Identifying Heroes: the Godfather and Pulp Fiction
Identifying Heroes: The Godfather and Pulp Fiction
The form of Classical Hollywood films is, first and foremost, invisible. In a Classical Hollywood film, the narrative is foremost, and style serves the narrative. Camera angles, lighting and editing patterns such as the shot/reverse-shot pattern aim to give us the best possible perspective on the unfolding events(1). These events are arranged in a strongly causality-oriented linear narrative, with one event causing the next. This narrative is arranged around a central, active protagonist, whose decisions and actions are the key to the pattern of cause and effect that drives the story(2). This pattern seems so logical, so natural, that the audience of the classical Hollywood film is supposed to feel that they are receiving the material without the mediating intervention of the filmmaker. The link between heroes and the spectator under this model is therefore one of relatively unproblematic identification. Even films that featured anti-social heroes, such as the thirties gangster genre, modified the pattern only through imposing the strongly moral, tragic sequence of rise and fall; the audience's identification remained firmly with the central protagonist(3). Such a situation, under these assumptions, puts the audience in an apparently perverse situation, and it is therefore hardly surprising that the infamous Hays code of the thirties moved to ensure that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin(4)."
The assumption of audience identity with the hero was never unproblematic, and of course the classical Hollywood model of filmmaking partially outlined above never existed entirely without challenge. Nevertheless, it is clear that up to the fifties the classical Hollywood model was relatively applicable and that challenges to it were largely ineffective. However, beyond the fifties, the model became increasingly irrelevant. The reasons for the downfall of
The form of Classical Hollywood films is, first and foremost, invisible. In a Classical Hollywood film, the narrative is foremost, and style serves the narrative. Camera angles, lighting and editing patterns such as the shot/reverse-shot pattern aim to give us the best possible perspective on the unfolding events(1). These events are arranged in a strongly causality-oriented linear narrative, with one event causing the next. This narrative is arranged around a central, active protagonist, whose decisions and actions are the key to the pattern of cause and effect that drives the story(2). This pattern seems so logical, so natural, that the audience of the classical Hollywood film is supposed to feel that they are receiving the material without the mediating intervention of the filmmaker. The link between heroes and the spectator under this model is therefore one of relatively unproblematic identification. Even films that featured anti-social heroes, such as the thirties gangster genre, modified the pattern only through imposing the strongly moral, tragic sequence of rise and fall; the audience's identification remained firmly with the central protagonist(3). Such a situation, under these assumptions, puts the audience in an apparently perverse situation, and it is therefore hardly surprising that the infamous Hays code of the thirties moved to ensure that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin(4)."
The assumption of audience identity with the hero was never unproblematic, and of course the classical Hollywood model of filmmaking partially outlined above never existed entirely without challenge. Nevertheless, it is clear that up to the fifties the classical Hollywood model was relatively applicable and that challenges to it were largely ineffective. However, beyond the fifties, the model became increasingly irrelevant. The reasons for the downfall of