Blond Hair and Crossed Eyes; or How I Learned To Quit Worrying About Genre and Love the "Knight Rider" Opening Voice-Over
What is genre? What's it for? How do we assign entertainments to one genre or another? What makes something a horror film, and how do we distinguish it from a thriller? When is something better described as a drama, and when it is better described as a comedy, and when do we use that zany portmanteau "dramedy"? And does the word "dramedy" actually mean anything, or is it just a verbal noise-belch thrown out there by people who can't come up with a more accurate description?
So many questions. And if you ask any cinema fan, you'll receive any number of answers. (You can even, if you're so inclined, find some of my other thoughts on the matter here and here.) One of my favorite approaches in this realm comes from Carol J. Clover, a professor at Berkeley, who notes in a footnote of her enchanting 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, that in terms of genre she was "guided by the most part by video store rental categorizations, which, despite some variation from store to store, seem to capture better than any definition I know what the public senses to be 'horror.'"
It's is a delightful notion, based on the idea that if you want to get answers about movies, sometimes it's best to go ask the fanatics. This has certainly been my experience, and when I worked at Showcase Video in Missoula, Montana in my youth – which had, at the time, somewhere in the range of 8,000 movies on DVD – we spent hours debating these exact questions, not only because we had nothing else to do but also because we were trying to save ourselves time and energy: if something like Heathers was cogently categorized, then a customer could find it on their own, and we wouldn't have to interrupt our conversation about how closely Straight Story accorded (or didn't accord) with David Lynch's established filmmaking principals to stroll grumpily out into the aisles and actually do what we were getting paid to do.
During those long nights, a fellow cash register jockey, whose name I've forgotten but who had a mullet and moonlighted as a DJ at the local classic rock station, offered a piece of wisdom along these lines. "Movies are exactly like people," he used to say. "They all come in families."
This seems to me to be helpful, starting with the way it delineates what genre is not.
It's not a set of definitions, nor is it a set of rules, nor is it something composed of hard boundaries. It is instead a set of recurring traits brought about by lineage, a series of sometimes overlapping patterns that express themselves in a multitude of expected and unexpected ways.
This idea was all brought back to me last weekend in New Orleans. One night in the Garden District, as some friends and I were sitting at a wrought-iron table on a second story balcony with a terrific slant, slow traffic and jazz music creeping through the dense air beneath us, one of them made an admission. Sometimes, as he's trying to fall asleep at night, he puts on episodes of the old David Hasselhoff show Knight Rider.
Another of us, unfamiliar with the details of the show, asked him what it was about. I can tell you exactly what it's about, he said with a sly smile. He then recited the show's opening voice-over, which is played over a montage of thrilling scenes, and which, true to my friend's word, lays out every episode of the show in its entirety:
"Knight Rider. A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of man who does not exist: Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless in a world of criminals who operate above the law."
At the time, perhaps because of the feeling in the New Orleans air, or the feeling in our bloodstreams, this slayed us. It seemed wonderfully silly. And it still does. But now, back in L.A. with the film and TV industry gurgling around me, it also strikes me as an almost perfect lens through which to understand the idea of genre as a kind of family resemblance, no more or less than an aid to helping people understand the kind of story a story is telling, based on its inherited traits.
To start with, take Knight Rider's claim that its protagonist is a "young loner."
It's immediately apparent that this describes a vast number of the American screen heroes. From James Dean's Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause to Martin Sheen's Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator II to Chris Pratt's Owen Grady in the new Jurassic Park films, and on and on, ad infinitum, one of the classic templates for our heroes is of a person alienated from society and burdened with the pressure of seeing what others cannot, having to do what they will not, possessing the abilities they do not.
They are loners, exiled because of the skills they possess; put differently, it's exactly the qualities that allow them to save others that also cause them to be cast out from society.
Jim Stark is a rebel who sees the fatuous world of adulthood with a clarity that both severs him from that world and allows his fellow teenagers (and us in the audience of the movie) to believe in him; Captain Willard is a killer, driven almost mad by his skills and yet needed by his superiors (and America) to attempt to clean up their mistakes and consciences by employing those skills to assassinate Colonel Kurtz; Sarah Connor knows what will happen in the future and must save her world from that fate, even though that knowledge means that the very people she has to save think she's insane; Owen Grady is similarly deemed crazy by everyone in his world because he's learned to communicate with the velociraptors, but it's that communication that is going to help him save humanity and defeat the other dinosaurs.
This trope is immediately recognizable to us, so much so that when we hear the voice-over intonation of Knight Rider saying it out loud, we're tempted to chuckle. It's a trait, like red hair or a cleft chin, in the terms of my video-store friend, that we recognize in these kinds of stories and thus use to group them together. It's also a trait that can tell us a great deal about the way the genre connects to American society. For there is something resonant to us in the notion of the loner, the alienated, the misunderstood, something very American in it.
Similarly, our experience of these people's stories is very much an experience of embarking on a "shadowy flight into the dangerous world" that they inhabit, in the words of Knight Rider's inimitable narrator. Which is to say that another key element of these kinds of films, something like the way a narrowness of the hips or a thickness of the wrists gets passed down from generation to generation, is the feeling of entering into a slightly altered realm in which there are terrible perils not present in our own existence.
The Clanton family existed in real life, but as they appear on the screen in My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or Tombstone they take on a larger, symbolic presence. This plays out differently in each film, but the sensation of viewing each is precisely of a kind of shadowy flight into a dangerous world, a descent into a place where there are darkened reflections of our own existence surrounding us. It is a threatening, menacing place, and it's only through the actions of our heroic young loners that this menace can be defeated, thus ridding not only the shadowy world of danger, but also, by that magical extension of movies, our own world.
It's the same in Jaws (a world in which massive sharks lurk in the depths beneath us) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (a world in which if the Nazis are not defeated they will gain control of a supernatural power); the same in Point Blank (in which there are mysterious crime syndicates operating just beneath the surface of normal life) and The Conversation (where wealthy people kill one another in impossible-to-trace ways) and John Wick (where there are so many assassins that they have their own fancy hotels).
And on and on. The dangerous worlds into which our young loners venture bear a kind family resemblance, resonating, like a certain facial expression or timber of voice, with us each time we experience them and reminding us of their relatives.
And what does our young loner do in this dark, shadowy world? They champion "the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless" by wrestling with antagonists that operate "above the law."
The first part of this idea – fighting for the oppressed – is straightforward enough, but the second is fascinating. What does it mean to be "above the law"? It means that the baddies are in possession of something – be it power, or magic, or secrecy, or cleverness – that elevates them above the normal constraints that keep the world in balance.
So in Star Wars Luke fights for the oppressed citizens of his galaxy against forces – in the Empire and Darth Vader – which have powers that make them invulnerable to anyone but him. So Chief Brody struggles against the giant shark in Jaws that cannot be touched by the normal methods through which humans control the natural world (namely the hordes of hapless shark hunters that swarm out to the ocean before he finally takes matters into his own hands) in order that the woebegone residents and tourists on Amity Island can enjoy their summer and not get eaten.
"He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct," says the general of the man who must be assassinated in Apocalypse Now. He's pointing out just what the narrator of Knight Rider is: the world of the film is beset by a force that has transcended whatever laws might be said to keep it in check. Screams Al Capone about Elliot Ness in The Untouchables "I want him dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground!" And we know he has the power to do it, for he is not simply untouchable, he is above the law. What can constrain the terrible aliens in Alien? Or the intergalactic bad hombres of the Avengers franchise? Or Hans Gruber and his pals in Die Hard?
Nothing. They're going to win, and the innocents are going to suffer…except for the timely actions of our hero. And this is exactly what makes these kinds of stories the kinds of stories they are. For it is this power of being above the law that gives the world our loner enters into its danger and puts the innocents at threat; if what the bad guys possessed was simply an ordinary power, we would not need a hero at all.
Are these movies all the same? No. Are you and your mother the same? I hope not, because then you would be more like identical twins than parent and child, which would be odd. But you bear similarities to her, perhaps so great as to be virtually identical in some areas, and perhaps so slight as to be entirely negligible in others.
This is what genre is. A set of resemblances and inheritances. Like families, genres change over the years, sometimes bringing in new blood so that you suddenly get a generation who all have weird ears and are phenomenal athletes, and sometimes almost magically pulling something out of the past so that you get a grandchild who's the spitting image of a great-grandfather.
And what do genres do? Like a well-organized series of signposts in a cosmic video store, they help us locate movies, help us understand what other movies might be clustered around them, help us think through the times when strange marriages or weird offspring occur, help us find our way from one place to the next. This is useful, becasue any massive video store, you'll note (or those of you who remember video stores will note) is akin to a maze.
What don't they do? Well, they don't have any definitional ability; they aren't restrictive; they aren't set in stone; in a very real sense, they don't really exist. They can help us understand movies, that is, can help us see them in new and different ways; but they can never be used to constrain, or wall off, because if you go back far enough, we're all related: human to human, human to ape, human to all mammals, and even further. And it's the same with film.
So the next time someone in person or online gets in your face to yell at you about how The Shining isn't really a horror film, or The Silence of the Lambs really is a horror film and not a thriller, or Written on the Wind is really a comedy, or The Road Warrior is really a western, just smile and tell them to go watch the introduction to Knight Rider.
It'll do wonders for them.
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