Genre & Narrative Theory

How To Analyse Genre: A Brief Introduction - 'The Western'

Genre theory is used in the study of films in order to facilitate the categorisation of films. Genre are dependent on numerous factors such as storyline, whom the director is, what are the audience expectations and what conventions are used.

In order to understand Genre we may look at several examples. When we analyse 'The Western' we may expect to find gunfights, horses and indians, the solitary cowboy and to some degree the actors and directors of such films (all regular conventions). They also expect certain content and a certain style of filmmaking (camera/setting/sound).

When analysing any type/genre of film it is important to recognise and discuss those elements that make it fall within a specific, or possibly a number of categories.  

Extract: Postmillennial Cinema and the Avenging Fatale in 'Sin City'

A New Kind of Tart (With a Heart)

Sin City is based on a combination of graphic novels written and illustrated by Frank Miller. It is a place where most of the authority figures are corrupt, turning a blind eye to vile serial killers with a penchant for human flesh or torturing children; allowing them to run rampant because of their connections to the “right” people. The femme fatales of Sin City are gun-toting, action-heroine–style prostitutes. They have a fragile truce with the police, who allow them to control a section of the city called “Old Town” in return for a share of the profits and free entertainment at parties. Although they are potentially lethal, these fatale figures stand out in that they lack the essential trait of dishonesty that has traditionally formed the basic construct of the deadly woman. Uncharacteristically, they are not intent on underhandedly stripping men of their wealth and dignity; rather, they are more closely aligned to sex worker Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) in the 1971 thriller Klute, who has a very business-like attitude towards the men with whom she has relations. As Dwight (Clive Owen), an on-and-off lover of one of the prostitutes, explains: “If you’ve got the cash and play by the rules they’ll make all your dreams come true.” It is only if you cross them that “you’re a corpse.” Not only are they straightforward in their dealings with men, for some, the women are true heroines. In Marv’s (Mickey Rourke) opinion, Goldie (Jamie King) is an “angel of mercy” as well as a friend and more when he needed one, showing him kindness that he had never experienced before. For Dwight (Clive Owen), Gail (Rosario Dawson) is his warrior woman and his Valkyrie. And although Miho (Devon Aoki) is a lethal ninja killer, she has a compassionate side, rescuing Dwight from certain death as he drowns in a tar pit. As he thankfully gushes: “Miho, you’re an angel, a saint, you’re mother Teresa, you’re Elvis, you’re God.”

Much of the frankness surrounding the women in Sin City relates to the way the commodification of sex is presented. The fatale figure as prostitute is a motif that has been present since 1940s US cinema. Fritz Lang’s 1945 classic Scarlet Street is a notable example, although in such films the fatale’s occupation in seedy industries such as sex work serves to further cement the character as highly untrustworthy and criminal. This image of the prostitute is often at odds with other sex-worker representations in a broader range of cinematic styles and genres. As Tasker (1998: 93) argues, whilst the femme fatale and prostitute are both stereotypes that articulate gender identities in relation to constructions of independence, self-reliance, and sexuality, the prostitute is often depicted as selling her sexuality in a straightforward “down-to-earth” manner and is repeatedly invoked to signify a position of relative “honesty,” as a “tart with a heart”. 

However, while the women of “Old Town” lack the inherent deceptiveness often linked to classical Hollywood fatale incarnations, Sin City is also a place where all the women are whores (Bould, 2005: 110), as well as being literally reduced to bits of meat by cannibal Kevin (Elijah Wood). According to Diane Negra (2009: 86-87), contemporary postfeminist discourse is marked by a new respectability (and even at times idealization) of women who are employed in the sex industry: “What is certainly clear is that the female sex worker is becoming one of popular culture’s most regular archetypes of paid labour” (Negra, 2009: 100). Negra draws on the “teen romance” The Girl Next Door (2004), where an honors student falls in love with his glamorous porn-star neighbour, as one of many examples. By depicting the heroine in the role of sex- industry worker, the threat of the urban career woman is defused. Therefore, representations such as this undercut and repudiate feminism, ensuring the restabilization of gender order (Negra, 2009: 87; McRobbie, 2009: 18). As Coulthard argues, by situating women in Sin City as prostitutes, gender clarity is restored (2007: 169). This sits in contrast to fatale representations in 1990s thrillers, where gender equality is undermined (and male anxiety alleviated) by positioning the career woman as a greedy, isolated psychopath.

Extract from:
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies Issue 26 October 2013
Postmillennial Cinema and the Avenging Fatale in Sin City, Hard Candy and Descent
by: Samantha Jane Lindop, University of Queensland

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District 9 - Genre/Representation

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‘Sin City’ (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller)

Sin City brought noir back to its pulp-magazine origins, using green-screen CGI technology to exactly recreate the exquisitely etched, near-monochrome ink-splash world of four of comic-book legend Frank Miller’s Sin City stories, all set in the seething dystopian hellhole of the imaginary Basin City. The actors (Bruce Willis et al) are shot and lit by Rodriguez to merge seamlessly into animated panels from Miller’s pages. For anyone who’s ever been a comic-book fan, it’s an exhilarating experience – one that’s much truer to the Pop Art quality of, say, the Marvel or DC superhero comics of the 1960s than any ‘realistic’ adaptation of those has yet achieved. There’s apt usage of Miller’s trademark white-out-of-black effects: white blood, the rectangles of sticking plaster on the rock-like head of doomed thug Marv (Mickey Rourke), the figure of Dwight (Clive Owen) falling as a flat white shape against black tar. Similarly enjoyable are the privileged small details – eyes, a bed, a dress – picked out in colour at key moments. 

Transparently immersed in a graphic-novel vice world, Sin City is able to push its levels of violence – and show nearly all women as lissome, semi-clothed or naked S&M vamps – to a degree you’d never get away with in a realistic-looking movie. The film is a relentless hymn to bloodlust, with a sidebar concern for romantic promises. At the scene of the massacre of bad guys at the end of the fourth story ‘The Big Fat Kill’, wanted murderer Dwight – who has engineered the doom of gangsters trying to take over the prostitute- run Old Town – describes his machine-gun toting former lover thus: “The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter... and so am I.” Marv, the implacable super-tough hunk of ‘The Hard Goodbye’ section, extols the pleasures of torture. It’s comical – in the gallows sense – to see how blatantly Rodriguez takes noir’s position as a site of repressed and undirected desires and opens up the valve. 

As with A History of Violence, there’s a mock-epic quality to the way graphic-novel voiceover description and speech-bubble dialogue is written that also tends to grant further distance from the real world, allowing greater licence. Sin City is fantasy fiction of a kind that caters blatantly to the urges of young males, cashing in on the fact that we remain fond of our adolescent pleasures in later life.

Source: Sight & Sound Feb 2013