Core Response #4 – Max Berwald

 

I thought the Mittell reading, “From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture,” did a good job explaining the historical tension between genre studies– and broadly formal analysis– and cultural studies. I actually like the car metaphor. From that vantage point, I can especially appreciate “Techno-Soap!” A comparative type of formal analysis is being deployed here at the service of cultural studies. In that chapter, issues of gender, for instance, are centered, but not in the sense you would expect them to be centered in something like, say, the Carroll book described. It’s formal analysis with frequent recourse to broader cultural concerns that are often, but not necessarily, rooted in other media texts. 

In the Feuerian sense, we can likewise see the narrative baroque mode that Kackman identifies in Lost as the object of a kind of meta-formal analysis that draws the viewer into the equation. For Kackman, Lost’s narrative complexity is both a form of “internal marking” (as Mittell puts it, describing Feuer’s perspective) and something that comes from without and is manifested in viewing practice. That is, it is something that happens through and during interpretation:

“Complexity isn’t just something we find in a text; it’s something we bring to a text– and our recognition of certain characters as meaningfully conflicted, their narrative and moral dilemmas agonizingly or beguilingly puzzling, is a cultural identification. I’d like to see us talk more about melodrama and contemporary quality television not just as an ameliorative, cathartic symbolic resolution of social anxieties, but as a mechanism for the registering of political dreams.” (Kackman)

Looping back to the Mittell, I appreciated the problematization of genre as category: is this a quality that certain texts partake of, or something brought interpretively to texts? When Mittell writes, “While the members constituting a category might all possess some inherent trait binding them into the category… there is nothing intrinsic about the category itself,” it seems to me that there’s a solution within reach: genres describe clusters of interpretive practices. So the horror film may feature a monster (what is or is not a monster is certainly cultural) but it may also be a film featuring scenes that frighten one. Whichever meaning of “horror film” one is referring to will likely work in conversation, and likewise we can imagine they carry relatively well in industrial settings. (Whichever definition is primary in the speaker’s mind– and it may be that this would not be clear, upon reflection, to the speaker themself– the others might well be hanging around as secondary concerns or associations. If my friend describes a film as a “horror movie,” meaning by that designation that the film includes monsters, and I interpret it instead as “a film with scenes that will frighten me,” and then later a monster appears in that film, I will not feel that I have guessed wrong, because these interpretive moments (the recognition of a monster) or practices (the paying of attention to something that is frightening) are linked. When we introduce different cultural foci between which these interpretive moments and practices take place, I think we get to the Foucauldian picture that Mittell moves to as the chapter progresses.) Mind you, I don’t feel clever as I write this; I’m only trying to come to a full understanding of the problem posed by genre. 

“But by decentering the text as the site of generic essence, a potential problem emerges– if genes are categories that do not emerge from intrinsic textual features, then isn’t any system of categorization potentially a genre?” 

Yes! I fail to see the problem here. Of course, in the same way Mittell recognizes Cop Rock as a hybrid of the cop show and the music video, a novel interpretive practice may well constitute a novel genre. That doesn’t mean it will be popular or widely recognized, but we’re in the realm of cultural formations: what’s universal? I think Mittell hits on this when he himself writes that the “oater” failed to become a “generic label” while “soap opera” was able to “transcend its original usage as trade journal shorthand.” That is, one of these terms became popular and recognized and the other did not.