Functions of Popular Culture

1. Functions of Popular Culture HUM/COMM 4034 spring 2009 Neal King

2. Production of genre Tuesday, February 24, 2009

3. Genre as business • Genre refers to a story with which producers and audiences become familiar by virtue of recognition and repetition. • Public recognition tends to begin with aspersions cast by bored critics, who label sets of retreads and knockoffs. • Audience loyalty requires a combination of: • minor variations in characterization and plotting that forestall a sense of being sold knockoffs, and • generic thrills in scenes that celebrate deviance, such as car chases, fights, sex scenes, or songs. • Genre production can reduce risk both for indies and for blockbusting majors, though in different ways.

4. Genre as business cycle • Realignments between different but interdependent sectors of the industry inspire indies and majors to produce copies. • For instance, competition between both kinds for distribution channels leads each to produce knockoffs of successes that originated in the other’s production. • Usually, this means that a low-budget, experimental film becomes a surprise hit and inspires majors to make bigger-budget knockoffs. • They use stars and special effects to raise the bar on audience attractions, raising the costs of production high enough to exclude independent producers.

5. Genre as business cycle of renewal • Agents and stars of high-end production demand more money, boosting the costs of star-driven films to the blockbuster realm. • Actors defer salaries for indie dramas that enhance reputations among their subcultures, but not in the case of major genre pictures. • Rising costs make producers conservative about other aspects of production, limiting experiment. • Indies come up with the next low-cost experiment, beginning the cycle all over again. • (Indies can also produce knock-offs of major hits that began with proprietary characters.)

6. Slasher integration and diversification • early, abortive tries include Black Christmas (1974) • the indie mother lode: Halloween (1978) • rush of knockoffs include major studio copycatting with high-end effects and stars: Alien, Dressed to Kill • early cycles: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepaway Camp • early notoriety: 1980 episode of Sneak Previews devoted to “women in danger” movies; protests in 1980 against Dressed to Kill.

7. Slasher integration and diversification • early 1980s integration with early labels: stalker, slasher • revival in the late 1990s by major studios’ indie divisions, after end of `hood cycle: Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend. • diversification by majors into star-driven knockoffs of low-cost, pre-sold stories from Japanese horror: The Grudge, The Ring • diversification by indies during wartime into torture porn: The Hills Have Eyes, Hostel, Saw

8. Car chase storytelling • Generic economy demands deviance: scenes of violent carnage in horror and war, or chases and races in action • Car provide signs of youthful rebellion that slashers supplied with parties: races, drive-ins • storytelling with car chases • suspense as to outcome of negotiation between characters and larger success of protagonist • character placement as engaging storytelling • subjective shots (including bumper cams) as identification with protagonist as well as spectacle

9. Car chase style • Rear-screen process to real-world car chase genre • Realism in cop movies, made possible by … • New technology: tough cars, nonvibrating lenses, tow-rigs, quiet cameras • … served many functions: • Discourage looking for stunt drivers • Differentiate from TV crap • Place characters more firmly in a spectacular section of the story

10. Car chase diversification • The car chase genre ended because: • comedy has little viewer-involving suspense, and • men’s heroism turned to fighting not driving. • Meanwhile, cop action had started because: • A young audience conditioned by social turmoil, Bonnie and Clyde, and Peckinpah movies; and westerns began to give way to urban cinematography, obscene dialogue, grim stories, and the use of cops as consultants and writers. • This story to be continued next Tuesday …

11. Conclusion • Though not a production of auteurist blockbuster production, we can understand the development of the car chase and slasher genres in terms of business practices between major studios and independent producers: Copying is life and diversification is rebirth. • Such group activities amount to more immediate causal factors than larger forms of Reaganite conservativism, anti-feminism, or Boomer or anti-authoritarian rebellion.

12. Mind Job production and interpretation Thursday, February 26, 2009

13. Mind-job study • Scenes of shocking violence suggest postmodern concerns with schizophrenia and machine invasions of the human body. • End-act transitions suggest matters of normalcy vs. a life of rebellious violence, in the context of confusion about the line between the two. • Could such stories hail a postmodern period? • They are not popular enough to justify structuralist attribution of mass concern with their tensions. • This suggests a look back at authorship, in particular the networks in which auteurs like Cronenberg make films and people read the stories of Philip Dick and Richard Burroughs.

14. Mind-job development • Stories originate with concerns about mind control and double-lives—with brainwashing and secret identities, that emerged during the Second World War and the Korean War. • Sci-fi readers absorbed Philip Dick’s stories of spies and assassins who had bought their own cover. • The genre allows for the vivid depiction of unusual bodily experiences, including violations that can symbolize the invasiveness of brainwashing. • It also allows for virtuosic storytelling, which tend to draw attention to auteurs who are forever in need of the next job in the Hollywood labor market.

15. Mind-job development • Technology: Prosthetics and animation compositing limited development during the 1980s but allowed more production by the late 1990s. • The failure of Blade Runner and other (expensive) sci-fi cop movies might have steered American filmmakers away. But Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall) was able to do more in the late 1980s. • Cronenberg did the most, drafting wife-killer stories Total Recall and the Burroughs homage Naked Lunch. • During the last decade, Philip Dick stories have flourished, in part with new effects technology to realize drug-laced hallucinations: Next, Imposter, A Scanner Darkly.

16. Mind-job development • Cyberpunk translation of Burroughs/Dick themes eventually resulted, during the late-1990s vogue in mind-job filmmaking, in Dark City and The Matrix • … which also benefit from the development of digital animation and compositing. • peripheral developments at the turn of the century: protagonists either hallucinate that they are agents when they’re not (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, A Beautiful Mind), or that they’re not when they are (Fight Club, Memento). • Such films, whether they make money upon initial release or not, can rocket authors to fame via celebration of mind-blowing plots and “distinctive” styles.

17. Mind-job structuralism • Structuralism 1.0 not only imputes large-scale demand for new stories by diagnosing social neuroses and tensions, but also suggests that films made in a postmodern period (now) are ambiguous in meaning as a result. • Thus, the films both depict schizophrenia and suffer from it. • This mimetic argument, that films reflect with their poor intelligibility the societies that they depict, holds that films both are and are not clear. • Structuralism 2.0 looks at the filmmaking routines that resulted in the stories: Low audience demand but high auteur payoff from clear stories about muddle protagonists.

18. interpretative problems • In the case of ambiguous meaning, what data does one need to draw a conclusion? • Filmmaker comments? • marketing rhetoric vs. veracity • Story structure? • initial goals and thematic oppositions vs. happy conclusions • Audience research? • dominant vs. resistant interpretations, initial success vs. cult discovery

19. How to settle questions? • Filmmakers • What are they actually accomplishing within their networks? Money? Bragging rights and auteurism? Earnest political expression? • Stories • How do their structural patterns contrast to other cycles/genres? • Audiences • How do they respond?

20. Functions of Popular Culture HUM/COMM 4034 spring 2009 Neal King