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Prologue to a Study of Myth and Genre in American Movies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Richard Slotkin
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Myth and Genre are essential terms in the vocabulary of cultural historians. They refer us to the apparent continuities we perceive in the development of culture and of the various arts, professions, disciplines, and institutions that give culture its form. Myth has to do with the continuity of meanings: the transmission from generation to generation of a characteristic system of beliefs and values, embodied in a continuously evolving language of symbols, fables, images, and fictions. Genre has to do with the continuity of forms: the persistence from generation to generation of particular ways of telling stories, making symbols, structuring systems of representation. Each concept offers a special insight into the workings of cultural systems. Myth directs our attention toward the ways in which our material and social history shape our culture, and is in turn shaped by it. It highlights the aspects of our ceremonies and fictions that represent and preserve bits of history, deploying them as metaphors to interpret the present for us, enabling culture to serve as a kind of collective memory. It emphasizes the connection between cultural productions and ideology (in the broadest sense of that term), and it emphasizes the ways in which the historical development of our fictions reflects and justifies the social order as it changes over time. It suggests that the logic of ideology, in dialectic with the recalcitrant materials of the real world, is the informing logic of cultural history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 407 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This essay was adapted from part of a forthcoming book on movie genres by Jeanine Basinger, Joseph Reed, and Richard Slotkin. Research for this project was generously supported by grants from Wesleyan University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

1. I have undertaken fuller discussions of the theory of myth in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar, ch. 1; and in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1984).Google Scholar See also the definition in Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 176–8.Google Scholar

2. The concepts of genre I find most useful are developed in Frye, Northrop, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), especially pp. 5–36Google Scholar; Green, Martin, Dreams of Adventure and Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 53–5Google Scholar; Kubler, George, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 31–82.Google Scholar

3. Wise, Gene, “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly [hereafter, AQ] 31: 2 (Bibliography Issue), pp. 295–6, 319–25Google Scholar; Henretta, James A., “Social History as Lived and Written,” American Historical Review [hereafter, AHR] 84:5 (12, 1979), 1293–1322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Wise, , “Taradigm Dramas,” pp. 293–337Google Scholar; Kuklik, Bruce A., “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” AQ 24:4 (10 1972), pp. 435–50, especially 429–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Nisbet, Robert, “Genealogy, Growth and Other Metaphors,” New Literary History [hereafter, NLH] 1:3 (Spring 1970), pp. 350–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Sahlins, Marshall, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in The Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1981), pp. 7, 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 3; Turner, Victor W., “Process, System and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis,” Daedalus (Summer 1977), 63–4, 72–5Google Scholar; The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 94–7, 102–11Google Scholar; and Barthes, Roland, “Mythology Today,” in Mythologies, tr. Lavers, Annette (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 129, 142.Google Scholar

7. Green, , Dreams of Adventure, p. 53.Google Scholar

8. Williams, Raymond, quoted in Henretta, , “Social History as Lived and Written,” p. 1303Google Scholar; Sahlins, , Historical Metaphors, pp. 8, 72.Google Scholar

9. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery and Romance, pp. 6, 29–30Google Scholar; Clarens, Carlos, Crime Movies: From Griffith to The Godfather and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980, p. 11Google Scholar; and also Lenihan, John H., Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 4, 9.Google Scholar

10. Balio, Tino, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1976), chaps. 8–9 and Pt. IIIGoogle Scholar; Jarvie, I. C., Movies and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970)Google Scholar, Pt. II; Jowett, Garth, Film, the Democratic Art: A Social History of the American Film (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976) chaps. 2, 4, 9, 13.Google Scholar

11. The theoretical argument and historical outline given here are adapted from my larger study of myth and ideology in nineteenth-century America, The Fatal Environment. The “red-blooded” writers—Owen Wister, Jack London, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, and Stewart Edward White—are treated in a second volume, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century, scheduled for publication by Atheneum in 1985.Google Scholar On the decadence of dime-novel genres, the most useful work is still Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), especially chaps. 9–10.Google Scholar

12. On the nature of “producing communities” see Boorstin, Daniel, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 89–166 and 537–46Google Scholar; Gitlin, Todd, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 2–18, 249–82Google Scholar; Slobin, Mark, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 1–31.Google Scholar On the Hollywood producing community see Balio, , American Film IndustryGoogle Scholar, chap. 4; Jarvie, , Movies and Society Pt. I and pp. 179–94.Google ScholarBrownlow, Kevin, The Parade's Gone By (New York: Knopf, 1968)Google Scholar is invaluable on Hollywood's formative years.

13. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres: An Approach to a Critical Theory of Popular Film (New York: Dell Books, 1977), p. 11Google Scholar; Clarens, , Crime Movies, pp. 10–31Google Scholar; French, Philip, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: Viking, 1974), pp. 17–18Google Scholar; McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 11–21Google Scholar; Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1979), pp. ix–xiGoogle Scholar; Jarvie, , Movies and Society, chaps. 10–13.Google Scholar

14. Kitses, Jim, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship Within the Western (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 8–27Google Scholar; McArthur, , Underworld USA, pp. 11–58Google Scholar; Shadoian, , Dreams and Dead Ends, p. x.Google Scholar Andrew Sarris catches the paradox nicely in “Death of the Gunfighters,” Film Comment 18:2 (03–04 1982), pp. 41–2.Google Scholar He says that “all action-adventure narrative forms can be subsumed under a single genre” — a statement with which both formalists and archetypalists could agree (for different reasons); but he qualifies this by asserting that “there are limits to the changes [in identifiably Western landscape, history, sociology] to which the genre can submit and still remain … recognizable.”

15. My understanding of the importance of the star system is based on a research seminar with Jeanine Basinger and Joseph Reed, 1979–1980, Wesleyan University. See also Jarvie, , Movies and Society, pp. 62–75Google Scholar; Balio, , American Film Industry, chap. 7Google Scholar; Jowett, , Film, pp. 54–7.Google Scholar

16. French, , Westerns, pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

17. On the literary mythology of the Frontier see Slotkin, , Regeneration Through ViolenceGoogle Scholar; Smith, , Virgin Land.Google Scholar

18. Sarris, , “Death of the Gunfighters,” p. 42Google Scholar

19. Kitses, , Horizons West, pp. 8, 15Google Scholar; Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: How the Movies Changed American Life (New York: Random House, 1975), chaps. 1, 4–5Google Scholar; Jowett, , FilmGoogle Scholar, chaps. 1–2; McArthur, , Underworld USA, pp. 17–20.Google Scholar

20. Sonnichsen, C. L., From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction (College Station: Texas A & M Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 40–82Google Scholar; Rosa, Joseph G., The Gunfighter: Man or Myth (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Slotkin, Richard, “The Wild West,” in Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Pittsburgh: Brooklyn Museum and Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 27–44, especially p. 42.Google Scholar

21. Brownlow, Kevin, The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 223–7, 235–49, 253–62, 275–80, 290–300.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., pp. 268–9, 279–80; Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford: A Biography (New York: Dial Press/S. Wade, 1979), pp. 29–31, 34–5.Google Scholar

23. Brownlow, , War, West, and Wilderness, pp. 257–69, 275–89, 300–12.Google ScholarOuster's Last Fight, promotional material in archives of Custer National Battlefield Museum, Crow Agency, Montana.

24. Brownlow, , War, West, and Wilderness, pp. 263–74Google Scholar; Fenin, George N. and Everson, William K., The Western: From Silents to the Seventies, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 75–107.Google Scholar

25. Brownlow, , War, West, and Wilderness, pp. 267–9.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., pp. 386–96; Sinclair, , John Ford, pp. 34–6Google Scholar; Fenin, and Everson, , The Western, 139–43, 237–40.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., pp. 176, chaps. 11,13; Jowett, , Film, pp. 190–2Google Scholar; Sinclair, , John Ford, p. 37.Google Scholar These writers minimize the purely technical aspect of the difficulty under which Western movie makers labored and suggest instead a studio preference (perhaps shaped by market realities) for gangster films, comedies, extravaganzas, and musicals.

28. Fenin, and Everson, , The Western, pp. 240–3Google Scholar; Lenihan, John D., Showdown, pp. 140–4.Google ScholarJarvie, , Movies and SocietyGoogle Scholar, chap. 13 attempts a similar analysis for the gangster-detective-spy genre.