Genre Analysis

     Jason Mittell explores genre analysis in American television culture in his text Genre and Television. Within his examples he touches on four specific elements in genre analysis: Defintional, Interpretive, Historical, and Psychological. These are four distinct lenses one can use when analyzing a text of media. Since media and art have blurred boundaries there is always room for an artistic approach in classifying genre. In another class I am taking on the Performing arts in Western Civilization we are focusing on an eclectic method of analysis where when approaching any art piece (visual, musical, or otherwise) one must employ an arsenal of gazes to really determine the art. In this same way I think Mittell’s four prongs of genre analysis are best served to work together.

        I have chosen to examine the film Grey Gardens in an Eclectic/Mittell style. Historically, this film was made in 1975. It has since been distributed by the Criterion Collection which prides itself on distributing select “important classic and contermporary films” and in 2010 the film was selected by the Library of Congress to be entered into the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historicall, or aesthetically significant.”

        Through an Interpretive lens, this film examines several topics. Obviously, there is the enigmatic relationship between the mother and daughter where Little Edie remains at the home to take care of her mother even though her mother is the main source of her psychosis. Additionally the relationship the women have with men and marriage opens up an entire discussion on “old-school” society in an era when family defined social status and marriage defined women. Their fall from high-soceity American royalty to neighborhood nuisance is extremely thought provoking as well potentially a comment on the loss of respect for the nuclear families of the American 50’s.

     Definitionally this piece is a documentary. It was self pro-claimed and was screened at film festivals as documentary. While it has a film crew and direction, the film is considered in the style of direct cinema or cinéma vérité which uses objectivity to let the subject of the film dictate the content, aside from editing the physical film has virtually no distortion and the meaning is open to interpretation.

       Psychologically this film has extremely varied affects on it’s audiences.  It began with a cult following in the film industry and throughout the past forty years has been referenced in media for those “in-the-know” who are savvy enough to know the text. It has also gained a large following in the homosexual community. One theory is that the resilience of Little Edie to live her life no matter the condition of it appealed to the community, another explores the idea that it is simply the outlandish nature of the piece that made it a gay-cult hit. Either way, the piece has an audience and has continued to have an audience for forty years.

Production Constraints

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In chapter two of Nina Leibman’s Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television, she explores the relationship between the production of media and the content of media. She is focused mainly on the nuclear family as portrayed in television shows such as My Three Sons and Leave it To Beaver and how the formant of television dictated the content of the shows. The episodic nature of television made the plot lines digestible and soft, but it also gave the characters within the show a more full and round representation (unlike film where character development occurs strictly within the time frame of one film). Additionally budget constraints on television shows, especially the early forms, created challenges and affected the product. For example using a laugh track is easier than managing and housing a studio audience- it is less of a risk of re-shooting a scene.  To distill these into one clear image I will reference the example from class where we mentioned that wardrobe pieces are cheaper to buy in sample sizes so actors are usually smaller people which in turn causes the message in media to be that all people are “model size.”

Keeping this in mind I thought to examine the film institution of James Bond pictures. This example is something of an anomaly in the film industry.  Whereas most films with sequels become progressively contrived and less and less main-stream, the James Bond series has presented itself as just that: a series. In production and execution James Bond is very similar to a television show, the movies are self contained plots with a cast of recurring characters, they center on the action and leave the character development to be developed as the series progresses.  Most importantly, more similar to a television show than a movie, the james bond series functions under production constraints. Continuing the films for a half a century means many changes. The most obivious of those changes is the cast.

Six different men have played the character of James Bond and the changes in casting are met with no more than a sideways glance. At one point George Lazenby’s wife is killed (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and in the next film Sean Connery returns as Bond to avenge her death (You Only Live Twice). Distinctively, these changes are usually due to the age of the actors rather than contract negotiations in television.

What intrigues me most about the institution of James Bond is that, aside from the more indie cult of Woody Allen, it stands unparalleled in longevity. Even compared to Woody Allen films there is a huge disparity in budget and profits as almost each James Bond film is a financial success and the most recent, Skyfall,  broke the box offices records in it’s first week in the UK. What is this series doing right to continue producing with popular and financially stable successes?