9

Working Against Genre

Because genre provides a writer with a shorthand that audiences readily understand, less time is needed to establish its characteristics. Just as character stereotypes are useful to the writer, so, too, are genres. However, stereotypes don’t sustain our interest, nor do they fascinate us enough to carry us, via curiosity or tension, through the balance of the story. In order to sustain an audience’s attention, the writer must give us the unexpected and must challenge our expectations.

As mentioned earlier, genres are often influenced by current events. These historical, political, and social changes suggest new perspectives. For example, technological advances were a powerful feature of the decades following World War II. Dalton Trumbo, in his 1962 modern Western Lonely Are the Brave, decided that in his conflict with primitivism and civilization, civilization would be represented by technology. Indeed, in the film, technology is the antagonist to Kirk Douglas’s modern cowboy protagonist. Helicopters, jeeps, trucks, and advanced weaponry are the inanimate antagonists that challenge Douglas’s character. Even a Social Security number poses a challenge to what he stands for—the values of a former age, freedom, or, as he puts it, “A girl Paul and I grew up with…a wild-eyed mountain girl…her name is Do-what-you-want-to-do-and-the-hell-with-everybody-else.”¹

How did the 1960s influence other genres? Perhaps the most striking gangster film of that decade was Bonnie and Clyde, whose main characters are very different protagonists compared to Tony Montana in Scarface or Rico in Little Caesar or Diggs in The Asphalt Jungle. The first difference is in their ages; the young age of the protagonist was a central feature of the films and plays of the 1960s. The society of the 1960s was gripped by the young and the attendant foment in social values. The sublimated energy and idealism of the young are the central feature of Hair, and the subverted energy and consequent cynicism are the central focus of The Manchurian Candidate.

The second difference in the protagonists of the 1960s is in their characterization. Bonnie and Clyde are depicted as innocents victimized by a society that offers no options to young people. This life-as-a-trap view, however, was also present earlier, in William Wyler’s 1937 version of the Sidney Kingsley play Dead End.

So far, the changes we have discussed are aligned with society’s changing perceptions and issues. To explore the idea of working against genre, we now turn to more dramatic alternatives.

Changing a Motif

Genres characteristically have consistent motifs that recur in all film stories. Motifs usually relate to the main character, the antagonist, the environment, the nature of the conflict, and the tools for resolving the conflict. Underlying attitudes about the past, present, and future are also important qualities.

What happens when a writer challenges an important motif within a genre? By examining four particular genres, we will see how a writer can make a genre seem fresh, rather than simply giving it a contemporary sensibility.

The Western

Few significant writer-directors are as exclusively identified with the Western as is Sam Peckinpah. While Peckinpah’s film work parallels the period of the Western’s decline, his films Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch are among the most important in the genre. When we look at Peckinpah’s work, we see a recurring effort to challenge the traditional presentation of the Western hero. In the classic Western, externalized action affords the hero the opportunity to be true to himself. Generally, he is not a character given to introspection, nor is he a character of psychological complexity. Only Borden Chase and Phillip Yordan’s heroes, portrayed by James Stewart in a series of films made by Anthony Mann in the 1950s, and the tormented Billy the Kid in Gore Vidal and Leslie Stevens’s screenplay The Left-Handed Gun, suggest a psychological complexity that motivates the hero to externalized action. Peckinpah takes the psychological framework of the Western hero and tries to make him more complex, more realistic, and more difficult. The simple hero of the classic Western is replaced by one who is presented to us not only as that classic Western hero, but also as his alter ego.

In Ride the High Country, two old men, former famed gunfighters, are the composite heroes. Interestingly, the two men are played by Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, each of whom portrayed classic Western heroes for the preceding 25 years. In addition to drawing upon our movie memories of these two actors, Peckinpah presents them as two men with diverging views about their present: One of them remains faithful to his past; the other wishes to improve his present by becoming a thief. The clash of values between them, represented by their past (the myth of the West) and their present (discarded but honorable), is really the clash between alter egos, the good and the evil present in all three-dimensional heroes. The casting adds a layer of movie mythology to the Western mythology.

Peckinpah carries on his exploration of composite heroes in Major Dundee. Dundee and Tyreen (Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, respectively) portray the stubbornness (Dundee) and nobility (Tyreen) crucial to the hero’s survival in the hostile environment of the West. The historical backdrop for this film is the Civil War, but the action of the film takes place in primitive Mexico, far from standing armies and urban centers.

Mexico is also the backdrop for the action of The Wild Bunch, set during the Mexican Revolution of 1913. Peckinpah again presents us with a composite hero in Bishop Pike (William Holden), the leader of the Wild Bunch, together with his alter ego, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), who portrays the cruelty and the camaraderie that forms the moral code of the Wild Bunch. Even in its unusual depiction, this code remains recognizable as the code of the Western hero. By splitting the character, however, Peckinpah again presents a more complex and realistic hero. The composite hero is more difficult to relate to, but he is the 1968 manifestation of those heroes who stand for the struggle of primitivism versus civilization—a theme central to the Western.

This process of character splitting is not exclusive to Peckinpah and the writers with whom he worked. William Goldman does the same in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as does Michael Cimino in Heaven’s Gate. The gain in psychological complexity has made the Western hero in each of these films profoundly different and fresher than the classic one.

What if the central character in the Western is no longer a hero? What if he is as much a killer as Bishop Pike is, without the redeeming circumstance of being surrounded by characters who are even worse? This is the central feature of the protagonist in David Webb Peoples’s Unforgiven. Bill Mooney (Clint Eastwood) was a gunfighter who gave it up to appease his wife, and after her death, he finds himself with children to care for but no money to support them. When a reward is posted by a group of prostitutes to bring to justice the two men who mutilated one of them, Mooney takes the job because he needs the money. Throughout the search, he maintains his sobriety and his dead wife’s values. But it does not last. Whether it is the cruelty of the town sheriff, the loss of his friend, or just the reassertion of the old demons, Mooney reverts to what he was, a killer without remorse or glory.

This Western hero is not psychologically troubled like Lyn McAdam (Jimmy Stewart) in Winchester ’73, nor is he relentlessly pursued as Bishop Pike (William Holden) is in The Wild Bunch. Mooney is the antithesis of the Western hero. Peoples altered the nature and goal of the main character and made a pursuit Western seem to be a meditation on the values of the classic Western.

Maggie Greenwald has a similar goal when she makes the central character a woman who must dress and act like a man in order to make her way in the West. The Ballad of Little Jo alters the gender issue, and the result is very effective. Bad Girls, by Ken Friedman and Yolanda Finch, is another film that alters the gender of the conventional male protagonist and is a catalogue of what not to do if you want your screenplay to succeed. A momentary comparison between The Ballad of Little Jo and Bad Girls illustrates this point very well: although both films focus on a female Western protagonist, it is here that the linkage to other Western motifs ends. In The Ballad of Little Jo, the main character takes on the characteristics of the male Western hero—she dresses like a man and acquires the skills men need to survive. She becomes capable with horses, guns, etc. In Bad Girls, the group of young female prostitutes does not acquire much in the way of skills. At least four times, one of them is captured and needs to be rescued by a man. In The Ballad of Little Jo, the main character achieves a level of mastery that allows her to become part of the primitive rural values of the West (the opposite of the censorial civilized East she runs away from at the beginning of the film). There is no mastery or progression of the main character in Bad Girls. The plot simply does not afford such opportunities for growth.

Another motif that has been challenged by writers of the Western is the presentation of the town. In the classic Western, the town was viewed as a civilizing force, a place that represented the future. The church, the general store, and the marshal’s office all represent the spirit of commerce and the law and order of the West. In the past three decades, writers have tried to challenge the presentation of the town. Dalton Trumbo, in Lonely Are the Brave, presents the town as one large holding center, a jail for the spirit. Ernest Tidyman, in High Plains Drifter, presents the town as a place much worse: it is the center of barbarism and, as is Sodom in the Bible, a place to be destroyed.

Less malignantly, but no less terminal, Miles Hood Swarthow and Scott Hale, in The Shootist, present the 20th-century Western town as a good place to die. In this film, John Bernard Books, grandly portrayed by an ailing John Wayne, is a gunfighter dying of cancer. He visits a town doctor (James Stewart) whom he had known in better times. Upon hearing the news that he will die, Books chooses to die in the town, but on his own terms—in a gunfight with three worthy town villains.

Tombstone presents the town as a center of opportunity, a place where a man can make a living. The central character, Wyatt Earp, has moved to Tombstone to improve his material well being after having been the sheriff in Dodge City, Kansas. Here, the town does not have the negative connotations it has in the classic Western. When trouble comes from the Clantons and the McCowerys, it is as if two sets of entrepreneurs were competing with each other, and after a time, they revert to guns rather than to opposing advertising campaigns.

In all of these films, the town is not viewed as it is in High Noon or in 3:10 to Yuma. In each case, the town is a central but different feature in the film. In each case, an old story is renewed.

The Gangster Film

The gangster film continues to be presented in its classic form. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Oliver Stone’s Scarface, and David Mamet’s The Untouchables attest to its continuing importance. However, as with the Western, variations and challenges to the motifs of the genre result in fresh and exciting films. To accomplish this, as in the Western, the presentation of the hero is challenged.

In the classic gangster film, the gangster hero is killed for transgressing the usual means to succeed in society. But against a backdrop of an increasingly drugged, corrupt society, more and more gangster heroes are not killed. They survive and are, in their way, heroic, given the levels of corruption surrounding them. The first of these heroes can be seen in Walker, played by Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Walker’s vengeful attempt to retrieve money stolen from him by his partner takes him on a journey through the organization to which his partner now belongs. As Walker eliminates level after level of the organization, his revenge has less meaning, as does the money he seeks to retrieve. Walker is a thief, but he is portrayed as an existential hero. He has the same energy and intuitive drive of the classic gangster hero, but he has modern self-doubt that makes him particularly empathetic, given that he is as much a killer as is Tony Montana in Scarface.

The same characteristics—energy and intuition—are combined with decency in the James Caan character in Thief. He, too, is an existential hero, and he, too, lives to walk away from those who are dishonest with the thief.

Perhaps the most interesting gangster hero is Lou, the petty criminal portrayed by Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City. Lou is an aging bodyguard to a once-famous criminal’s moll (Kate Reid). With the good old days behind him, Lou finds a new lease on his reputation via Sally (Susan Sarandon). She is young and in trouble because of her criminal brother-in-law and former husband (Robert Joy). But in rescuing Sally, Lou is forced to kill again in the process. Yet, he walks away happier than before. In a world of criminality and corruption, Lou is an empathetic hero, and he lives on.

Police and detectives as heroes have also been presented in a different light. The messianic Serpico is not dissimilar from Dan Banion in The Big Heat. Both have a moral fervor we associate with the energy needed to turn back the forces of criminality that challenge the social order, but there are variations. In Bullitt and Madigan, the main characters, played by Steve McQueen and Richard Widmark, respectively, have upper-class tastes. In Tightrope, the main character, portrayed by Clint Eastwood, suffers from a guilt complex arising from his troubled domestic life. He is a single parent as well as a busy detective with a major murder case on his hands. Is he protagonist or antagonist? This blurring of the distinction takes on new levels in a film such as Barry Keefe’s The Long Good Friday. The gangster is the protagonist, and an active political movement, the IRA, is the antagonist.

Not only are the gangster and the cop presented differently, but so is the traditional environment of the gangster film—the big city. The city is presented as the seat of power, particularly material power. In two noteworthy films, buildings became cities unto themselves. In Die Hard, a postmodern tower is the center of power where a policeman (Bruce Willis) must stop a high-stakes robbery. In this milieu, the gangsters are robbers posing as international terrorists. In Someone to Watch Over Me, the center of power is the building in which a wealthy murder witness lives. The detective assigned to guard the witness falls in love with her. This cross-class entanglement suggests another path to material success—climbing the social ladder—that moves beyond the gangster’s approach of theft and murder.

A cross-cultural perspective on the center of power is explored in Witness. In this film, the main character, John Book, escapes from his corrupt colleagues who threaten to kill him and the murder witness he is protecting. Book and his witness escape to rural Pennsylvania, the home of the Amish, where the murder witness will be among his own people and thus harder to find. This shifting of the environment for the gangster film is the second challenge to a genre motif.

A third challenge is the alteration of the expected narrative shape of the gangster film. Characteristic of this genre is the strong plot: foreground over background action. Also characteristic is the drive of the main character to succeed in rising to the top in the gangster world, to solve the crime for the police.

In Carlito’s Way, David Koepp explores a gangster trying for a different kind of personal success—he wants to leave the life of crime and live a normal life. Unfortunately, Carlito (Al Pacino) is loyal to his family and friends, which ultimately draws him back into the life of crime; consequently, he must suffer the classic fate of the gangster hero, death. This shift in the character’s goal alters the balance of the foreground and background stories in the film. The result is a less exciting but more deeply felt sense of the character, his fate, and the impression that in certain ethnic communities, the fate of the members is predetermined and tragic.

Another example of the shift between plot and the interior concerns of the character is David Mamet’s Homicide. Here the central character is a Jewish policeman named Gold. The plot has Gold and his colleagues trying to apprehend a young black drug dealer. The background story concerns Gold as a Jew, how he feels about it, and how he is pushed to try to be loyal to other Jews. An old Jewish woman has been murdered, and Gold’s growing interest in the case involves him with a Jewish terrorist organization. Should he help them? Should he break the law, go against his own code of behavior to validate himself as a Jew? The meditation that proceeds in the background story eventually supercedes the hunt for the drug dealer. Although the plot does resolve itself, the background story leaves Gold as confused as he was early in the film. Nevertheless, the shape of this police story, with its shift away from plot toward the interior life of the main character, provides a striking example of working against genre expectations.

Film Noir

Film noir, the genre of deception and betrayal, provides writers with a narrow band of options to reorder. The protagonist, unlike the Western or gangster protagonist, is a victim and doesn’t lend himself to redefinition (at least not yet). The antagonist, on the other hand, provides writers with considerable scope. Generally, the antagonist is the spider woman (Black Widow) that destroys its mate, or alcohol (The Lost Weekend) or drugs (The Man with the Golden Arm) that destroy the main character. However, writers have been increasingly adventurous in their antagonists; politics and history have helped.

A number of the key film noir works of the past decades have made antagonists representatives of the government. Beginning with the Angela Lansbury character in George Axelrod’s screenplay of The Manchurian Candidate (updated in 2004 by Jonathan Demme), the government and those in power, or closest to power, have manipulated the main character for political ends. In The Manchurian Candidate, Lansbury has her own son trained as a killer for the purpose of political assassination. This satire-tragedy puts political goals above personal affiliation. Here a mother sacrifices her own son to the cause.

No such personal sacrifice is at stake in William Goldman’s All the President’s Men, but the belief that the government functions “by the people and for the people” is challenged. This sobering tale, based on the Bernstein–Woodward book on the Watergate scandal, has terrifying overtones. This view of the antagonist is also present in Alvin Sargent’s The Parallax View, in Robert Stone’s Who’ll Stop the Rain?, and in Robert Garland’s No Way Out.

Another variation in film noir is the addition of pimps, promoters, and sociopaths as frightening antagonists. In Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, the principal antagonists are the purveyors of pornography; in Elmore Leonard’s 52 Pick-Up, the antagonist is a sadistic purveyor of pornography; and in Klute, the antagonist is the pathological client of hooker Bree Daniels. Since sexuality and aggression are motifs of film noir, the blending of two motifs, aggressive sexuality and the antagonist, brings a less personal, but no less menacing, position to the role of the antagonist. It is as if the workplace in film noir has become as dangerous as the home is.

Film noir has also invaded the terrain of other genres. The pastoral small town is the setting for Blue Velvet, but in this story of voyeurism and violence, a small town is no haven for its characters. Instead, it is the scene for nightmarish aggression and a level of sadistic sexuality rare in film noir. The small town no longer projects the good-neighborliness of It’s a Wonderful Life. Nor does the Pentagon prove to be a safe haven in No Way Out. It is as fraught with danger as the city is in a classic film noir.

Film noir tends to play itself out through the actions of a desperate main character at a critical moment in his or her life. A good example is Sunset Boulevard. We meet Joe Gillis when he is a down-and-out writer in Hollywood, at the point where his car is about to be repossessed. Without a car in Los Angeles, his career will be over; he might as well give up his dream of being a Hollywood scriptwriter. It is at this point that the main character enters a relationship with a woman who he hopes will rescue him from what appears to be his fate. In Sunset Boulevard, the woman is Norma Desmond, whose driveway Joe has entered to evade the repo men pursuing him. In film noir, the fate Joe meets at the hands of Norma Desmond is far worse than anything the repo men could have done. This is the narrative shape of classic film noir. The relationship and the consequent betrayal embrace the degradation the main character must accept if he is to strengthen this false, final relationship. He erroneously believes that the sexual-aggressive nature of the relationship will strengthen him.

What happens when the writer tries to alter this classic narrative shape? Paul Schrader, who is responsible for a number of excellent film noir stories, including Hardcore, American Gigolo, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, also wrote Light Sleeper, a film that alters the narrative shape of film noir by including a relatively happy ending. Light Sleeper tells the story of John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a former drug addict and current drug dealer. He works for Ann (Susan Sarandon). In the course of the story, he meets Mary Ann (Dana Delaney), his former wife, who left him because of his drug abuse. He genuinely wants to rekindle their relationship and tells her he is drug free, but she does not believe him. He persists and visits her dying mother. His kindness touches Mary Ann, and she agrees to go with him. They make love, but she tells him it won’t happen again. He carries on his passion for her. When he drops off drugs to a classy client (Victor Garber), LeTour sees Mary Ann in the apartment in a drug-induced state. We are surprised that she is on drugs. He waits outside for her, but she jumps from the balcony of the apartment to her death. Angry, hounded by police to become an informer, he tells the police where he last saw her alive. The furious client arranges to have LeTour killed, but LeTour turns the tables and kills the man and his bodyguards. Although LeTour goes to jail, Ann has decided to wait for him. They decide that their relationship, first presented as mother–son, is genuine and can last. There in jail, hands together, the new lovers patiently vow to stay together after LeTour is released.

This optimistic ending of Light Sleeper is but one alteration to the classic narrative shape of film noir. There are many others. Since the main character is a desperate man, we expect him to relapse into drug use and eventually die, but he doesn’t. He does enter a desperate final relationship with his former wife, but his fate and hers are the opposite of what the genre leads us to expect. Nor is he killed in the attempt to kill the client who provided his wife with the drugs that killed her. The fact that in the end the main character is alive, happy, and in love again leaves us with some hope, a state utterly foreign to film noir. The narrative shape of Light Sleeper resembles the dreamy sequel to a film noir story. It’s as if LeTour has hit bottom just before the beginning of the film and the film is about his resurrection. In this sense, Light Sleeper begins where classic film noir ends. Whether this more hopeful vision of the urban nightmare is Schrader’s redefinition of film noir for the 1990s or whether he simply wanted to create a Christ parable with a changed ending, Light Sleeper changes our experience of the film noir genre.

The War Film

Rather than choosing the combatant as the protagonist, as is usual, two noteworthy films chose as the protagonist a young noncombatant whose life is very much influenced by war. In both Empire of the Sun and Hope and Glory, the protagonist is a 12-year-old boy. In one case, the boy has to cope with the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during World War II and with subsequent imprisonment in a concentration camp; in the other case, the boy has to cope with the London Blitz and its consequences. The boys identify with the romance of war and discover its reality as well. The challenge to the motif is that the protagonists are not totally absorbed with survival, as their youth allows for a much broader engagement with the war and its meaning. They are as involved with growing up as they are with the war.

Forbidden Games and The Tin Drum also use young protagonists. Each film is placed in the native country of the protagonist, and Forbidden Games takes place during World War II. Because these protagonists are not combatants, they have very different perspectives on war and on the issue of survival.

Another war film that treats the protagonist differently is Full Metal Jacket. In the story, Matthew Modine is an observer. The passive nature of this character is discussed in a later chapter. For now, it is useful to point out that this protagonist functions as much as a witness as an active participant. He watches and photographs the brutality of war in Vietnam as it occurs around him. The more classic protagonist is Charlie Sheen’s character in Platoon. He wants to survive and does, albeit with less idealism. The two characters couldn’t be more different.

Mixing Genres

For the writer, challenging a motif within a genre offers an opportunity to present a story in a fresher way, while mixing two distinct genres in one story offers a different, more radical opportunity. Some genres often have such different meanings to an audience that mixing two can have a dissonant, troubling impact. With other genres, the mix may be more complementary and can make the film seem more energetic, fresh, and renewed. In both cases, the impact can be surprising. Mixing genres has resulted in some of the most startling and important films of the past decades, such as Raging Bull, Blade Runner, Diva, Something Wild, Raising Arizona, and Blue Velvet.

A Case Study of Opposites I: The Stalking Moon

No two genres could be more different than are the Western and the horror film. Yet, in Alvin Sargent’s The Stalking Moon, we have both genres. As a Western, the film is the story of an army scout (Gregory Peck) who is about to retire. On his last assignment, to capture a group of Indians who have escaped from the reservation, he finds a white woman and her Indian son. The woman (Eva Marie Saint) is to return to her white family in the East. To expedite her leaving, she goes with the scout, who eventually takes her to his home in the mountains. There they await the arrival of her vengeful Indian husband, the chief of the band, who will do anything to return his son to his side. So far, this is a Western with a surrogate family in the making—scout, white woman, and Indian boy. However, the horror genre intercedes when the Indian chief, who we never see until the last 5 minutes of the film, inflicts horrible death on all who stand in his way. The sudden violence and the scope of the killing suggest an inhuman power. The chief, Salvahee, takes on a primitive and supernatural destructive power as he wreaks insurmountable terror on those with whom he comes in contact, including the surrogate family.

The mixing of the two genres, Western and horror, one that focuses on the world of dreams and the other on the world of nightmares, is effective because those two worlds are flip sides of each other. They coexist in the subconscious, and it’s not hard to imagine one quickly turning into the other. The fact that they are opposites helps the two genres coexist. The result is a dramatically effective story that is certainly unexpected.

A Case Study of Opposites II: Wolf

The horror film embraces the nonrealistic manifestations of the nightmare; the melodrama tends to be about realistic people in realistic situations. The blend of nonrealistic horror story and realistic melodrama is the mix of opposites we find in Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick’s Wolf.

Wolf tells the story of Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), an editor with a large publishing house. Mature and middle aged, he is about to be replaced by his young, aggressive protégé (James Spader). Driving in Vermont late at night, he accidentally hits a wolf, then tries to move the body off the road. The wolf, which is not dead, bites him and runs off. As expected, Will becomes a werewolf. In the classic werewolf tale, the wolf victimizes and destroys those he loves and eventually is destroyed. In Wolf, Will is not destroyed but is instead renewed, made young, by becoming a werewolf. The tired, middle-aged man becomes sexually vigorous and vocationally effective. His newfound aggressiveness applied in the corporate world makes him succeed over his rival. The horror dimension follows the story line of the main character—how he deals with becoming a werewolf when the moon is full, his fears that he murders people (including his estranged wife). He ends up biting both his rival and his lover (Michelle Pfeiffer).

In the horror genre, the main character needs to be destroyed because the surfeit of aggression and sexuality makes him a danger to himself and society. Implicit is the idea that the character is evil and thus must be destroyed. In Wolf, the writers carefully separate good from evil. A good man who becomes a wolf may be sexually active and aggressive in business, but, essentially, he will be a good wolfman. An evil man (Spader) who becomes a wolf will become a killer and deserves to be destroyed. Simply becoming a wolf is no longer a reason for the main character’s destruction, a deviation from the fate of the typical protagonist in the horror genre. In Wolf, the main character transcends victimization, a point we will return to later.

In the melodrama, the main character challenges the power structure, but in the end becomes its tragic victim despite a heroic effort. The melodramatic layer in Wolf centers on Will’s age. Although highly thought of by his writers, his publisher (Christopher Plummer) wants someone with a more aggressive marketing-oriented approach. It is the classic case of the broom that follows the corporate takeover; the main character is swept aside. The concern with his age reflects the fascination with youth in the media; studio executives in Hollywood and reporters on newspapers are younger than ever. Even the character’s wife is having an affair with his young successor. Will challenges the publisher and the age issue by devising a strategy to keep the writers with him in a new company and by taking up with the young, troubled daughter of the publisher.

The Nicholson character offers some compatibility between the two story forms—the horror film, where the main character is a victim, and the melodrama, where he struggles valiantly but in the end fails, a victim of the power structure. The same is true of the antagonist. In both genres, Spader’s character—the young, evil, ambitious male—is the antagonist. Wolf uses elements of the horror film—sexuality and aggression—to overcome the weakness and powerlessness typical of the melodrama protagonist. The main character uses these qualities to overcome the by-products of aging, fatigue, and depression in order to renew himself and be successful. Because he is essentially good, he can use the sexuality and aggression for positive purposes. Although this alters the narrative shape of both genres, it seems to work. The result is a touching, adult sense of the fate of the monster. By altering the narrative shape, these opposite genres work well together.

A Case Study of Similar Genres: Blade Runner

The science fiction genre is similar to the horror film genre. Often, it focuses on apprehensions about the future and technology, with the negative tradeoff of humanist values. The protagonist may be like Captain Kirk, struggling with the issue of aging (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), while the antagonist is a mad man, Khan, who may bring about Armageddon.

The protagonist in the science fiction film always has hope, while the protagonist in film noir displays a desperation that precludes hope. In film noir, the protagonist views life experiences more as a last chance and the antagonist is much more personable than Khan is. Indeed, the protagonist–antagonist relationship in film noir is often characterized as a dance of death, with the dancers as two lovers rather than as foes. Science fiction and film noir, although both proximate the world of the nightmare, are not a natural mix. Indeed, at the levels of protagonist, antagonist, and setting, they conflict with one another. In Blade Runner, we can explore where the mixing of the two genres works and where the contradictions are so great that they undermine the drama’s credibility.

This science fiction story is the story of an ex-cop, Deckard (Harrison Ford), who is now a blade runner. A blade runner tracks down and destroys replicants, which are technical duplications of human beings used as slave labor on the Offworld space colonies. The manufacturer of these combinations of commerce and technology, the Tyrrel Corporation, works with the motto, “More human than human.” Six replicants have escaped and returned to the polluted, polyglot metropolis of Los Angeles, and the blade runner must track them down and destroy them. Machines that become more human than human are a genuine danger.

The film noir story is that of Deckard, the desperate ex-cop who falls in love with the replicant Rachel (Sean Young). Does he destroy her or does he become more human than human, too? The film noir is framed by the futuristic metropolis of Los Angeles—a jungle of technology, overpopulation, and constant rain.

The Blade Runner script is both inventive and disappointing. The struggle between humanity and technology—the basis of the science fiction story—introduces elements of pathos and hope into the film noir story, which in turn provides a believable context for the science fiction element. We can imagine the Los Angeles of 2019 as something like the city we discover in Blade Runner. However, in dealing with the protagonist and the antagonist, the two genres contradict each other and eventually defeat a fascinating narrative effort.

In film noir, the protagonist is a victim. In the science fiction film, he is an idealist who struggles with the abyss toward which technology pushes him (and us). It is hard to imagine a cynical victim and a romantic idealist in the same person, yet this is precisely what Blade Runner proposes in Deckard. In terms of the antagonist, the science fiction story suggests that Tyrrel, who invented the replicants, is the antagonist. In a sense, he is the antagonist in the film noir story as well. He did ask the police to destroy the runaway replicant, Rachel, with whom Deckard falls in love. More important, however, he is the man who incorporated a finite life span in Rachel and thus put a very short term on the duration of Deckard’s and her love. Rachel is destined to die sooner than one would expect in a love relationship with a human; Deckard is destined to be alone.

As an antagonist, Tyrrel is an eminent, but not gripping, presence in both stories. Although he is rarely present, there is considerable ambivalence about Tyrrel, about commerce, and about technology. However, there is nothing visceral in this antagonist; he is little more than a symbol. The demands of the two genres have pushed him, as the antagonist, far into the background. In the end, the mixing of the two genres undermines the effectiveness of either. The film script remains a fascinating failure.

A similar mix was attempted in Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner’s Robocop, with more success. The protagonist, Murphy (Peter Weller), is believable as a victim. He is a policeman who is killed in the line of duty and is recreated as a robot-policeman, a Robocop. His personal struggle is that he was once human and is now the product of technology. By the end of the film, he finds some humanity, despite his technological makeup. The part of the antagonist is split between Murphy’s murderer and the corporate head of security, in whose department Robocop’s construction was requisitioned (a surrogate inventor). Particularly with regard to the protagonist, this mixed-genre film works.

A Case Study of the Police Story as Nightmare: The Fugitive

Writers Jeb Stuart and David Twohy mix the police story and film noir in The Fugitive, which was based on the famous television series, which in turn was heavily inspired by Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables. The police story uses its central character Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) to solve a crime. He is a man accused of killing his own wife, and it is up to him to both prove his innocence and seek revenge for his wife’s death while being hunted by the authorities. After Act One, he spends as much time searching for the true murderer as he does evading Lieutenant Girard (Tommy Lee Jones), the man who is relentlessly pursuing him. In film noir, the main character is a victim, so the pursuit maintains Kimble as a victim on one level, giving it the principal duality that prevents The Fugitive from being seen strictly as a police story. The victim quality increases our sympathy for Kimble.

The screen story opens with the murder of Richard Kimble’s wife. Kimble, a well-known surgeon in Chicago, returns home to find a one-armed man in his home; he struggles with him, but the man escapes. Kimble is accused of the murder, found guilty, and sent to prison to await execution. En route to prison, another prisoner shoots the bus driver and, in the resulting accident, Kimble escapes. The balance of the police story deals with Lieutenant Girard’s hunt for Kimble, who eventually returns to Chicago to try to find the one-armed man. By looking for an amputee with a prosthetic similar to the one Kimble detached from the killer the night his wife was killed, Kimble does find the one-armed man and he leads Girard to him. The investigation, however, brings Kimble face to face with the true antagonist, his friend Charles, also a heart surgeon. Charles, in the employ of a drug company, had hired the one-armed man to assassinate Kimble, not his wife. The plot ends with the real killer, Charles, apprehended, and Kimble, now in the protective custody of Girard, soon to be a free man.

These two genres of police story and film noir tend to have complementary shapes, with the police story being plot driven and the film noir story being driven by the background story about the relationship that will bring destruction to the victimized main character. In The Fugitive, the differing shapes do not undermine one another because, in the police story, both Girard and Kimble are working to solve the crime, despite Girard’s pursuit of Kimble. In the film noir dimension of the story, Kimble is the classic victim protagonist, and the destructive antagonist, usually a woman, is a policeman. The drive, the relentlessness of Girard’s pursuit of Kimble, parallels Javert’s endless drive to capture and destroy Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Miserables. Girard, in this sense, carries literary weight as the false antagonist in The Fugitive. Although Kimble and Girard are rarely together in the conventional sense, the strongest relationship in the film is between these two men, and until the final scene in the hotel, it is clear that Girard means to bring Kimble to justice and to death. Because of the common characters, the two story forms do not undermine one another. If anything, the emotionally powerful film noir dimension helps the viewer overcome the disappointing foreground resolution of the plot. The Girard–Kimble relationship is simply far more interesting than is Kimble’s relationship with the one-armed man or Charles. The result is a film that seems to have the best of both genres—an exciting plot in the police story and a powerful emotional relationship in the film noir tradition. The sum is greater than the parts.

A Case Study of Screwball Comedy: Something Wild

The screwball comedy is the flip side of film noir. In both genres, the (usually male) protagonist is viewed as a victim, and the antagonist is often the woman he chooses (or is chosen by) and with whom he gets involved. The prime difference between the genres is that the outcome of the screwball comedy is happy, while the outcome of film noir tends to be tragic. The action line in both genres is the story of their relationship.

Max Frye’s screwball comedy Something Wild is the story of Charlie Diggs (Jeff Daniels), a corporate executive with a rebellious side. He is picked up by Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who virtually kidnaps him for a weekend, one that becomes wild beyond all expectation when they meet Lulu’s ex-husband. The relationship between Charlie and Lulu is prone to much role reversal and sexual aggression. She is unpredictable, seductive, and dangerous, but she appeals to the rebel in him and he falls in love.

The film noir story in Something Wild has much to do with deception. Lulu deceives Charlie and Charlie deceives Lulu. When they meet her ex-husband, played by Ray Liotta, the deception becomes lethal. Lulu’s ex-husband wants to kill Charlie, and almost succeeds. The principle of deception is pervasive. It goes on in the city as well as in rural settings; it takes place within relationships as well as within families. Lulu and her mother have an elaborate code of interaction, all based on a series of lies and delusions. This is the perfect milieu for the tragic outcome of film noir.

The upshot of mixing screwball comedy and film noir, however, steers us away from the logical tragic conclusion toward a happier outcome. The film provides considerable tension between the two genres. The goals differ and, consequently, the treatment of protagonist and antagonist differs. The screwball comedy aspect of the film softens our sense of the protagonist as a victim. Indeed, he has to overcome his victimization if he is to transcend the classic film noir protagonist. There is some loss of credibility in this leap. A similar fate is cast for the antagonist. Lulu moves from being a predator to being a pussycat, and the transition gives her little to do in the second half of the story. To keep the story going, her ex-husband becomes the antagonist. The result is a dramatically mixed experience, but also a rich one in terms of the alternating of comic and tragic goals. The energy that results from the clash of two genres heightens our fascination with the story and with what might happen next. However, the shifting natures of protagonist and antagonist result in a less emotionally involving experience than if the film focused on one of the genres. This particular experiment in mixing genres is designed to appeal to us as voyeurs, rather than as participants.

A Case Study of Genders and Genres I: The Ballad of Little Jo

Many Westerns have introduced a dimension of melodrama into their stories. The Gunfighter, The Left-Handed Gun, and High Noon all include an overlay of melodrama, but few Westerns have used it as a major element. The Ballad of Little Jo, however, relies on melodrama as much as on the typical Western form.

Maggie Greenwald has written a story of a young eastern woman who must leave home. The woman, Josephine, has had a child out of wedlock and now, shunned by her family, is traveling West to make a life for herself. What she quickly discovers is that, as a woman, she will be viewed as chattel suitable only for sexual pleasure. To avoid this fate, she takes on the appearance of a man—in her clothing, hair, and affectation. At first unsure and shy, she begins to live and work in a mining town. Fearful that she will be discovered, she takes work as a winter sheepherder. Here, she believes she can avoid having her true identity discovered. She enjoys the solitude, and her growing competence is clear. She begins to acquire the survival skills that men have mastered. Eventually she earns enough to start her own farm. One day in town, she takes on a Chinese rail worker as her cook, to prevent him from being hanged. He quickly discovers her true identity and they become lovers. Suddenly she has companionship. As time passes, her happiness is threatened by the local cattle company, which through intimidation and murder has been buying adjacent land. In the end, she decides to defend her land and stays. Both she and her lover die on the land, and it is only when she dies that the town discovers she is actually a woman.

As a Western, The Ballad of Little Jo has many of the classic elements. The main character is heroic. The story is shaped around the struggle between primitiveness and civilization, although, uncharacteristically, the central character here opts for primitivism, with its tolerance of individuality—Little Jo’s relationship with a “Chinaman” and her deception. The Ballad of Little Jo presents a violent milieu, but there is little ritualized killing on-screen. Most of the killing takes place off-screen, and there is no gunfight at the end of the film. The story’s resolution certainly differs from that in the conventional Western. There is no fierce antagonist to make Little Jo’s actions stand out more heroically. The land, however, does play the classic Western role. Beautiful but dangerous, it offers opportunity to the character, but in the end the harshness of land ends Jo’s life.

As a melodrama, The Ballad of Little Jo is the story of a woman challenging the male power structure. By pretending to be a male, Jo demonstrates her desire to participate in society in the same way men are able to. At one point, her Chinese lover warns her that if the men of the town find out she is a woman, their humiliation will be such that they will kill her. The film deviates from melodrama, however, by adopting the Western convention of the victorious main character.

Although the melodrama tends toward realism and the Western less so, Maggie Greenwald has not presented an elegiac West. The Western dimension of this screenplay is realistic rather than heroic and ritualized, which reduces the conflict between the two genres. If there is a genuine difference between this Western and most others, it is in the absence of an antagonist. Here, the melodrama form helps. By providing the entire male population as a power structure opposed to women, every male encountered prior to the Chinese man becomes at one point or another a threat to Little Jo. In this sense, men in general become Little Jo’s antagonists, and her struggle to avoid discovery, even in both instances when her true identity is revealed, becomes heroic given the level of threat. Although the two genres do not share many elements, their combination in the movie strengthens and makes the 19th-century story into a modern struggle. The Ballad of Little Jo is an excellent example of mixing genres to good effect.

A Case Study of Mixing Genders and Genres II: The Crying Game

The Crying Game, which is on one level a political thriller about IRA terrorists, is also a melodrama about gender and sexual preference. The film opens with the IRA kidnapping of a black British soldier, Jody; from a bar where he is socializing with a woman, Jude; Jude is an IRA member who is part of the kidnapping plot. If the British do not release IRA prisoners, the soldier hostage will be killed. Fergus (Stephen Rea), who is assigned to guard the soldier, becomes his friend; Fergus is eventually supposed to kill Jody but doesn’t, although Jody dies accidentally. The kidnapping plot ends disastrously for the IRA, because of Fergus. Before his death, Jody asks Fergus to take care of Dil, his lover back in London. Fergus agrees.

The next phase of the film, in London, focuses on Fergus’s efforts to get to know Dil, and his gradual falling in love with Dil. All is well until he discovers that Dil is male. This apparently ends the budding love affair, but it is soon rekindled, as Fergus simply cannot get Dil out of his mind. Fergus’s IRA cohorts, including Jude, resurface in London and demand his participation in the assassination of a government official. He has no choice, but Dil innocently prevents him from fulfilling the obligation, believing only that Fergus wants to leave to take up with Jude. With the mission betrayed, Jude returns to kill Fergus, but Dil kills her instead. Fergus sends Dil away and stands in as the murderer. In jail, Fergus is visited by Dil, who is impressed with his commitment to her. The film ends with the fantasy of their possible future love together.

In the political side of the story, Fergus is the main character. He is in the IRA for life. If he does not kill, the IRA will kill him, and the British might kill him anyway. The main character is presented as a potential victim attempting to avoid a particular fate. When a plot provides enough surprises, the sense of excitement and emotion around the fate of the main character can be considerable. (The Day of the Jackal is a good example of a plot-centered thriller.) However, Crying Game director Neil Jordan is not very interested in plot, and there is a minimal investment in surprise here. It looks to the melodrama to engage and move us.

The melodrama in The Crying Game focuses on a heterosexual white male who, against his previous disposition, begins to fall in love with a black male transvestite. His tragedy is, in the end, an altruistic sacrifice, but he is alive and eventually he will be able to return to Dil. As he did in The Miracle, in which incest was the taboo, Jordan flirts with the possibility that love can overcome boundaries of race and gender.

The success of The Crying Game stems from Jordan’s interest in the melodrama, which helps compensate for the plot flaws in the thriller. Indeed, the melodrama is so provocative that it all but makes the audience forget that The Crying Game began as a political thriller. The script is also aided by the fact that both genres rely on realism. Compatibility in the role of the main character in both the thriller and the melodrama, essentially realistic, also strengthens the film. The absence of a strong antagonist in the melodrama leaves the role to poor Jude from the thriller. Her death, on one level, kills off the female rival to Dil, but on another level makes no emotional sense in the way the fate of a true antagonist should.

A Case Study of Adventure Film as Satire: Raising Arizona

The Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona is both an adventure film and a satire. Since both genres move away from naturalism, or realism, this particular mix of genres is both stimulating and fresh. The adventure film genre is narrative intensive and pits a romantic protagonist against a mythic antagonist. The levels of conflict between protagonist and antagonist are increasingly intensified and fantastic as we move through the story. In the end, the goal of the adventure genre is to claim goodness over evil and to have a good time doing it. The genre is based on adolescent wish-fulfillment.

In the case of satire, the goals are much more serious. The satire genre tackles serious issues of social concern with a sense of aggressive comedy. The genre is critical, pointed, funny, and fast. Energy is essential. The antagonists are the issues of the day—television, nuclear war, medical incompetence, government bureaucracy. The protagonist, in a sense, becomes the audience, since it is we who suffer the antagonistic effects depicted in the film.

Raising Arizona is about a couple’s (Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter) desire to have a child. They can’t, so they decide to kidnap one from a rich businessman whose wife has given birth to quintuplets. The kidnapping, and the subsequent efforts to prevent others from taking the child, is the heart of the story. In the end, the desperate couple decides to return the baby to its family. The adventure story relates to the kidnapping and to the efforts of two convicts and a bounty hunter who try to steal the child from the kidnappers. The satire on contemporary American values revolves around children. This most precious resource, the story suggests, is nothing more than a valuable commodity; like bonds or gold; the baby is no more than a possession. The story satirizes this view of children by making the childless thieves desperate for a child to fill their empty lives. The Coen treatment is energetic and filled with action. Car chases, robberies, and explosions occur with startling frequency around the baby, pointing us toward the question of the value of children in today’s society.

The mixing of the adventure and satire genres works in Raising Arizona because of the freedom inherent in both genres. Anything goes. There are few restrictions on protagonist–antagonist interaction, except that in both genres, it tends to be intense, active, and frequent. Pace, energy, and comic aggression are key to mixing these two genres. The Coens fulfill that requirement and the result is a fresh, funny, and touching film about family values in the 1980s.

We have suggested that writers can work against genre expectations by challenging the motifs of particular genres or by mixing two genres to tell their story. In either case, the result is an unexpected and often more energized view of what could otherwise have been a formulaic story.

A Case Study of Failed Mixed Genres: Basic Instinct

Mixing the police story and film noir can work effectively, as in The Fugitive, but the mixture fails in Basic Instinct. The reasons for this failure provide important lessons for aspiring screenwriters.

Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct tells the story of Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), a San Francisco detective with a troubled past. He has been drug- and alcohol-dependent, and he has killed bystanders in the line of duty. The plot unfolds when a woman kills a rock star with an ice pick during intercourse. The woman suspected of the murder, Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), is a novelist whose last book included a scene about killing a rock star with an ice pick. She also seems to know a lot about Nick; we soon find out that he is the research for her next book.

The police story proceeds along the lines of a criminal investigation. For half the story, Catherine is the primary suspect. But at one point in the investigation, suspicion shifts to someone trying to frame her. That person increasingly seems to be Beth, the police psychologist (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who knew Catherine when both were psychology students at Berkeley. Catherine’s bisexuality alludes to an affair between them, an affair that led to the death of Catherine’s faculty advisor. The instrument of death was an ice pick. As the film draws to a close, Beth is apprehended and then shot after having killed Gus, Nick’s partner. The original crime seems solved, as does the older crime, as Beth’s actions imply she is the killer.

The film noir dimension of Basic Instinct unfolds via Nick’s fascination with Catherine. She knows a great deal about him, and he is provoked by her taunting him about his past—his wife’s suicide, his drug and alcohol abuse, and his penchant for masochistic sex. The fact that Catherine seems more interested in him as research is compounded by her narcissistic excitement and her desire for women, specifically her lesbian lover Roxy (and earlier, Beth). His is a true “noir” love in that he is driven by passion and excluded from a permanent relationship by implication. Catherine is absolved of the opening murder, and the story ends with her and Nick in bed. She prepares him for sadomasochistic sex, and the film ends as she reaches for an ice pick.

Beyond the lack of credibility in the plot (it is hard to believe that Beth is the killer), it is difficult to believe that an investigation by the Internal Affairs Department could be conducted with such a dearth of intelligence. The police story fails because the red herring of Catherine as the false antagonist is at odds with her role in the film noir story, her role as the true antagonist. Which brings us to Nick Curran. We have a contradiction in our expectations of Nick in the police story and in the film noir. In the police story, he is the hero who solves the crime. Yet in the film noir, we expect him to be the victim of the antagonist. We are faced, then, with a character who has to be both hero and victim, two roles that are at best difficult to reconcile. Coupled with the complication of an antagonist who is the antagonist in the film noir but a false antagonist in the police story, we have a situation of dramatic incongruity. Joe Eszterhas is a clever screenwriter, but he is not a magician. The result is the use of irreconcilable deployments of the protagonist and the antagonist in each of the two genres. The resulting loss of credibility is understandable, and the result is a failed screenplay.

A Case Study of Changing Motifs and Mixing Genres: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors is a remarkable example of audacious storytelling. Allen tells two independent stories linked by a single character, a rabbi, and an idea that morality is both relative and relatively elusive in our modern urban world. It is a complex enough challenge to combine two stories in one film; it becomes even more complex when the two stories are presented in different narrative forms—a straight melodrama and a situation comedy. Allen then goes one step further and decides that within each story—the melodrama and the situation comedy—he will challenge the most important motif—the fate of the protagonist.

The melodrama is the story of ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a man whose mistress threatens to ruin him unless he leaves his wife. Judah relies on two people with whom he shares this pending disaster. One person is a patient, a rabbi, who, in spite of going blind, is optimistic and encouraging to Judah. The other is his brother, a small-time hoodlum, who suggests that the only way to deal with the situation is for Judah to get his mistress out of his life permanently. How Judah deals with this personal crisis is the story line of the melodrama. Judah’s sense of immorality and his anxiety are central to the decision he makes and the range of feelings he experiences once the decision is made.

The situation comedy follows the efforts of Cliff (Woody Allen) to sustain his integrity in the face of a career during which he has experienced limited success and a marriage that has been a total disaster. Cliff makes documentary films and is currently working on a film about Professor Levi (a character based on Primo Levi, the writer and Auschwitz survivor), a concentration camp survivor who postulates on the meaning of love and morality in modern life. Enter his brother-in-law (Alan Alda), a successful television producer. To appease his sister, Alan Alda’s character offers Cliff a job making a documentary about himself. Cliff fools himself into thinking that he’s taking the job for the money. He hates everything his brother-in-law stands for. In Cliff’s mind, you can’t have both wealth and integrity. Naturally the story line displays his ambivalence.

The documentary on his brother-in-law brings about a crisis, both professional and personal. While making the film about his brother-in-law, Cliff meets an associate producer, Hallie (Mia Farrow), with whom he falls hopelessly in love. He also botches the film. In the end, Cliff loses both the film and the relationship with Hallie. Not even Professor Levi can help Cliff overcome the cesspool of materialism that swirls about him. The professor inexplicably kills himself, thus ending the film project that would have at least provided Cliff with some integrity.

Cliff’s moral position is vulnerable on every level, and he is left perplexed and saddened by the various outcomes—all of which are bad. In rereading this description, it doesn’t sound very funny, but the story line of all situation comedies might be tragic from a different point of view. As Alan Alda’s character says, his definition of comedy is tragedy plus time. So, too, is the situation comedy about Cliff tragic. The melodrama in Crimes and Misdemeanors is about recognizable people in a power struggle. Judah’s melodrama story, on the other hand, reflects the most important power struggle of the 1980s, the battle of the sexes. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the melodrama and situation comedy genres work to complement each other. There are points where the differences add a level of tension, a dissonant chord, that surprises us and helps move the story beyond our genre expectations.

In terms of character, the central character in each story is recognizable—the ambitious Judah Rosenthal and the idealistic Cliff. Each character is ambivalent and has an interior conflict about his value system. Each wants to be perceived as a success, but each carries a family history. Judah has a religious background. His father’s words continually resonate, “The eyes of God are on us always.” To find his way, Judah becomes an ophthalmologist, but (according to his father) he is always losing his way. Cliff has a history of failed relationships. Both he and his sister share this penchant and its implications, and they both fail in life.

The two stories are also similar in the types of conflict that prompt their respective crises. In both cases, the source of the conflict is a woman—Judah’s mistress or, in Cliff’s case, a wished-for mistress. Both characters desperately deal with these two women. In each case, the character convinces others to aid him in his struggle. Judah uses his brother; Cliff uses Professor Levi. In each case, the struggle unleashes an intense, almost desperate attempt to cope with the resulting events.

The two stories differ primarily in their resolutions. Woody Allen twists each tale away from the genre convention. Melodrama usually ends in the tragedy of the thwarted ambition of the central character—the execution of Montgomery Clift’s character in A Place in the Sun, the absence of the mother from her daughter’s wedding at the end of Stella Dallas. This is not the case with Judah Rosenthal. Although a party to murder, he is not arrested, nor will he be absent from his daughter’s wedding. Judah is scot-free and has freed himself from his anxiety and guilt as well.

In the situation comedy, the main character usually finds success in the end: Jack Lemmon loses his job but gets the girl at the end of The Apartment, and James Garner gets the girl (or boy, depending on your interpretation) at the end of Victor, Victoria. No such luck for Cliff. His resolution is closer to that found in melodrama. Cliff loses everything—his wife, the girl of his dreams, the film he didn’t want to make (about his brother-in-law), and the film he wanted to make (about Professor Levi). Cliff, the man who is interested in ideals, ends up powerless, and Judah, the man who is interested in power, ends up with even greater power. The mix works in this case because of the proximity of the two genres. Situation comedy is the flip side of melodrama. Film noir and the screwball comedy are also mirror images of each other. Consequently, a film like Something Wild has a greater likelihood of working than does a film that uses wildly different genres—the horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, for example. It is easier to succeed with genres that share basic qualities.

In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen poses numerous narrative challenges for himself and for his audience. By telling two different stories, by using two different genres, and by twisting genre characteristics within each story, he creates a modern parable. What is the nature and role of love and morality in our lives? Allen’s meditation is structured, formal, rather than alluded to as an afterthought or aside. He doesn’t use the classic qualities of an empathetic main character or a monstrous antagonist. He confidently proceeds to tell two stories, using two genres, and allows us to ponder the questions in our lives.

Conclusion

It is critical for the writer to understand genres in order to write mixed-genre screenplays. Clearly, writing against genre has become the crossword puzzle of the screenwriter—difficult, but addictive. Know your genres and you will be able to work against them; you’ll be able to move beyond formula into other interesting and energetic options.

Mixing genres offers the writer much in the way of narrative opportunities—surprise and novelty at the very least. But there is also the option of layering the story in new and interesting ways. Just as challenging a genre motif alters our experience of the screen story, the mixing of genres can undermine our expectations and provide new dimensions to old stories to entice the fickle film audience.

The examples mentioned in this chapter only scratch the surface of mixed-genre screenplays. So many of the big films released in the early 1990s were mixed-genre films—Dick Tracy, Die Hard II, Total Recall, The Fugitive, Schindler’s List—that mixed-genre stories may now be viewed as the standard and genre stories may be the exception.

References

1. Trumbo, Dalton. Lonely Are the Brave. Universal Pictures, 1962.