The combat/war movie has been a standard item in Hollywood's generic repertoire for more than five decades. But unlike the western, the horror film, and the musical (among others) it has been subjected over the years to remarkably little scrutiny or close analysis by film historians and theorists. The war movie, to all appearances, is the unwanted stepchild in the context of the literature of the American cinema's family of genres: its presence is recognized and acknowledged, but its specific 'behavior patterns' are subsequently only haphazardly attended to, if not ignored completely.
Nonetheless, and despite the relative paucity of material, there does exist a body of literature which deals at least in part with the combat/war film. This literature, while intermittently dotted with genuine (though invariably incomplete) historiographical and theoretical achievements, is much more often ruthlessly unfocused and very shallow indeed. As matters currently stand, the study of war films is just beginning to emerge from the 'primitive' stage characterized by prose-inflected lists of movie titles and coffee table picture books concerned only with narrative surfaces and overt themes. Such (anti-) analysis is fundamentally a historical and therefore has no practical bearing on or meaning within our quite concretely historical existence. It ignores the culturally-derived and ideologically-informed iconography of films which are, after all, produced within the perimeters of a particular social order and designed for mass consumption by its inhabitants.
Thus, the study of the combat/war film still lacks a truly exhaustive scholarly effort which uses the methodological tools of film genre analysis to: (1) delineate the unique and shared narrative and thematic conventions of the war film and (2) position the war film in its social, economic, and historical contexts based on a reading of the deep structures of those conventions. The following overview of the modus operandi of genre study, the as-yet sketchy outline of a generic template for the combat/war film, and the superimposition of a recent example Of the genre (Southern Comfort, 1981) on that template are meant to attest to the very basic need to begin the process of gathering the diverse 'and at times very divergent theoretical strands that do exist into a more
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coherent and useful bundle. The eventual goal is to arrive at a working theory of the combat/war film.
I. Genre study as such: philosophy/economics/history
In the past decade, the generically-based analysis of Hollywood movies has been refined as theory and practice to the point where there now exist general methodological models which are arguably both viable and productive (see e.g. Schatz, 1981, Britton, 1979). These models are rooted for the most part in selective plunderings or refinements of ideas developed in a number of related academic fields: structural anthropology (e.g., Levi-Strauss's notion of myth), symbolic anthropology (the work of Victor Turner), literary semiotics (Barthes), Marxist philosophy (Althusser's ideas about ideology), Russian Formalist literary analysis (Bakhtin's concept of 'heteroglossia' is currently undergoing new scrutiny), and the polyglot discipline called cultural studies (exemplified by Horace Newcomb's television-oriented investigation and the work of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England). The thread which links these often methodologically and ideologically divergent domains is a common interest in defining the social, cultural, and aesthetic environments in which messages are communicated from one human being or group to another. They are, that is, concerned at least in part with questions of context and process, the means and motives involved in the production and consumption of relevant information.
Genre film analysts share these interests with regard to their particular, mass-mediated field of study. As a result, the best recent genre studies have approached genre films not as static collections of narrative and formal motifs which mechanically (and mysteriously) coalesce to designate a certain work as a 'western' or a 'musical' or a 'war' movie but as the product of circumstances within the overall American sociohistorical process. In this setting, the genre films become 'a form of secular cultural ritual... a formalized celebration of collective values, attitudes, and ideals' (Schatz, 1981:46). Thus, genres and genre films, as 'cultural ritual', have an intrinsically social and ideological function; they are not produced in an historical vacuum, but in an incredibly complex and frequently mystifying environment of events and values, signs and meanings.
Robin Wood (1977) has pointed out that the narrative structure of individual genre films is almost always oppositional (for instance, the conventional dichotomy in westerns between civilization and the wilderness), reflecting the internal contradictions of the society in which they are produced. Thomas Schatz (1981:31) suggests further that genre is basically a problem-solving strategy, a means of at least temporarily resolving those contradictions; and, as Wood puts it, 'at best different genres represent different strategies for dealing with the
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same ideological tensions' (1977:47). Consequently, all genre films (and probably all films, period) are informed not by a single set of values but are, since the perceived meaning of events (including fictitious ones) is culturally-derived, infused rather with an implicit and frequently unconscious comparison of conflicting points of view representing a smorgasboard of oppositional ideologies. Certain value structures (representing the dominant ideology) tend to be more visible than others, producing what Stuart Hall has called the 'preferred meaning' of a text, but that meaning is always accompanied and challenged by a range of coterminous, alternative meanings (1973:9). That is, the dominant ideology leaks; it never completely succeeds in its attempts to construct and maintain total ideational hegemony in any kind of communication (and it is perhaps least Successful in the field of mass-mediated communication).
The reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive. At any time,
forms of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the society. (Williams, 1977:113)
And, because, the dominant ideology is therefore a dynamic rather than a static entity, it is also vulnerable to change. Cultural values and beliefs are constantly undergoing a process of negotiation and renegotiation in what Horace Newcomb (borrowing the term from Victor Turner) describes as a 'liminal' environment,
the 'in-between' stage, when one is neither totally in nor out of the structures of society. It is the stage of license, when rules may be bent or broken, when roles may
be reversed, when categories may be over-turned. (1980:11)
The artifacts of popular culture, including genre films, exist and make meaning in this liminal context, which is, of course, dominated the philosophical and practical marketplace demands of the capitalist economic system. The Hollywood movie studios that were established in the period between 1915 and 1930, that is, felt an economic impetus to standardize production techniques, culminating in the fundamentally industrial studio system of film-making which flourished from the 1930's to the 1950's (Schatz, 1981). This assembly line system was seen as the best and most cost-effective means of mass-producing movies for a mass audience. Standardization ultimately included not just the logistics of Hollywood production but also the subject matter and narrative devices used in many of the films themselves. Film-makers and studio executives have always been keenly interested in and aware of exactly what kinds of movies can be relied on with some certainty to do relatively well at the box office. They churn out more of these (genre) films because they seem to represent less of a financial risk and because they are relatively easy to |produce, owing to the film-makers' and the audience's mutual familiarity with the basic narrative conventions of certain well-established genres.
Genres in turn evolve over time as film-makers fine-tune particular
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generic conventions (for instance, the treatment of Indians in westerns) in response to perceived shifts in audience expectations and attitudes. The impetus for this evolutionary process implies a symbiotic linkage of Hollywood economics and shifts in the prevailing Weltanschauung of American society.
Feature filmmaking, like most mass media production, is an expensive enterprise. Those who invest their capital, from the major studio to the struggling independent, are in a curious bind: on the one hand, their product must be sufficiently inventive to attract attention and satisfy the audience's demand for novelty, and on the other hand, they must protect their initial investment by relying to some extent upon established conventions that have been proven through previous exposure and repetition. (Schatz, 1981:5)
Thus, to paraphrase communication theorist James Carey (1975), genres maintain, repair and transform themselves in order to survive. This process takes the form of an informal dialogue between filmmaker and audience. The site of this dialogue is the box office, where movie audiences indicate their preference at a given historical moment for certain genres or certain forms of expression within a genre's menu of narrative possibilities. That this system of informal negotiation is a continuous and ongoing real-world phenomenon is only reasonable; if it were not so, all films would logically make just about the same amount of money, reflecting a society that is diachronic, denotative, digital and static rather than synchronic, connotative, analogic and dynamic.
Finally, then, the demands placed by this evolving social order on genre films are double-edged and apparently contradictory. As the mercantile tensions cited above suggest, each individual film is simultaneously asked to be both the same as and different from its generic predecessors. Genre films must foreground certain narrative and formal conventions in order to be identifiably generic, yet those same conventions must be continuously retooled to give each new film a veneer (however thin) of uniqueness.
There is a sense... in which a film genre is both a static and a dynamic system. On the one hand, it is a familiar formula of interrelated narrative and cinematic components that serve to continually reexamine some basic cultural conflict ... On the other hand, changes in cultural attitudes, new influential genre films, the economics of the industry, and so forth, continually refine any film genre. (Schatz 1981:16)
The production process of any commercial film, then, includes a tacit (but not necessarily systematic or even conscious) comparison by the film-makers of their proposed treatment of a given subject or range of subject matter with their perception of the prevailing attitudes of the film's target audience. In other words, explicitly 'revolutionary' or 'subversive' form and content are by definition not Hollywood's province. The bottom line in Hollywood has always been the bottom line, and the viewer must in this situation be able to connect with a film relatively easily, must be able to make meaning of it, in order for it to have a shot at commercial success. Genre films, embedded as they are
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with a relatively static array of culturally-attuned conventions and values, are considered a good risk in this scenario. The audience 'knows', more or less, what to expect from each successive western or horror film, and the film-makers 'know', more or less, what subject matter is most likely to be commercially viable at a given time (usually based on recent box office performance). Generic evolution in this environment is a three-pronged process of sociocultural synchronization: new conventions may arise (e.g., the presence in several Seven ties westerns of the automobile as a symbol of encroaching civilization); established conventions may assume new importance or new meanings (the shift in the horror genre's treatment of violence since the early 1960's from the allusively metaphoric to the brutally explicit); and conventions which have become socially unacceptable may be phased out (the treatment of Indians in westerns as ignorant, brutal savages).
In Hollywood Genres, Thomas Schatz draws a very enlightening series of distinctions between what he sees as two fundamentally different 'types of genre (which) represent two dominant narrative strategies of genre film-making' (p.34). He designates the first of these types the 'rite of order', which incorporates genres such as the western, the gangster film, and the hard-boiled detective film. The rite of order centres on a ruggedly individual male hero who mediates the usually binary cultural contradictions and conflicts inherent in his milieu (e.g. the Wild West, the corrupt modern city - what Schatz describes as 'contested space'). These conflicts are usually resolved through externalized, ritualized violence and usually in favor of the dominant social order. Upon reaching this narrative climax, the protagonist (literally or figuratively) rides off into the sunset, forcefully restating his ambiguous relationship with the community he has been instrumental in establishing or preserving. Ultimately, he is doomed to wander forever between the opposing worlds he temporarily inhabits because he is unable or unwilling to subscribe completely to the value system of either, although at the same time he has much in common
with both (implicit here is the corollary idea that both of these value systems are in different ways equally desirable, even as they also remain mutually exclusive).
Schatz's other generic type is the 'rite of integration', which includes the musical, the screwball comedy, and the family melodrama. These genres are set in 'civilized' (i.e., uncontested) space and feature either a (heterosexual) romantic couple or a 'collective (usually a family)' in place of an individual male hero. The narrative here involves the process of integrating or uniting the values of these protagonists with those of the community at large (again usually representing the dominant ideology). Conflict is internalized and emotional, expressed not in a war of bullets but of words. Resolution is signaled by a final embrace which symbolizes the rejection of anti-social values by one or more of the protagonists.
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Schatz's dialectical division of the narrative strategies of genre films represents an attempt to devise a systematic means of getting at the deep structures of genre films through the observation of patterns of recurrence and variation in their surface structures. There is a conceptual link between these narrative strategies and the network of cultural oppositions they contemplate. Schatz's model, then, can help us get a fix on how genre films tell stories and why those stories are told in the ways they are.
It was mentioned earlier that genre films in general are 'problem-solving strategies'; as such, they represent one of Twentieth Century American popular culture's most protracted and intricate attempts to alleviate the existential tensions and anxieties created in all of us by the simple act of living in a world that all too frequently makes very little rational sense. Robin Wood has noted that the component parts of the American capitalist system, the dominant socioeconomic order of our national community, 'presents an ideology that, far from being monolithic, is inherently riddled with hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions' (1977:47). The rites of order and integration embodied in film genres, then, manifest attempts to resolve the unresolvable through the invocation of a complex network of narrative conventions and ideological assumptions. These conventions and assumptions in turn direct the viewer's perceptions to an apparently logical and 'natural' and therefore satisfactory narrative endpoint involving either a violent confrontation or a romantic embrace, through which specific sets of values are implicitly accepted, rejected, or reconciled.
However, the order and integration strategies are themselves internally and externally oppositional and contradictory; the process of narrative resolution in examples of each, then, is also a process of narrative repression. While attributes of each may well be equally attractive to the viewer (the virtues of rugged individualism vs. the prospect of a harmonious community, for instance), each must at least implicitly deny the ideological viability of the other in order to maintain internal narrative logic (and the generically-attuned viewer -i.e., most of us - is aware of this, whether consciously or unconsciously). Thus, for instance, the cowboy hero of the rite of order rides off into the sunset instead of settling down with the schoolmarm (as would be characteristic of an integration narrative) simply because the order-oriented narrative system of the western demands this resolution. Any other is generically untenable.
II. The narrative stakes of the combat/war film
The status of the combat/war film in this oppositional context is apparently somewhat unusual in that war movies seem to represent a fusion of particular aspects of both the rite of order and the rite of integration. (This status is not unique: Schatz (1983) demonstrates that
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the science fiction film is also in many ways a hybrid form. My own recent work has indicated that certain romantic outlaw' films, e.g. Bonnie and Clyde, They Live by Sight, also incorporate both order and integration strategies.) The ideologically implausible (if not ostensibly impossible) doppelganger effects of such a fusion suggest that the narrative strategies of the war film may involve a set of assumptions and denials that are significantly different from those of most other genres. To begin clarifying this proposal, let's look at some of the more apparent narrative conventions of the war film.
It is immediately obvious that the typical war movie is set in the determinate space characteristic of the rite of order. American soldiers are shown fighting over con tested, ideologically unstable turf {foreign turf: Italy, France, North Africa. Burma, the Philippines. Korea. Vietnam, etc) against an enemy whose background and ostensible beliefs are politically, ethnically, and or racially contrary to those of the American mainstream (i.e., alien. non-American, un-American). At the same time, though, much if not most of the war movie's running time tends to be spent not on the battlefield but in the confines of the American encampment (the American community) as the soldiers interact with each other. The narrative and ideological stakes in this latter setting are significantly different. Instead of an impetus toward violent confrontation, there is an emphasis on the value and cultivation of team work that is more typical of the rite of integration. Thomas Schatz crystallizes the implications of this doubled setting when he suggests that:
The external military conflict, which determines the arena of action. 'concerns the protection and perpetuation of American society: the internal integration of the
collective demonstrates the values and attitudes of an idealized society which the combat unit seeks to defend. (1983:85)
A similar dualism seems to be present in the portrayal of the war movie's designated protagonist hero. In one sense, the role is generally assumed by a single male warrior, a machismo-laced rugged individualist not unlike the typical detective or cowboy hero. The war movie hero is most often a grizzled, hard-nosed regular Army sergeant (John Wayne in The Sands of Iwojima, 1949. Gene Evans in The Steel Helmet, 1951) or an equally hard-boiled, non-elitist, usually relatively low-ranking officer (Robert Mitchum in The Story of G.I. Joe. 1945; Jack Palance in Attack, 1956; Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen. 1967). Like the cowboy hero, the war movie's non-comm protagonist usually must mediate an order-threatening conflict. But this conflict not only involves an external enemy but also takes place within the domestic community of the film, represented by the ethnically-diverse dog-faces under the sergeant's command. The important point here is that the war movie hero is not a free agent like the cowboy or the detective: he functions as the designated front-line representative of the American ruling elite, of official government policy. Thus, while he may seem as ruggedly individualistic as the typical cowboy hero, in truth he stands
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much more firmly and unambiguously in the camp of the dominant social order.
The majority of war movies do in fact feature a single identifiable male hero figure. But unlike the typical western or detective film, the dynamics of group interaction are crucial to the thematic objectives of most war movies. Thus, not only must the individual hero totally suppress his individuality in the name of 'duty', but in many films successful teamwork on the part of the entire company or platoon or squad of soldiers results in the partial displacement of the individual hero in favor of this total community, which is recognized as a collective hero (Battleground, 1949; Pork Chop Hill, 1959; The Dirty Dozen, 1967; Uncommon Valor, 1983).
Conflict in war films is similarly double-barreled. As a rite of order, conflict is represented through externalized violence on the part of American forces directed against a particularized enemy (a national or national ideology - the 'Japs' or the 'Krauts' or the 'Commies'), who responds in kind. As a rite of integration, there is frequently a parallel conflict taking place within the American fighting unit in which a single soldier registers opinions which are potentially disruptive of the group-oriented military dynamic, usually because he doesn't 'understand' the basis or need for that dynamic. This apostate is convinced of the error of his ways in the course of a war of words with his peers and/or a superior officer; in this sense, the conflict is internalized and is fought with emotional, not explosive, charges. Examples of this conflict are found in characters played by John Garfield in A ir Force, 1943; John Agar in The Sands of Iwo Jima; Russ Tamblyn in Retreat, Hell, 1952; and Woody Strode in Pork Chop Hill.
On the one hand, then, war movies tend through a ritualized process of male bonding 'to celebrate the values of social integration'. This is accomplished through the recurrent use of story and character conventions which, when linked, postulate a situation in which a small, ethnically-diverse group of soldiers overcomes a degree of ideological dissension within the ranks in order that the group may fight as one in a climactic battle in the service of some higher goal. That goal may range from the unabashed nationalism of World War II era films like Bataan and Guadalcanal Diary, both 1943, to the materialist greed of Kelly's Heroes, 1970, to the primal desire simply to survive a life-threatening situation, as in the war movies of Robert Aldrich (Attack; The Dirty Dozen; Too Late the Hero, 1970). There may be other goals; there may be more than one expressed in the course of a film, but the key factor remains: the individual, personal goals of the soldiers involved are suppressed in favor of a group-oriented dynamic. This suppression of individuality may be incomplete or presented ambiguously; indeed, this has been an increasingly common narrative device of war movies at least since the mid-Sixties, from Hell is for Heroes in 1962 to Southern Comfort in 1981. But this thematic emphasis on
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social integration has been a remarkably consistent source of narrative tension in war movies for over forty years.
On the other hand, war movies may also be seen to 'uphold the values of social order' insofar as they depict the externalized conflict of two diametrically opposed and usually national ideologies. This conflict (almost always described from an identifiably 'American' point of view) directly involves the maintenance of America's dominant value and power structures; it is nationalistic because those doing the 'arguing' are official representatives of the ruling elite, which seeks to preserve the dominant social order against a competing, external enemy.
This peculiarly dualistic narrative tendency is evident throughout the history of the combat/war genre; it is not insignificant that the genre emerged during World War II in such films as Wake Island, Air Force, Objective Burma, and They Were Expendable. The thematic concerns of pre-World War II war movies were quite different: in the earlier films, war existed either as an engaging backdrop for a romantic melodrama, or else as an abstracted social condition subject to philosophical inquiry (Schatz 1983:82). In the immediate post war years, the genre's unique ability to telescope the order/integration distinctions of other genres into a single, unidirectional story meant that the war film became the most overtly polemical and nationalistic celluloid weapon in Hollywood's propaganda arsenal.
In this context, the war movie also represents perhaps the most radically Utopian of all Hollywood genres. It explicitly attempts to link order and integration, and struggles to resolve the seemingly hopeless cultural contradictions that other genres tacitly acknowledge and accept. The baldly nationalistic, propaganda-oriented thrust of the genre during World War II permanently affected its evolution, the range and nature of its generic conventions. In its most extreme form, embodied by the rallying agitprop of the war years (but unambiguously reprised as late as 1968 in The Green Berets), the war film's narrative conventions are geared to a level of jingoistic hysteria unmatched for sheer sustained intensity by any other genre.
I suspect that this penchant for jingoism (especially) in early examples of the genre, its apparently unambiguous celebration of machismo, violence, and the dominant ideology (war might be hell, but it's also exciting) has been a strongly contributory factor in the critical “neglect of war movies by film scholars. The genre seems to lack thematic richness and ideological flexibility of the western and the horror film and is therefore obviously less 'interesting'. Its form, signs, meanings are apparently too self-evident to bear (or warrant) much close scrutiny.
But if war itself, in the words of military historian Peter Paret, 'is policy expressed in extreme forms of organized violence' (p.385); if, that is, war is a result of a decision on the part of a nation's ruling elite
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(the exceptions here would involve certain revolutionary movements) to use 'extreme forms of organized violence' as a means of enforcing or imposing 'policy' (domestic or foreign); then the genesis of the combat/war film should in itself seem logical enough. Hollywood was mobilized for the war effort shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor (after it was first established that movie production was in fact going to continue). The war movie coalesced as an identifiable genre, then, at a time when its primary function was by definition propagandistic (and it was the only still-familiar genre to emerge at that time). War movies were at first explicitly designed as mouthpieces for official government policy.
At its inception the war film provided a generic format in which the stakes of momentous ideological struggles could be dealt with and explicated in the most immediate and ideationally foreshortened arena possible: the battlefield. Soldiers who are willing to die for their country are supposed to believe that their cause is righteous; otherwise, their suffering and sacrifices are meaningless (and the ruling elite will then find it more difficult to recruit fresh cannon fodder). One's ideological mettle is tested in the heat of combat along with one's physical prowess and emotional grit. The rock-jawed combat heroes of the most ultra-nationalistic war movies represent behavioral exemplars who stand (burp gun in hand) firmly astride both the most deep-seated and abstract American ideals and the tenets of the dominant social order of our society. This conjures an ideological transformation which seems to fuse one with the other: the ideal is rendered indistinguishable from the real.
Thus, the ideological crux of the war film is captured in the title of Frank Capra's series of World War II propaganda documentaries: what matters is Why We Fight. If the dominant social order is perceived to be worthy of preservation and the enemy deemed sufficiently threatening to that order, the film that results will most likely be a real flag-waver. If, on the other hand, the slightest doubt is expressed regarding either of these basic principles, strange mutations begin to occur. This is exactly what I would suggest has happened in the evolutionary pattern of the Hollywood combat/war movie since the early 1950's as more and more examples of the genre began to deviate from the super patriotic norm, began to show misgivings about certain aspects of official policy. Not coincidentally, this gradual fragmentation occurred at a time when government policies were in general increasingly pressured and contested by opposing points of view stretching the length and breadth of America's ideological terrain.
I would again emphasize that this evolutionary process has been too little recognized by those few genre critics who have dealt with the combat/war film at all. As recently as 1981, Andrew Britton (in the context of a generally excellent overview of post-Vietnam war movies) asserts that 'of all the major genres, the war film is typically the least problematic ideologically' (1981:5). Such a statement implicitly
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50
assumes that for some reason the war film did not (at least until the post-Vietnam era) undergo the process of formal and thematic evolution that has been observed in connection with the post-World War II development of other Hollywood genres (e.g., the western, the gangster film, the musical, the horror film, and the science fiction film). This is pa tent nonsense. The trajectory of the combat/war genre from Wake Island to Southern Comfort (and beyond) incorporates
works which are to varying degrees tangibly less unproblematical (ideologically hegemonic) than they are explicitly or implicitly problematical (ideologically heteroglossic). It will be the task of another time and place to more fully delineate the many narrative, thematic, and rhetorical twists and turns in the Hollywood war movie's forty-plus years of cultural dialogue.
III. A recent combat/war film
The remainder of this essay represents an attempt to apply some of the basic narrative concerns of the combat/war movie (outlined above) to the analysis of 1981's Southern Comfort (directed by Walter Hill). In many ways, I think, Southern Comfort may be seen as a culmination of sorts to a thematic trend seen in several recent war (though not necessarily combat-oriented) films. These films (e.g., Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Who'll Stop the Rain, The Boys in Company C) with varying degrees of thoroughness and intensity attempt to 'come to terms' with the 'meaning' of the Vietnam experience through a kind of nationalized moral catharsis. Residual feelings of guilt over the rationale and conduct of the war and over its purported toll on the national psyche are expressed and therefore (at least in part) purged in these films. By the same token, films like The Deer Hunter and Uncommon Valor may be seen as 'reactionary' moves to reassert and recover a place in the modern world (and the modern war film) for traditionally patriotic values (or variations thereof). I will try to show that Southern Comfort represents a logical extreme of this mea culpa trend (and its mirror-twin denial), expressed as a national self-loathing of virtually unprecedented magnitude.
Southern Comfort's narrative is relatively simple and straightforward, centring on the training manoeuvres of a squad of National Guardsmen in the Louisiana bayous in 1973 (while, of course, the war in Vietnam was 'winding down'; the date is superimposed over the first shot of the film, making its intended symbolic resonance quite clear). After a member of the squad plays a childishly malicious prank on a group of the indigenous Cajuns, the Cajuns proceed without further contact or explanation systematically and relentlessly to track and murder the soldiers. By the time the film reaches its ambiguously dreamlike conclusion, only two Guardsmen are left alive. The story, then, is essentially a variation on the very conventional patrol-behind-enemy-lines narrative (which originated not with Objective Burma
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but with Xenophon's Anabasis, which in turn was the explicit basis for The Warriors, a film Walter Hill had directed in 1979).
In Southern Comfort, Hill uses conventional combat/war film iconography in the service of a Vietnam allegory which posits nothing more or less than the total moral bankcruptcy of mainstream American society. As such, its narrative and thematic structures represent a significant attitudinal shift from the liberal despair of Apocalypse Now and the zenophobia of The Deer Hunter. Unlike these films, the experience of war in Southern Comfort is, given the societal microcosm depicted, not so much horrifyingly tragic and absurd as it is numbingly (but no less horrifyingly) inevitable.
After all, the possibility of tragedy in any story necessitates the presence of some vestige of individual or collective 'goodness' which remains implicit or apparent in at least some of the characters and situations involved. Thus, most of the American characters in other post-Vietnam war films are seen primarily as victims of lethally illogical circumstances beyond their control, the blame for which is ascribed variously to the amoral military power structure and/or to the alien incomprehensibility (for Western minds) of Far Eastern culture. At worst, Americans become complicit with the surrounding moral depravity. For instance, Martin Sheen's Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now functions as a hired gun (a la Jack Palance in Shane) for the corrupt military establishment, while Marlon Brando's Kurtz submerges himself in an anthropological debasement of Oriental ritual violence; and Willard's climactic (ritual) killing of Kurtz suggests the conflation of the two into an altogether new manner of rough beast - the worst of both worlds, as it were.
In most cases, though, the average US soldier is depicted as a fundamentally virtuous or at least well-meaning individual whose adherence to traditional notions of friendship, loyalty, and even patriotism are challenged not from within the immediate community of fellow soldiers but from without, by the irrational and brutal situation he finds himself in. When these American boys are killed (Clean and Chef in Apocalypse Now, maimed (Steven in The Deer Hunter), or go crazy (Lance in Apocalypse Now, Nicky in The Deer Hunter), the fault for these tragic events is assigned primarily to external, ideologically-charged environmental factors and only secondarily (if at all) to internal, individual 'weaknesses'. In this world, this war, only the Nietzschean deer hunters survive.
In Southern Comfort, though, there is a clearly discernible modulation from a mood of existential wretchedness (tinged with the hope that with self-awareness comes the light at the end of the tunnel) to one of nihilistic rage. This attitudinal shift occurs despite the fact that the basic generic conventions of the combat/ war movie are left intact: the central characters are an ethnically and racially diverse, all-male group; the setting is 'foreign' (none of the soldiers speak the Cajuns’
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French dialect); and, as mentioned above, the plot is that of the traditional 'patrol' film.
But it is immediately made apparent that this film will treat these standard conventions with bitter irony. The Louisiana bayou country and its Cajun denizens clearly function as symbolic geographical and racial displacements of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. Like Deliverance (1972, another Vietnam allegory), the sick joke is that The War has come Home not just in principle but in fact; and like the urban torns in Deliverance, the soldiers in Southern Comfort are completely unfamiliar with the terrain, the culture, and the language of the 'country' they have invaded. Unlike Deliverance, though, these soldiers exhibit no folkloric curiosity concerning the Caj un way of life, lUch less any simple respect for it. Instead, in their initial encounters, Bravo Team' treats the 'swampers' like ignorant backwoods rubes. This proves to be the disastrous mistake which triggers the film's ensuing horrors. As we watch the squad slogging through the lush bayou foliage (the similarity to the dense, exotically green Asian jungles of other war movies is readily apparent), the soldier on point indicates the cultural insensitivity of the entire group by unnecessarily destroying a Cajun trapline which blocks the path. When the squad subsequently comes upon a deserted swampers' camp, they 'borrow' some of the Cajuns' rowboats in order to traverse a recently-flooded on the land more easily. As the soldiers row away, the Cajuns appear on the receding shore (they say nothing and are at this point shown only in extreme long shot), whereupon a squad-member proceeds to stand up in a boat and fire his automatic rifle - which contains blank cartridges - at them. The Cajuns dive for cover in the distance as several bf the soldiers laugh hysterically at the 'joke'. The situation then takes a suddenly horrific turn as Hill cuts to a medium close-up of a Cajun aiming his rifle and then to a slow-motion close-up of the squad leader's head exploding with the impact of a bullet. A it eventually did 3r in Vietnam, it immediately becomes clear here that Bravo Team is no longer just playing at war. The rest of Southern Comfort details the trek of this patrol, virtually unarmed (the soldiers are subsequently allotted two live shells each, which meagre ration they have only because one of them had hoped to leaven the boredom of manoeuvres with some hunting), as they journey out of enemy territory (and back to Interstate 10) while the Cajuns relentlessly hunt them down.
But the soldiers' struggle for survival by no means turns into a redemptive journey on the order of the Anabasis or even Objective Burma. As was discussed above, the all-male military collective in combat/war movies conventionally represents a melting pot microcosm of American cultural diversity, and a crucial concern of the typical war film's narrative is the process through which that individualized diversity is subsumed in favor of a group-oriented dynamic symbolizing an ultimate cultural unity. In Southern Comfort, the melting pot metaphor still holds true enough; the characters' person-
52 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
alities are superficially sketched (narrative shorthand has always been especially appropriate in the portrayal of combat film characters, who are designed to function as two-dimensional icons) through an introductory action or line of dialogue which - minimally but sufficiently - crystallizes and differentiates them.
But in this case, the squad never learns to function as an organized unit, and each of its individual members is shown to be in some fundamental way unlikeable and or incompetent. The nominal leaders, Sergeant Poole and Corporal Casper, are weak and uncharismatic. Poole (the only regular Army member present) repeatedly allows his leadership role to be challenged: he watches as the soldier maliciously cuts the trapline but says nothing, and he vacillates over the theft of the Cajuns' boats until the majority of the squad essentially browbeats him into capitulating (whereupon he is almost immediately killed). Poole also has little affection for or faith in the men under his command. In the final briefing before the squad sets off on its mission, he concludes the standard teamwork speech 'You're all buddies. You're all counting on each other. Everybody does their job' with a rather scornful plea: 'Please - for once in your life, try to look like soldiers.' Casper, who assumes command after Poole's death, generates even less respect inasmuch as he exudes the overdeveloped gung-ho seriousness of a fast food restaurant manager. He assumes a thin veneer of macho bravado which impresses or fools no one (he is mock-ragged in the pre-credits sequence by one of his own men); he reacts to crisis situations by reciting laughably inadequate training manual strategies verbatim; and, after leading a ludicrous and chaotic assault on a one-armed Cajun's cabin (and taking the Cajun prisoner), remarks with evident self-satisfaction, 'I guess we conducted ourselves a pretty successful little raid here.'
The rest of the squad, meanwhile, consists of a variegated assemblage of sociopaths, racists, drug dealers, morons, and outright lunatics. They are just about as unsavory as the Dirty Dozen, but instead of being hardened criminals blackmailed into doing the military high command's dirty work, the soldiers in Southern Comfort are simply presented as Today's Army, officially sanctioned representatives of the ruling elite. In other words, they represent what apparently passes for or is acceptable as 'normal' in the modern world In fact, they are a disaffected, disagreeable crew of post-existentialists, steeped in self-interest and lacking any discernible external bonds. Even the intra-group relationships are atrophied. Only a few of the soldiers seem to be friends in civilian life, and some are openly scornful of the others. There is a universal disinterest among the men in establishing some version of the conventional military camaraderie we see in most other war films; no one is even willing to attempt a basic, task-oriented form of cooperation just to minimize the drudgery of
manoeuvres.
53 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
This state of borderline anarchy holds even after the squad's situation becomes genuinely life-threatening. Reese (Fred Ward), the man with the clip of live ammunition and the most overtly sadistic member of Bravo Team, refuses to share his cache of bullets until another soldier puts a bayonet to his throat. No coherent defensive strategy is ever worked out among the men; they can't even agree on which direction they have to march to get to 1-10. In short, there is absolutely no God-and-country, why-we-fight talk in this group. The one squad member who seems to adhere closely to traditional, John Wayne-style values (he is a high school football coach and is referred to only as 'Coach') is shown to be a repressed, unstable individual who quickly loses his cool and eventually his mind. He goes catatonically insane once the shooting starts, and it's really no wonder. The idealized values Coach clings to are constantly contradicted by the realities of the world he finds himself in. His trials are suggested forcefully in an exchange of dialogue with Cribbs, the inner-city black representative to the group:
Cribbs: Say, man, I'm on sentry - you want a hit of this stuff (offers Coach a
puff on his joint).
Coach: How can you smoke that crap?
Cribbs: I ain't on your team, Coach.
Coach: God damn right you're not. You couldn't make the squad. That stuff
kills your will to win.
Cribbs: How your boys do this year?
Coach: This was a rebuilding year. We had injuries to key personnel. We
finished three and seven ... What do you do for a living, anyway?
Cribbs: I pick up a litle cash pimpin'here and there, but most of what I turn
over come from sellin' dope to high school kids.
Coach: You're goddam lucky I don't believe you.
Cribbs: No, it's true, Coach. Some of my best customers are at Fremont High.
They were ten and oh this year, Coach.
Coach: I don't have to listen to this bullshit, (walks away)
Even the two members of Bravo Team who seem to be narratively placed as protagonists with heroic potential (they are shown to be superior to the other men in intellect and 'leadership qualities') are finally not very sympathetic characters, either (although they are the only squad members who survive until the end of the movie). Spencer (Keith Carradine) asserts his quick-wittedness mainly through acid-tongued cynicism; after lining up some post-manoeuvres prostitutes for the squad (in itself a commentary on the debased value of Spencer's innate ingenuity), he remarks, 'I'm sure they'll fuck us in a more interesting way than the Louisiana National Guard has.' But Spencer is more of a talker than a doer. The one time he directly challenges the weak-chinned Casper's leadership, Casper easily subdues him with a sentimental rah-rah speech and an unanswered punch in the mouth (their relationship in this scene plays like a parody of John Wayne's
54 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
hard-bitten sergeant and John Agar's smart-alecky recruit in Sands of Iwo Jima.
Finally, there is Hardin (Powers Boothe), who at first seems to be the film's likely hero but who for a number of reasons is the character in Southern Comfort most subversive of combat/war film conventions and viewer expectations. Initially established narratively as an outsider (he's from Texas and new to the squad), Hardin functions at first as the film's de facto point of view character; this is reinforced through the recurrent use of reaction shots as Hardin witnesses and sometimes comments on the bone-headed behavior of his fellow soldiers. Also, he establishes an immediate rapport with Spencer, the only other squad-member with any apparent charisma or even common sense. Thus, it seems at the outset that Hardin will be established as a gloweringly sullen but physically powerful and undeniably magnetic variation of the conventional machismo-infused hero of combat fictions (perhaps of the order of Croft in Mailer's T he Naked and the Dead). It is clear that only Hardin has the strength of character to lead the squad to safety.
But in fact neither Hardin nor anyone else in the film assumes a viable leadership role. Most strikingly, Hardin declines to back up Spencer when the latter challenges Casper's flimsy authority, although it is evident that his presence on Spencer's side would easily tip the scales. 'I'm not the volunteering type,' is Hardin's flip explanation to a chastised and justifiably angry Spencer. More generally, it is gradually made apparent that Hardin, instead of assuming control of the panicky, disorganized squad in the crisis situation which arises, is himself controlled by and at the mercy of that situation. After he discovers Reese torturing the one-armed Cajun, causing Reese to pull a knife on him, Hardin allows himself to be goaded by the Cajun into killing Reese with his bayonet (Hill cuts here from a close-up of the Cajun shouting, 'Kill him!' to a close-up of Hardin (wearing a slightly crazed expression) looking at the Cajun, and finally to a medium shot as Hardin plunges the blade into Reese's body as thunder roars on the sound-track). Hardin is subsequently more shocked than remorseful at his behavior. As the other soldiers bury Reese(amid more grousing than grieving) in a torrential rain, the camera tracks in to a medium close-up of a soaked Hardin huddled under his rain poncho and leaning dazedly against a tree. The sequence concludes with a very brief freeze frame of Hardin's dirt-and-rain-streaked face. The strain of the situation on him is evident, as is a certain dawning awareness (for Hardin and the audience) that he is not in control of it.
This issue of 'control' gradually assumes considerable narrative and thematic significance in Southern Comfort. The combat/war film is traditionally characterized in part by the presence of an unquestionably dominant protagonist (individual and/or collective). But when Hardin kills Reese, the last possible (and most probable) hero is shown
55 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
to be incapable of the war film's conventionally self-sacrificing, community-oriented heroism. His reluctance to assume that mantle is more conventional and perhaps serves to exaggerate still more the ensuing narrative dislocation of Hardin from his position as the film's nominal hero. Thus, an obliquely stated but important narrative current in Southern Comfort works first to establish Hardin as a relatively conventional action hero and then systematically dismantles that model (in his immediately previous film, The Long Riders , Walter Hill's demythologizing portrayal of Jesse James followed a similar pattern), leaving viewers with the uncomfortable realization that there are no heroes in this film. Instead, we are left with a constellation of characters which, in a caustic reversal of combat/war film convention, collectively stands as a summation of all that the film-makers find to be rotten in post-Vietnam American society.
The test of moral and physical will undergone by Bravo Team in Southern Comfort is another standard and crucial component of the Hollywood war film. The externalized testing agent is the foreign, alien, non-American Enemy, a role assumed in this case by the Cajuns. The depiction of the Enemy in war films was originally predicated on doctrines of ideological or racial repugnance, and, at least through the 1950's, this basic model remained fairly consistent in films set during World War II. Since 1945, however, America's two major shooting wars have involved Enemies who, in the words of a character in the Korea-set Pork Chop Hill, "are not just Orientals, they're communists." Many subsequent films set in the context of these Southeast Asian conflicts (from Pork Chop Hill through The Green Berets to The Deer Hunter and, most recently, Uncommon Valor) have implied that 'Orientals' are: (1) culturally opaque to Western minds, and (2) bent on either killing Americans under brutal and 'unfair' circum-stances (in the case of Asian communists) or economically exploiting our troops (in the case of our supposed allies, who might be termed Asian capitalists). In any case, the motivations of Asian enemies and allies alike are unfathomable for our boys; at times, the communists deliberately resort to psychological mind games in order to demoralize American forces (the historically bogus Russian roulette games in The Deer Hunter are only a lethal extension of the spooky public address propaganda of the Chinese communists on Pork Chop Hill's battlefield). In effect, then, we might not understand them, but they understand us (and how to 'get to' us), and that can leave American troops twitchy, paranoid, and at a distinct tactical disadvantage. Suddenly, the Enemy threatens to assume psychological control of the engagement at hand.
This portrayal of the enemy in some war movies as an incomprehensible, alien threat parallels that of the 'monster' in certain recent horror films (e.g., Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Eaten Alive, Halloween, The
56 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
Hills have Eyes). In these films, the monster's (or monsters') murderous behavior is, for the characters being murdered, at least, un-motivated, inexplicable, and decidedly unmanageable: all they know and see is a terrifying figure coming at them with a chain saw or a scythe or a butcher knife and there is nowhere to run. This unhinged fiend can in a sense be equated with the Enemy of many war films along the psychoanalytic lines drawn by Robin Wood in his description of the horror film's monster as an expression of an ideological 'Other',
that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with... in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it was far as possible into a replica of itself. (1979:9)
But while the monster/Other of horror films (Wood argues) is primarily an expression of what our culture tells us to repress (that is, it functions as a projection of internal, culturally motivated neuroses and fears), the war film's enemy/Other remains external and irreducibly foreign. This common strategy works to let 'us' (US) off the hook of culpability for the horrors of war - 'it's awful, but it's not our fault'.
By the same token, however, there have been a few films that have not so easily excused the US role in the destruction of Southeast Asia, and here again there is an element of generic cross-referencing. Some Hollywood westerns of the early 1970's (Chato's Land, Valdez is Coming, Ulzana's Raid) featured 'Third World' enemies (Indians or Mexicans) whose violent rampages against soldiers, settlers, and posses are motivationally incomprehensible to the films' white characters. These motivations are at least partially explained to the viewer, however, resulting in a much more sympathetic portrayal of the 'Third World' character (in Chato and Valdez, he becomes the unequivocal, avenging angel hero of the story) and either completely or to a considerable extent justifying his murderous behavior for the viewer. Of these revisionist westerns (which are clearly intended as doomful Vietnam allegories), Ulzana remains the most fascinating because of its rigorously-maintained thematic ambiguity. The film refuses to champion or condemn either of the competing cultures (white and Indian), showing instead that each is capable of compassion and brutality in equal measure. Primarily, though, director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter Alan Sharp concentrate on establishing that the Indian and white cultures are so fundamentally different that they may in fact have no basis for communication or interaction of any kind. A meeting in battle is for both parties therefore both pointless and tragically logical.
Southern Comfort, of course, also works as a Vietnam allegory, but its thematic ambiguity is restricted to the depiction of the Cajuns. They are again avenging angels, but neither the soldiers nor the film's
57 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
viewers are given any clear cultural signposts that might suggest specific reasons for the Cajun's relentless vengeance against Bravo Team. The soldiers are presented clearly enough as brutal imperialists, if Swaders of the Cajuns' ancestral territory and violators of their cultural heritage. But the Cajun culture itself is subsequently shown only in fragments, most cohesively in the long climactic sequence set in a remote Cajun village. Spencer and Hardin, by this time the sole surviving members of Bravo Team, arrive while the village is in the midst of some unspecified community-wide celebration and feast. At this point, we see and hear the playing of Sydeco music (for the average American, probably the most familiar aspect of Cajun culture) and are given a National Geographic-style visual tour of the locals and their environment. Even this flavorful glimpse of Cajun society has a somewhat ironic edge, though, in that it reveals only the most obvious surface structures of the community. It seems as though the soldiers in the film and the audiences watching it are similarly and deliberately positioned as cultural outsiders, suggesting that we can never really hope to understand the Cajuns simply because we are not Cajuns ourselves. This in turn clearly alludes to a particular attitude toward American involvement in Southeast Asian (expressed currently with regard to Central America) which stresses the arrogance expressed when the United States assumes that it knows what is 'right' politically and economically for societies very different from our own. What Southern Comfort is finally 'about', then, is the eventual toll that this arrogance exacts from our own social fabric it is irreparably shredded.
The films ends very enigmatically, with Hardin and Spencer, after fighting for their lives in a deserted general store (their pursuers are never specifically linked with the Cajuns in the village; rather, a connection is vaguely implied through the intercutting of festival scenes with the deadly final 'battle'), fleeing the village toward a
hovering Army helicopter and an Army truck winding its way over a jungle road toward them. But these vehicles, instead of being presented as instruments of salvation, are as visually spectral as the Cajuns have been through most of the film. The scene is shot in agonizingly dreamlike slow-motion; the chopper and the truck appear out of nowhere, and the soldiers run but never seem to get closer to their ostensible rescuers. This effect is doubled in a series of tantalizing soft-focus close-ups of the helicopter and the truck which look like (but aren't) loops of the same two shots. We can't see the faces of the chopper pilot or the truck driver or any other human being, only these increasingly ominous-looking machines which seem to be flying and driving themselves. Meanwhile, the relentless, metallic swishing of the helicopter blades builds to a crescendo on the soundtrack, intensiflying this impression of an outside world (the world which has made Bravo Team what it was) dominated by a metaphor of olive-drab in inhumanity.
58 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
Southern Comfort's merciless destruction of conventional viewer expectations of the combat/war film as genre leads to a situation in which the film's functionally leaderless and anarchic National Guard unit implicitly expresses certain relatively widespread attitudes characteristic of US society in the Vietnam/Watergate period and after. Throughout the 1970's, as one institution or authority figure after another was unmasked as criminally corrupt or incompetent (if not both), the ethical anger of the Sixties gave way to a mood of hedonistic cynicism. Both the Carter and Reagan eras have been seen as attempts to resolve this sense of psychic alienation through a retreat into fantasy versions of America's 'simpler' past, guided in the first case by a young mister Lincoln poseur cultivating an ante-bellum image of rural simplicity and honesty, and in the latter by an authentically movie-made American who envisions for us a King's Row of white picket fences and wealthy white people (with the underclasses neatly remove to 'their' side of the tracks). Both represent attempts to comprehend and deal with the world through a new and desperate kind of emotional isolationism, nostalgia-mongering, and an increasingly rabid xenophobia. (See e.g. Hodgson 1980; Barrett 1983; Cockburn and Ridgeway 1981; Dugger 1983).
What Southern Comfort suggests in this context, to a degree matched previously in mainstream American cinema by few other films (Robert Aldrich's magisterially apocalyptic Kiss me Deadly comes immediately to mind), is that American society has become so diseased, so rotten at its very core (with Vietnam's symbolic status as cause or effect totally blurred), that our culture doesn't deserve to survive. The film does not indicate the origin of this moral carcinoma, only its pathology and its pervasiveness, and that it manifests itself most visibly in Americans as blinkered self-interest and a total lack of human compassion. None of the soldiers who are the film's nominal protagonists 'learn' anything about the world around them except that it is going to kill them. A terrified, weeping member of Bravo Team, just before he is shot through the heart with a Cajun's bullet, whimpers with genuine disbelief, 'I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not supposed to be here.' Yes, he did, and yes, he is: Southern Comfort presents us with an entirely new kind of original sin, one which requires the most extreme punishment and precludes the possibility of redemption. The film's 'message', then, is finally very much not socially constructive and it is even anti-revolutionary, despite its vehement condemnation of the social constructs of the dominant ideology (implicit in the historical/generic referent of the combat/war film). But as Terry Eagleton has suggested:
To write well is more than a matter of 'style'; it also means having at one's disposal an ideological perspective which can penetrate to the realities of men's experience in a certain situation ... Whether those insights are in political terms 'progressive' or 'reactionary' ... is not the point... Marxist criticism ... sees that, in the absence of
59 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 2:2 (1984)
genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature. (1976:8)
In conclusion, then, Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland, California may be generalized here to incorporate Southern Comfort's vision of an America beyond redemption: 'There isn't any there' - not anymore, anyway.
REFERENCES
Barrett, L.I. (1983) Gambling with History, New York: Doubleday and Co. Britton, A. (1981) 'Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam', Movie, Winter 1980-Spring
1981.
(1977) Violence and the sacred, Baltimore: John Hopkins.
et al (1979) American Nightmare, Toronto: Festival of Festivals.
Carey, J.W. (1975) 'A Cultural Approach to Communication', Communication, 2.
Cockburn, A. and Ridgeway, J. (1981) 'The World of Appearance: the public campaign'. In Ferguson, T. and Rogers, J. (eds) The Hidden Election, New York: Random House.
Dugger, R. (1983) On Reagan, New York: McGraw Hill.
Eagleton, T. (1976) Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley: University of California
Press. Hall, S. (1973) 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', unpublished paper.
Hodgson, G. (1980) All Things to All Men, New York: Touchstone Books. Newcomb, T. (1980) Symbolic anthropology' and the study of popular culture', unpublished paper.
Paret, P., 'The History of War'. In Gilbert, F. and Graubard, S. (eds) Historical Studies Today. Schatz, T. (1981) Hollywood Genres, New York: Random House.
(1983) Old Hollywood Genres, New York: Random House.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press. Wood, R. (1977) Ideology, genre, auteur', Film Comment January-February.
(1979) 'An introduction to the American horror film', in Britton et al(eds) 1979.
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