Genre studies – final essay

What role does spectacle have to play in definitions of genre? Do different genres deal with different kinds of spectacle or does spectacle cross generic boundaries? In your discussion you may want to compare the different types of spectacle to be found in epics and melodramas.

Spectacle is central to the appeal of cinematic entertainment. It may exist as a stylistic flourish contained in the mis-en-scene – for instance lighting, costuming and set detail – which exists within the diegesis; or it may be a scene in itself, intended either to propel or stall the narrative, and almost certainly for its thrill or shock value. An analysis of the different types and purposes of spectacle – as style, as shock, as sexuality, and as a means of generic definition – will help to determine whether spectacle in the melodrama or the epic crosses generic boundaries, or has ends specific to its genre. A great deal of the spectacle in melodramas and epics is either implicitly or blatantly sexual in nature, and this allows an investigation of whether spectacle is gendered, just as genre categorisation is gendered, if we are to accept the appraisal of theorists like Schatz. In my study of the nature of spectacle, I will discuss three Douglas Sirk films, All That Heaven Allows (1956), Written on the Wind (1957), and to a lesser extent, Imitation of Life (1959), as examples of the family melodrama of the 1950s; and two epic films of approximately the same period, Ben Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960).

Epic films are characterised by spectacle at every level. Visual, aural and narrative flourishes and excesses abound; cinemascope, Technicolour and casts of thousands are mandatory, as are grandiose sets, mammoth production budgets and lengthy running time. Yet the recognition that these spectacular semantic elements are central to the concept of an epic film also leads to the misconception that they define the genre. Thus, the term epic has been loosely applied to mean any blockbuster production with the aforementioned characteristics. I have used David Elley’s more narrow definition and construed the word epic to refer to a particular type of historical film, usually set in pre-Christian times. The use of an ancient context is important, as it allows a particular types of spectacle, unique to the genre, to be played out. Many of the films set in early or pre-Christian films have religious overtones which present possibilities for special effects; momentous occasions involving the male body, not only as competitor, but as weapon/site of violence in itself (such as crucifixions, gladiatorial combat and chariot races); certain types of pre-Christian behavior which would probably otherwise be frowned upon in conservative 1950s America; and, because of the settings, (usually ancient Rome or the Middle East) spectacular scenery. Thus, in Spartacus, when Crassus speaks allegorically about bowing down before the splendour of Rome, it could be taken literally as an invitation to the audience to take in the elaborate visuality of the film.

Spectacle in the family melodrama of the 1950s resides not only in the narrative – which assaults the viewer with coincidence, misunderstanding and calamity – but also in the lavish way in which the text is presented – resplendent in hyperreal Technicolour, overwrought supra-diegetic music and opulent costumes. Thus, in the way that it prioritizes its semantic elements and visual style, the melodrama could be described as similar to the epic. Fred Camper suggests that the pleasure of looking at a melodrama, of taking in its formal qualities, is part of the spectacle. For him, aesthetic beauty is an end-in-itself.

The whole point of Sirk is not to lead us to some more physical experiencing of things, but to show us the beauty of his anti-physical, two dimensional perspective….Ultimately, as an artist, Sirk does not deal in despair but in aesthetic beauty.

Other theorists hold the more likely view that Sirk’s penchant for vibrant colours and lavish set design served to undercut and problematise the narrative, showing the characters lives as somehow too rosy to be true. Thus, the beauty is an ironic statement which, far from rendering the narrative two dimensional, serves to highlight the tragedy and falseness of the opulence, which belies the despair and plight of the characters. Thus, the view that in Sirkian melodrama, style is a spectacle in itself, independent of narrative, is to ignore the true spectacle of melodrama – emotion.

The stylistic spectacle in melodrama serves to critique the stultified, materialistic 1950s American dream. With the notable exception of the Rock Hudson character, the central characters in Written on the Wind are all intrinsically unhappy, despite the fact that they are successful, socially mobile and attractive. The use of vivid colour, luxuriant settings and costumes (which throw into stark relief the bleak emotional states of the characters) and mood-altering orchestral scores also serve to heighten the sense of fatalism and melodrama, with the effect of drawing the audience into the tragedy of the events. The use of tragedy as spectacle might be said to be unique to melodrama. Whilst the notion of emotional turmoil and distress crosses generic boundaries, only in melodrama is it so heightened, so intense as to constitute a spectacle in itself – provoking tears. Within melodramatic narrative, one expects to feel remorse, regret, loathing – a multitude of excessive emotions which would be bearable or ‘normal’ had they not been magnified or exacerbated by

“chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings.”

Indeed, the epic uses melodramatic emotion in a similar way to the melodrama, (causing it to be dubbed ‘the male melodrama’); but it does so with a resigned acceptance – even optimism – which forbids tears, and relies less on such devices to propel the narrative. The final scene in Spartacus bears comparison with the corresponding final moments of Imitation of Life. In Spartacus, Varinia says good-bye to her husband as he hangs dying on the cross, before resignedly being driven away from him by Batiatus. In Imitation of Life, Sara Jane, having rejected her mother and started a career as a showgirl, returns too late, and cries over her mother’s coffin having never had a chance to say goodbye. The scenes are similar in some respects – there is grief over the death of a loved one, final good-byes are being said, and both films end with the future of the surviving character being of vital importance to the continuation of the story beyond the credits. Yet in Spartacus, emotion gives way to fate, to more transcendent goals. Characters are imbued with a righteousness which compels them to accept their plight. There is at least an implied understanding between characters of their destiny, and a feeling that events have unfolded as they should. In Imitation of Life, there is remorse, self-hatred, despair, and little hope of redemption, despite the seemingly happy resolution of the finale. It is this excess of emotion and contrivance of fate which combine to create the spectacle. While this particular type of spectacle is unique to melodrama, Linda Williams argues that its impact and consequence, in terms of audience response, is universal, and compares its excess with the fear and repulsion evoked by horror, and the sexual excitement and arousal of pornography. In effect she asserts, spectacle affects all orifices. Thus, it could be argued that the effect of spectacle crosses generic boundaries, with similar consequences for audiences – what differs is the way in which the spectator is “thrilled”.

Yet the uses of spectacle in melodrama are so complex and varied that it is difficult to discern a pattern by which to determine genre on the basis of spectacle alone. For example, spectacle in melodrama does not elicit the same response from all who see it – as Sirk himself said of his happy endings ” It makes the crowd happy. To the few it makes the aporia more transparent.” Thus, the final union of Cary and Ron in All That Heaven Allows, and the funeral scene at the end of Imitation of Life, both with their almost artificial vibrancy, and abundance of signifiers – such as the deer wandering up to the window on the picturesque snowy evening, adding the final touch to the cliché, and ultimately confirming the scene as such – involve a conflict between narrative and mis-en-scene, both of which are of equal importance in contributing to the spectacle of melodrama. Thus, the viewer of the melodrama is cued to so many conflicting forms of spectacle, that the ultimate response is either one of disbelief, or suspension of disbelief.

A melodramatic spectacle of a very different kind is Rock Hudson, who starred in both All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. He has an important symbolic, signifying function within the narratives of both films (in which he portrays similar characters) as well as being pure spectacle, an unproblematized “nature man” around which the other more complex characters revolve. Unlike the characters which surround him, he has no guilt or repression, and is not bound by the etiquette of the class and status conscious sociopaths who surround him. In Written on the Wind, he is the focus of the envy of males (particularly Kyle, his best friend), and he is coveted by the women. The audience, similarly, views him as an object of envy and/or desire – and he is clearly projected as such in the frames in which we observe him – the ideal of hulking masculinity. In both Written of the Wind and All That Heaven Allows, he is the passive, stoic ‘eye of the storm’. He is the cause of the injudicious, impulsive decisions made by those around him, yet he assumes an (unusually) passive male role, as does John Gavin in Imitation of Life. He leaves his relationship with Cary in her hands until it is too late; he is subordinate to her in status and in age. He is a straightforward male spectacle and object, leaving the control of the narrative, and the gaze, to those around him.

Steve Neale suggests that Rock Hudson is feminized by the camera in order to be safely depicted as the object of an explicitly erotic gaze. Underlying this is the assumption that women alone are supposed to be sexually objectified. He does not attempt to describe exactly how Hudson is feminized. Perhaps a better argument would be that because melodrama was – as it was pejoratively described – a “women’s” genre, it thus catered to women’s (heterosexual) desires in the same way that the rest of the film industry catered to men, and was therefore ’safe’ from accusations that it might be encouraging homo-erotic voyeurism in its viewers. Perhaps this is the reason why the musical, also, was able to offer depictions of masculinity on display – because, as genres of order, rather than disorder , the melodrama and the musical catered to a largely female audience. In this way, types of spectacle can be said to have been divided at least across gender, if not genre lines.

It has been contended that in epics and other action films, the male body cannot be put on display unless that display has a purpose or is in some way justified – usually possible charges of homo-eroticism are diffused under a pretext of the propulsion of the narrative, or of an action sequence. Often the objectification of a male in an action, western or epic film is presented as unnatural – it would not occur if the status quo were not somehow ruptured by an evil, bad form of patriarchy. The enemy, for whom the hero’s body is usually bared (in order to be punished) is depraved, and (especially in the epic, where there is scope for the portrayal of the decadence of pre-Christian ‘amorality’) often coded as homosexual – for example, Crassus. In Spartacus, Draba the Ethiopian pays, supposedly for having refused to kill his opponent; or, by another reading, for the gratuitous display of his body, and the refusal to make it a purposeful display. For this transgression, he must be violated in some way, to justify this display. This necessity is most blatant when his (by now ineffectual, and thus no longer sexually threatening) body is strung up for the perusal of the other gladiators. The pretext for this display of his naked, gleaming body is thus defiantly re-asserted by his death. As Steve Neale notes:

We see male bodies stylised and fragmented by close-ups, but our look is not direct, it is heavily mediated by the looks of the characters involved. And those looks are marked not by desire, but rather by fear, by hatred or aggression.

Unless, of course, we are female, in which case our gaze is directed by the women within the text – in this case, the two Roman women whose thinly veiled purpose is to objectify the gladiators in an unequivocally sexual way. This is obvious by the criteria on which their choices are predicated – they must be physically pleasing to the eye. It is interesting to note that the only male who takes part in this particular appraisal of the gladiators is Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), who is depicted as amoral and effete. The audience is placed more or less exactly in the position of the decadent Roman spectators. Thus, under the guise of historical accuracy, it is possible for the gladiators to be displayed as more explicitly sexualised than would be possible in a genre set in contemporary society and thus bound by its mores. Ina Rae Hark notes that in Spartacus, the gladiatorial combat serves no real narrative purpose but to thrill – the Romans are watching for precisely the same reason that we, the audience, have come to watch the film – to be entertained. Thus, the spectator is implicated in the proceedings, and the spectacle of the film becomes somewhat self-reflexive. This can be contrasted with the chariot race in Ben Hur – between Ben Hur and his one-time friend Messala – which is excusable as it is not mere spectacle, but a matter of honour.

The term spectacle appears to have a number of applications. It may be extra-diegetic or it may be stylistic. It may have the more weighty function of propelling the narrative, or causing the audience to call the narrative into question, or it may be pure spectacle. Trying to categorise spectacle seems to be as exhausting a task as attempting to categorise and define genre. Suffice it to say that certain forms of spectacle, when used in conjunction with other forms of spectacle, may help to establish a film as belonging to a particular genre. For example, both the epic and the melodrama use grandiose scores and vibrant technicolour. However, the ends to which these are used are different, and they are used in conjunction with other forms of spectacle. The spectacle of the epic – its attention to history, to detail, to realism of set design and to producing the genuine article, might be said to have a purely commercial motive, and thus be spectacle intended for its sheer crowd-drawing potential, predicated on authenticity. By contrast, the stylistic flourishes (excesses?) of melodrama are not intended to increase realism; they work to precisely the opposite effect, undercutting the truth of the ‘happy’ ending. The use of emotion in these genres differs in that in melodrama, emotion is heightened to become spectacle in itself. In this regard, the types of spectacle employed by melodrama and the epic respectively are completely at odds – in melodrama the narrative itself acts as spectacle, whereas in the epic, spectacle is often presented at the expense or delay of the narrative. Although both genres use masculinity as spectacle, the narrative outcomes of such displays are very different, even though the erotic impact on the audience may be equally as strong. The epic requires some justification for its objectification of masculinity, whereas the melodrama to some extent reverses the roles of subject and object of the classical Hollywood film.