Salon writer confuses "genre" in New York Times OT?
John Donaldson
I'll send you the essay on META in the New York Times Magasine today
(sunday) where the author seems to define genre to include groups of 20
films or less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/magazine/17META.html
exerpt:
"In his book ''American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre,'' Joseph W. Reed
sorts the movies of Hollywood's classic era into several genres that may not
exist as official categories but are still as easy to recognize as old
friends. In addition to War, Women's and Westerns, there are Inventor, High
School, Jungle, Psychiatrist, Escape and Southern pictures, too. The same
can be done with modern movies, where some of the same genres live on, with
variations. We could add to Reed's list such genres as the Incurably Ill
Child movie, the Ghetto Kid Makes Good movie, the Girlhood Friends Working
Out Their Issues movie and the European Food movie, flooding at us in such
volume that they can hardly pretend to be unique."
Author is from Salon so she must be an authority!!!!!!! :-)
Whole article below
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November 17, 2002
This Is a Headline For an Essay About Meta
By LAURA MILLER
The best jokes in the most recent ''Austin Powers'' sequel -- the ones that
aren't about flatulence or Fat Bastard or both -- are the jokes about
movies, especially about spy movies and most especially about ''Austin
Powers'' movies themselves. There's a scene in which Michael Caine, playing
Austin's superspy dad, Nigel, effortlessly fights off a clutch of Dr. Evil's
henchmen, the last of whom he persuades to fall over without even being
punched: since the henchman is nameless (to the extent of not even
possessing a name tag, as Nigel points out) and since the entire purpose of
nameless henchmen is to topple at the slightest feint from a man like Nigel,
why doesn't he just lie down immediately and save them both the trouble?
Later, Austin and his comrade Foxxy Cleopatra meet with a Japanese
businessman who makes what seems to them a series of naughty remarks; like
the audience, they're following the English subtitles, portions of which are
washed out because they're printed over a white background.
Not quite parody but possibly ironic and probably postmodern -- what these
jokes are, as the former English majors out there will no doubt recognize,
is meta. ''Meta'' is a liminal term these days; it's creeping more and more
into everyday conversations, even if it's not nearly as widespread as, say,
''irony.'' Some people talk about meta all the time. Recently a friend and I
were e-mailing back and forth, trying to sort out our plans to catch an
evening movie, when we started to discuss how we were going to make the
decision itself -- should we stick to e-mail or switch to instant messaging
or the phone? ''This is getting too meta,'' he wrote. ''Just call me.''
Other people, including another movie-steeped friend, may not recognize the
term ''meta,'' but they know exactly what it is all the same; on the basis
of a quick definition, my friend could instantly list a half-dozen good
examples: ''Oh, I get it. 'Beavis and Butthead' was a music-video show about
watching music videos, and that teen film 'Not Another Teen Movie' had a
character whose only name was the Token Black Guy.''
It's easy to come up with examples in other media, too. At the hit Broadway
musical ''Urinetown,'' you can hear two characters -- a little girl and a
policeman -- say things like ''Of course she loves him, Little Sally. He's
the hero of the show. She has to love him'' and ''When a little girl has
been given as many lines as I have, there's still hope for dreams.'' If,
looking for a cheaper thrill, you rent the horror film ''Scream,'' a feast
of meta devices, you'll see a scene in which a teenage B-movie buff explains
to fellow partygoers that ''there are certain rules one must abide by in
order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, No. 1: You can
never have sex,'' just before the camera cuts to the film's heroine losing
her virginity upstairs.
Flipping through TV channels, you might stumble across a rerun of ''The Drew
Carey Show'' in which the sitcom's star tells the camera that the cast is
miffed about not receiving any Emmy nominations and has put together the
following episode in order to fish for some. What follows is a sendup of the
kind of ''serious'' TV revered by awards judges -- hospital-bed death
scenes, brooding soliloquies and simple-minded efforts to ''address'' such
social issues as gun control and illiteracy -- with the actors zestily
hamming it up. An entire season of ''Seinfeld'' concerns Jerry's development
of a sitcom ''about nothing,'' a sitcom that's clearly ''Seinfeld'' itself.
During commercial breaks, you might catch an ad in which one man sings the
praises of an automobile to another. ''You sound like a car commercial,''
his friend jokes. ''Didn't they tell you?'' the first man says
significantly. Once an arty experimental theater technique used by people
who wrote plays with titles like ''Six Characters in Search of an Author,''
meta is now being used to tout antilock brakes. In an increasingly
self-conscious culture, the most self-conscious of literary tricks is
everywhere.
Defining meta, though, can be tricky. A prefix, it comes from the Greek for
''beside,'' ''after'' or ''change.'' The critic Herbert Kohl, in his 1992
book ''From Archetype to Zeitgeist,'' takes a pretty good shot at explaining
it. Meta, he writes, ''when used with the name of a discipline, designates a
new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original
one.'' Metamathematics, for example, is ''the critical study of the nature
of mathematical systems,'' and metapsychology is ''the critical study of
psychology as a discipline.'' ''Metaphysics,'' one of the most familiar
derivations, is the title of the work by Aristotle that follows his
''Physics'' and that deals with the ultimate nature of the universe. How did
meta get from statements like ''2+2=4 is valid within Frege's formal
system'' and speculation about the first principles governing causality to a
dapper Japanese gentleman inadvertently making potty jokes to a kitschy
secret agent? It traveled by way of metafiction, a literary school of the
1960's and 70's. Metafiction is fiction that openly admits it's an
artificial creation -- as opposed to naturalism, in which art strives to
represent real life. (The same idea got tried out even earlier in the
theater. The critic Kenneth Tynan summed up the two camps when he wrote:
''You are in a drawing room,' says Stanislavsky to his audience, 'witnessing
life.' 'You are in a theater,' says Brecht, 'witnessing actors.''')
John Barth, one of metafiction's stars (others include John Hawkes, Donald
Barthelme and Robert Coover), wrote a story called ''Lost in the Funhouse''
in which he refers to a character as ''Magda G------'' and then goes on to
explain: ''Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names
in 19th-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the
author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal
liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an
illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.'' The
metafictionists liked to point out that people are always telling stories
and that stories have their own laws, utterly different from the laws that
govern real life. You can see those rules played out in more than just
novels; they prevail in everything from fairy tales and gossip to comic
strips, movies and pornography.
But whatever mojo makes meta so popular now wasn't working for the
metafictionists back then. With the exception of Barth at the beginning of
his career, they never found a large audience outside of academics and
critics; readers complained that the whole enterprise came across as
mandarin, aloof and theoretical.
Perhaps that's because a lot of metafiction has a whiff of the schoolmaster
about it. The novelist David Foster Wallace captured the queasy subtext of
literary metafiction in a short story, ''Octet,'' that is a satirical
metafiction about metafiction itself. The story's ''author,'' voicing his
distress through footnotes, frets about his inability to pull off the
intended ''cycle of very short belletristic pieces'' in the form of pop
quizzes. What he wants to avoid, he says, is the ''now tired'' meta device
of ''the dramatist himself coming onstage from the wings and reminding you
that what's going on is artificial and that the artificer is him (the
dramatist) and but that he's at least respectful enough of you as
reader/audience to be honest about the fact that he's back there pulling the
strings, an 'honesty' which personally you've always had the feeling is
actually a highly rhetorical sham-honesty that's designed to get you to like
him and approve of him (i.e., of the 'meta'-type writer) and feel flattered
that he apparently thinks you're enough of a grown-up to handle being
reminded that what you're in the middle of is artificial (like you didn't
know that already, like you needed to be reminded of it over and over again
as if you were a myopic child who couldn't see what was right in front of
you).''
In other words, metafiction could be pretty patronizing and, what's more,
puritanical in the particular, medicinal fashion of the American
avant-garde, which is so often eager to relieve its audience of the
oppression of a good time. By comparison, Wallace's own vamp on the
endlessly receding hall of mirrors in which his overly cerebral and
self-conscious storyteller has trapped himself is much nimbler. Contemporary
writers give ordinary people more credit for knowing the difference between
real life and playacting.
Zadie Smith, describing the frankly bogus good-versus-evil theatrics of a
professional wrestling match in her new novel ''The Autograph Man,''
explains that the fans know the wrestlers ''are not here to express genuine
feelings, or to fake them and dress them up natural like on TV. . . . This
afternoon, these two hulking men are here to demonstrate Justice. The kind
Mr. Gerry Bowen (Block M, Seat 117) can't get from the courts in
compensation for his son's accident; the kind Jake (Block T, Seat 59) won't
get from school whether he chooses to squeal on those bastards or not; the
kind Finn (Block B, Seat 10) can't seem to get from girls no matter what
changes he makes to his wardrobe or record collection or personal hygiene.''
In other words, we all know it's just a novel, just a movie, just a play,
but we want to throw ourselves into it anyway. We know this isn't like real
life -- that's why we're here, and we'd rather not be lectured on the
difference. Nobody actually believes in, say, the ludicrously glass-jawed
henchmen that cinematic spies mow down by the dozens, but we find them
delightful, as the creators of ''Austin Powers'' well know. Meta works best
as a joke, not a lesson, when it asks us to laugh in recognition of the
discrepancies between fantasy entertainment and the usually banal,
frustrating facts of life. One episode of ''The Simpsons'' makes a meta nod
in this direction, opening with Homer and Marge sitting on the family couch,
looking bored. ''I guess we're not having an adventure this week,'' Marge
says. Even cartoon characters can't expect to have lives as exciting as . .
. cartoon characters.
Lowbrow entertainment best lends itself to meta; it has the most deeply
rooted conventions, reaching back to comedia dell'arte, medieval mystery
plays, Punch and Judy shows and folk tales, all forms that were popular long
before naturalism came along. We tend to forget that the notion that art
should be made to resemble real life isn't traditional at all. It's
pitifully arriviste, like the thin crust representing the Age of Man in
those timelines showing the geological epochs in Earth's history. Indeed,
when the artists of modernism and postmodernism decided to play up the
artificiality of their work, they weren't doing something new; they were
reviving something very, very old. When Zadie Smith, describing two
wrestlers going at it, writes, ''All of a sudden they run at each other once
more and if you have a better phrase than like thundering elephants insert
it here [ ],'' she's tipping her hat to Laurence Sterne's ''Tristram
Shandy,'' a book written in 1759, before the novel was properly born.
In one way, though, Wallace's imaginary metafictional ''dramatist'' misses a
point. Meta touches on the stories we, like children, demand to hear over
and over again, albeit with artful variations. They offer us the
satisfactions of ritual rather than the boredom of repetition, and however
familiar their devices, they still work. ''Urinetown'' is an extended joke
about the preposterousness of musicals: Officer Lockstock and Little Sally
discuss the importance of avoiding ''too much exposition,'' note the
discrepancy between the show's ''happy'' music and its grim plot and lament
its ''terrible'' title. The musical numbers themselves fall into the usual
categories -- love song, anthem, faux gospel -- and though they're hung on a
storyline that refuses to plausibly support them, they're a blast
nonetheless. The teenagers in ''Scream'' know the conventions of slasher
movies so well, they provide a running commentary on them as they unfold. In
the film's final sequence, the supposedly dead killer returns to announce:
''This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life for
one last scare.'' And here's the rub: it's still frightening. Wes Craven,
the director of ''Scream,'' even made an installment of his ''Nightmare on
Elm Street'' series in which the characters use a screenplay of the movie
they're in to outwit the series' monster -- and that's scary, too.
Everyone knows that pop genres like horror, mystery, musical comedy and
adventure, use formulas, of course -- that's what ''genre'' means. The
highbrow ideal says that art should be original and (usually) true to life;
those are supposedly the hallmarks of quality. But we now live in a society
more steeped in stories than any that has gone before. In a given week, we
may see a movie or two, rent a couple of videos, catch a half-dozen (or
more) television programs, listen to the radio, play CD's and read
newspapers, magazines or a book. The more of this we absorb, the more
clearly we see that every good story uses some kind of formula. After only a
couple of seasons of MTV's ''Real World,'' the show's participants could
talk authoritatively about which standardized role -- the naive virgin, the
bitch, the gay housemate emerging from the closet -- each person would
assume. Suddenly, everything starts to look like a genre.
In his book ''American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre,'' Joseph W. Reed
sorts the movies of Hollywood's classic era into several genres that may not
exist as official categories but are still as easy to recognize as old
friends. In addition to War, Women's and Westerns, there are Inventor, High
School, Jungle, Psychiatrist, Escape and Southern pictures, too. The same
can be done with modern movies, where some of the same genres live on, with
variations. We could add to Reed's list such genres as the Incurably Ill
Child movie, the Ghetto Kid Makes Good movie, the Girlhood Friends Working
Out Their Issues movie and the European Food movie, flooding at us in such
volume that they can hardly pretend to be unique. Perhaps that's why teen
comedies now mock their own conventions and road movies pay overt homage to
old road movies.
Then there are artier efforts that get labeled meta even when they don't
really hit the mark, like Steven Soderbergh's ''Full Frontal,'' in which
scenes of a bunch of loosely connected characters in Los Angeles shot on
digital video alternate with scenes from a film that some of those
characters will go on to make. Film-within-a-film isn't meta and neither are
films about filmmakers -- otherwise ''Singin' in the Rain'' would be meta
and it's not. However, the film-within-the-film in ''Full Frontal'' is a
little bit meta; in it, a black actor tells a white journalist that black
male movie stars never get to do real love scenes with white actresses, and
when the characters fall in love at the end, they move in to kiss each other
and then turn away at the last minute. But ''Full Frontal'' itself never
jokes about the genre it belongs to, the Indie Ensemble picture; after all,
the whole point of successful Hollywood filmmakers doing movies about
middle-class New Yorkers and Angelenos with career troubles is to feel that
at last they are getting to demonstrate their artistic chops by depicting
real life.
A better portrait of the flickering interaction between culture and reality
in the belly of the beast is ''Adaptation,'' the most recent film by Spike
Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. (Making a movie about the movie's own
screenwriter recalls the now common postmodern literary stunt of including
in a novel a character with the novelist's name -- Kaufman's following in
the footsteps of Philip Roth and Martin Amis.) It details Kaufman's tortuous
efforts to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction book ''The Orchid Thief'' for the
screen. ''I don't want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing, like an
orchid-heist movie or something . . . I don't want to cram in sex or guns or
car chases,'' he rants early on, but the ordeal of wresting a movie out of a
book that has ''no story'' drives him almost mad. Eventually, mystery and
intrigue creep into the plot of ''Adaptation,'' and by the time the film
veers into a ludicrous string of Hollywood ''action thriller'' cliches -- a
chase through an alligator-infested swamp and a bogus yet strangely
affecting moment of insight -- we realize that Kaufman has succumbed to
Hollywood's imperatives. ''Adaptation'' curses the contrivances of
blockbuster filmmaking so thoroughly that by the time it resorts to them,
the results are amusing, clever, even wise. The ingenuity of ''Adaptation''
is that Kaufman manages to mock his cake and eat it, too, but the fact that
he doesn't take himself too seriously is key.
The more high-minded it is, apparently, the easier it is for meta to annoy.
Ian McEwan's novel ''Atonement'' became a best-seller earlier this year, but
I keep discovering people who were irritated, as I was, by the ending (which
I'm about to discuss -- so jump ahead if you don't want it spoiled). In the
book's final pages, it is revealed that the preceding narrative has been one
character's fictionalized account of events, which in ''real life'' didn't
end quite so satisfyingly. The novel is an exquisite technical achievement,
but the apparent message of that ending -- that actual experience rarely
offers closure or redemption and that we should always be aware that novels
aren't like life (going on about how fiction is a ''lie'' is one of the more
irritatingly arch affectations novelists are prone to) -- is exasperating.
Anyone smart enough to read an Ian McEwan novel already knows this, and it's
hard not to feel, like the writer in Wallace's ''Octet,'' that you're being
talked down to. This is meta of the old school, solemn and scolding.
By contrast, Michael Winterbottom's supple ''24-Hour Party People,'' a
biopic about Tony Wilson, an impresario of the Manchester music scene during
the 1980's, is meta at its best. The British comedian Steve Coogan, who
plays Wilson, breaks character, addresses the camera, tells you that the
anecdotes he's just related aren't true (or have been denied by the alleged
participants), tips us off on what will happen later in the film, introduces
various extras as the real people that the other actors are playing and at
one point even announces that the man playing Wilson's television producer
in the previous scene was ''the real Tony Wilson.'' All this serves to
undermine Wilson's version of events and at the same time to demonstrate
that what actually happened doesn't really matter that much. Wilson's gift
for enthusiasm, for embellishing the truth, is his great talent, his very
life a testimony to the power of meta as the falsehood you believe in
anyway. His tireless mythologizing of the scene is what made living in his
Manchester (whether or not it was truly like ''Renaissance Florence,'' as he
insisted) so much fun.
When meta intends to teach us a lesson -- that is, when it's a drag -- it's
usually instructing us that we shouldn't confuse fiction with real life. But
as Wilson's own experience shows, sometimes the right story, well used and
passionately espoused however false it at first seems to be, is exactly what
real life needs. At its most anarchic and least instructive -- that is, as
it flourishes today -- meta suggests that distinguishing between truth and
fiction counts for less than knowing a terrific story when you have seen one
and relishing it regardless of its authenticity. If to be human is partly a
matter of believing, as Lewis Carroll's White Queen did, in ''as many as six
impossible things before breakfast,'' better that we understand what we're
doing when we select those impossible things, knowing not only how much we
may suffer from choosing the wrong ones but also how much joy can be found
in embracing the right lie. Manchester may not ever be Florence in the
Renaissance (if even Florence in the Renaissance was), but why should that
keep us from dancing all night?
Laura Miller is an editor of Salon.com.
Christopher Adams
> W. Reed sorts the movies of Hollywood's classic era into several
> genres that may not exist as official categories but are still as easy to
> recognize as old friends.
John, I don't think she's got the idea of "genre" wrong; she's just talking
about kind of mini-genres. Hence the "may not exist" part.
--
- Kit -
Worst Functions Officer Ever (2002)
Take your furs and your literal interpretations to the other side of the
river.
loucyphre
shat:
>
>I'll send you the essay on META in the New York Times Magasine today
>(sunday) where the author seems to define genre to include groups of 20
>films or less.
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/magazine/17META.html
>
>exerpt:
>"In his book ''American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre,'' Joseph W. Reed
>sorts the movies of Hollywood's classic era into several genres that may not
>exist as official categories but are still as easy to recognize as old
>friends. In addition to War, Women's and Westerns....
>
>
The Western is not an official genre? Fuck you!!! I've got half a mind
to lynch the asshole by the balls like she was a Chinese railroad
worker!
loucyphre
"I like it. It's a statement."
- (Linnea Quigley, "Return of the Living Dead")
"It's all these booze-addled British boys with their Viz-style
rough-and-tumble pub-style blabbering and bullshitting about fucking
sheep and 'getting pissed' and 'tits' and 'arse'. It used to be such a
polite, congenial place, did alt.horror."
- (Dr. Phibes, alt.horror, 12/16/01)
Christopher Adams
genres; Inventors, et cetera, are not, but just recognisable as
semi-distinct subsets.
loucyphre
<mhacde...@optushome.com.au> shat:
>Lou, I think you misread it. War, Women's, and Westerns *are* official
>genres; Inventors, et cetera, are not, but just recognisable as
>semi-distinct subsets.
So, no lynchings then? Hmmph, ruin my fun. Americans used to thrive on
lynchings, heh.
John W. Donaldson
> > W. Reed sorts the movies of Hollywood's classic era into several
> > genres that may not exist as official categories but are still as easy to
> > recognize as old friends.
>
> John, I don't think she's got the idea of "genre" wrong; she's just talking
> about kind of mini-genres. Hence the "may not exist" part.
Maybe in the most general terms I might agree. See definition below:
______________________________________________________________
*
"genre" definition
n.
A type or class: “Emaciated famine victims... on television
focused a new genre of attention on the continent” (Helen
Kitchen).
A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked
by a distinctive style, form, or content: “his six String
Quartets... the most important works in the genre since
Beethoven's” (Time).
A realistic style of painting that depicts scenes from everyday life.
Synonyms: brand, category, character, class, classification,
fashion, genus, group, kind, school, sort, species, style
Concept: status/class
______________________________________________________________________________
In real world terms her usage is so broad and undefined that it
negates any useful worth in the way she uses the term to attempt to
define anything with it.
How do you justify using genre as a description/classification
encompassing "official" categories (ie: Western, Horror, Comedy,
Action-Adventure, etc.) with thousands of entries with an
obvious(IMHO) "sub-set", "sub-genre", or "mini-genre" (pick one) of
500 or less entries (Spaghetti Western, Slasher, Giallo, etc.) with
variations (even under the qualifier "may not exist") as described in
the line "We could add to Reed's list such genres as the Incurably Ill
Child movie, "<snip> of which there may be 20 entries.
It reduces the entire article to an incomprehensible abstraction
negating any semblance of classification or definition of type.
In short the rational of using the term as some form of classifier is
bullshit.
As for her comments on META, it is very obvious to me she is writing
the article without any knowledge (or purposely ignoring that
knowledge to make her point)of film history. Much the same "in-joke"
self-parody excesses have always existed in film. "postmodern" ... HA!
It's just we don't get the jokes anymore.