America on Film - Sean Griffin

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characterization” often draws upon pre‐existing social and cultural stereotypes. Some may seem benign, like villains wearing black. Others, like repeatedly casting Asians as mysterious mobsters, or Hispanics as gang members, can have vast effects on how those identified as Asian or Hispanic are treated outside the movie house.

      In the linear design of Hollywood narrative form, each complication in the attempt to reach the protagonist’s goal leads to yet another complication. These twists and turns escalate toward the climax, the most intense point of conflict, wherein the antagonist is defeated by the protagonist. In the final moments of the film, all the complications are resolved, and all questions that had been posed during the film are answered. This is known as closure. Hollywood’s use of the happy ending, a specific form of closure, ties up all of the story’s loose ends and frequently includes the protagonist and the love interest uniting as a romantic/sexual couple. Even when the couple is not together at the end of the film (as in Titanic [1997]), the narrative is designed to make that separation acceptable to the audience. In Titanic, the ending may be sad, but the mystery of the diamond necklace has been resolved, and the film suggests that Jack and Rose will reunite in heaven. Closure is a potent narrative tool in managing ideological conflict, because closure makes it seem as if all problems have been solved. Any actual ideological issues or social strife that may have been raised by a film are allegedly resolved by narrative closure, and thus there is no longer any need for spectators to think about them. Closure in Hollywood film tends to reaffirm the status quo of American society.

      Since the ideological status quo of American society is white patriarchal capitalism, it should come as no surprise that most Hollywood films (throughout its history and still today) encode white patriarchal capitalism as central and desirable via both Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. First, the protagonist of most Hollywood films is constructed as a straight white male seeking wealth or power. He emerges victorious at the end of the film, proving his inherent superiority over those who challenged him. In consistently drawing audience attention to and celebrating his acts, the invisible style reinforces his “natural” abilities while not allowing the audience to think about the often far‐fetched qualities of those heroics. Since the white male commands the most narrative attention, the (usually white) female love interest is relegated to a minor or supporting part. Whereas the male is defined by his actions, job, and/or principles, the heroine is defined chiefly by her beauty and/or sex appeal. Their romance affirms patriarchal heterosexuality as well as the desirability of same‐race coupling. If homosexuals or people of color appear in the film at all, they might be associated with the villains or relegated to smaller supporting parts, in effect supporting the dominance of the white male hero and his female love interest.

Still frame from the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom displaying Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) together with the Third World children.

      copyright © 1984, Paramount.

      But haven’t Hollywood representations of women and minorities changed over the years? Haven’t the formulas been adapted to be less sexist and racist? Yes and no. There are now Hollywood films made in which the hero is not white, not male, or (more recently) not heterosexual. Recent films like Wonder Woman (2017), Black Panther (2018), and Captain Marvel (2019) have been understood by filmmakers and audiences alike as real game changers on that front. And Hollywood has always made a type of film that features female protagonists, the so‐called woman’s film or chick flick (discussed more fully in later chapters), but these stories usually emphasize the female character’s desire for a man, and thus reinforce patriarchy in their own way. It is true that black and Hispanic actors in Hollywood have made gains in the last few decades and now regularly play the hero part in a handful of movies every year. But even then, these are hegemonic negotiations within the dominant white patriarchal ideology and not inversions of it: most African American protagonists are still male, and most female protagonists are still white. The very few homosexual protagonists in recent Hollywood film are usually male and white. While the real world is comprised of people of all different races, genders, classes, sexualities, and physical abilities, the world depicted in Hollywood film usually posits straight white men as central and heroic, and everyone else as peripheral (or even non‐existent).

      The drive for simplicity and obviousness in the classical Hollywood style has other implications for Hollywood narrative form. Not only are Hollywood storylines excessively linear, using simplified stock characters engaged in clear‐cut struggles ending in closure, but Hollywood often consciously reuses popular (that is, already understood) storylines and characters. The proliferation of remakes and sequels guarantees that most audiences are already familiar with many main characters and basic narrative situations. The Saw and Paranormal Activity film franchises, for example, rely on audience knowledge not only of the previous films in the series, but also of the specific formal elements that go into making a scary movie. Many Hollywood films are thus identifiable by their genre, a term that this book uses to refer to a specific type of fictional Hollywood film such as the horror film, the Western, the war movie, the musical, or the gangster film. As will be explored in future chapters, racial and ethnic markers are activated within genres in unique and interesting ways. For example, Americans of Italian descent (and more recently Americans of African heritage) have been closely tied to the gangster film, while the representation of Native Americans in Hollywood film is almost exclusively tied to the Western.

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