Which Came First?

by Daniel Cerny
Emerson College

Hollywood, of late, has been producing a certain variety of movies that may be known as paltry, perhaps stale at best. It has, in fact, reached a zenith whence even the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has chosen to bestow its highest honors on do-gooder, middle-of-the-road films. Meanwhile they holistically ignoring more creatively innovative works which may actually exhibit steps in the forward progression of the medium. Sorer a point still, America eats it up hand over fist, steadily in line for the latest mindless romp provided it includes a fast car, an easily assimilated cultural catchphrase, or Julia Roberts.

An explanation for this phenomenon known as mediocrity is perhaps a simple, though disturbing one. Abysmal movies continue to be made because people continue to line up to see them. And why would Hollywood be as foolish as to dispel with both the popular and the profitable? After all, if “it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” as the old adage prescribes. This seems, though, too elementary for explaining a situation that only gets worse, rather than one that has merely leveled off from the applied practice of market research done long ago.

Authors Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella, and D. Charles Whitney seem to touch on more radical suggestions. In their book, Making Sense of the Media, they attempt to answer the tireless question of which came first, the chicken, what America finds palatable—or the egg, why Hollywood uses cookie cutter molds in the crafting of art and entertainment. Secondly, they address the question with which critics must wrestle daily: what makes Americans eager to be so easily humored while valid cinematic alternatives remain ghettoized, attended to by only a small niche market. In a capitalistic society, stressing the strengths of the individual, wouldn’t Americans chose to posit themselves as cultural proponents and denizens rather than be commodifiably known as sheep easily herded and pleased.

The media’s influence over people in this country is undeniable. “People learn everything from dance steps to how to treat members of the opposite sex…from media texts…They can learn how to make love or even kill someone” (150). Rightly, an audience may feel placed in a position of power, whether the filmmaker intended to do so honestly or otherwise. One way in particular a filmmaker can control what kind of audience he or she wants like to influence, is through the use of genre.

“Genres are invented by people in the industry…[as] a way of defining, measuring, and sustaining taste” (159). Herein, an audience is already being spoken down to insofar as people within the industry are able to pull the puppet strings of the audience needs, giving them no more than what they should expect for a particular picture. Grossberg, for example, “defines a genre by a shared set of conventions” (160). In this, someone promised a movie in the horror genre would easily be sated by a studio’s cookie cutter formula containing exactly 4 deaths, 1 villain, 20 shrieks of terror, and 30 exploitative shots of T&A. “Genre specifies both the formula that is reproduced in every [horror film] and the limits within which each new example of the genre has to find its own individuality” (160-161).

By creating no new expectations, genre allows Hollywood filmmakers to shoot for the lowest rung on the ladder. If an audience is already attracted to a product based on its similarities in form and content to previous works, there is no reason to offer the audience anything more. Stories for that reason, typically with struggling protagonists giving it the old American try right up to the sap-filled happy ending, often appear to be replicas of a seemingly endless conveyor belt of automated ‘product’. Indeed, Grossberg affirms that film and “television programs often tell the same basic stories over and over” (164).

A trick of Hollywood, one which they are obviously successful in pulling off, is to continually disguise these same plots as different stories. Still somehow, the majority of the public has yet to catch on to the outward similarity of what they are continuously watching. The media makers focus on the details not the story. “The same story can be told in many different ways depending on who is telling it and to whom” (165).

Building a connection between character and audience, the Julia Roberts effect essentially, is also helpful in this capacity. “What becomes central in these repetitious stories are the characters and the relationships among them” (164). This reflects on the success of the name-above-the-title star system. A Julia Roberts, to use a now-much-repeated example, might attract an audience regardless of the film’s content or worth.

The star system cuts right to the heart of the question: what suits America’s palate? However, each star is bound by golden handcuffs to their beloved screen persona, making for a double-edged sword. “For example, in any role, Harrison Ford plays, he brings the swaggering Han Solo along with him. And when he seems not to…he is ‘playing against type’ and often the movie flops” (164).

Another way Hollywood soothes America’s lowbrow sensibilities is through an adherence to a blatantly inoffensive, artistically neutered visual style. Most often observed in comedies and their derivatives, this mode of filmmaking is streamlined into the most easily digestible of movie going experiences, exhibiting virtually no signs of creative cinematic work. The camera is set up to take only the most basic wide shots encompassing all of the action unforcefully.

“In the most commercial Hollywood films, the camera never violates people’s sense of their perceptual position in the world…The camera may turn around, but it must always do so in predictable ways that do not violate the viewer’s sense of where they are standing in relation to the film’s world” (194). The camera then never gives the audience enough credit to follow even the simplest of stories. Instead of the old scripting rule of ‘show, don’t tell’ these films operate on a ‘show and tell’ basis, wherein the audience is held by the hand from beginning to end. This is pure patronizing. An argument supposedly to be made here, one from a purely financial point of view, is that the baser and the simpler the storytelling is, the wider the audience it appeals to, and the wider the audience, the more potential tickets sold.

Can Hollywood really say though that audiences are still confounded by continuity editing and frame composition? Surely we have come a ways from old radicalism of Eisenstein’s montage. The sterile, unmoving camera position personifies our sole experience with the film, with everything spelled out and defined. A single camera robs one of a total immersion and imagination. If the camera “is your only source of information about the world of the movie, you are basically forced to…be in the place it defines for you” (193-194).

Hollywood’s other argument is another reflection of its herd-like audience. America craves realism. To allow the camera to break away from diagetic action, is to cause a break in reality. Perhaps in this light, the simple function of continuous editing would be too much for a docu-seeking audience to put up with. In much the same way as concealing or restricting the work of a cinematographer, “to make a realistic text, producers have to try to hide their own presence in operation on the text” (179). In editing, “a producer who is aiming for realism will avoid editing practices that emphasize his or her own intervention” (179). Apparently, “once something is unbelievable, you’ve lost the audience” (180).

Can this be true? Is the American audience truly as simple as these “producers” assume? Can they really not fathom the idea of low-key lighting, changing camera angles, or jump cuts? Most probably, and unfortunately, yes. At least that would be the basis of this exposition as well as a conclusion easily arrived at merely by checking your local movie listings. Big blockbusters fill the megaplexes, while those few, scant films that attempt merely to chip pieces from the popular mold are holed up on the smallest screens of even the most posh, downtown ‘art-houses’.

In this argument of taste, America’s simple case of dry mouth, saved by Hollywood’s automated refreshments, should cut to the heart of our two introductory queries: what America finds appealing and palatable and why Hollywood uses the cookie cutter molds. It looks to be simple supply and demand. However, in this case of the latter, our single camera perspective has neatly hidden away what may be Hollywood’s chief excuse to stay the course: they created the American audience.

Hollywood created genre to specify America’s tastes, “the concept of audience is a social construction,” as well (208). “The fact of the matter is that the audience does not exist out there in reality apart from the way in which it is defined by different groups, for different purposes” (208-209). Therefore, perhaps it was the product that came first, followed by the conformed and applied American taster as determined by the subgrouping of texts and then of America itself into profitable, accessible audiences.