them? What we do know is that mixing genres has become popular and seems to have become more mainstream now. Consequently, it's important for writers to understand each genre very well, a prerequisite to making two genres work.