When Harry Met Godzilla: How Hollywood Genres Hold the Key to Your Personality (And Everybody Else's Too!)

By Garry Leonard and Deirdre Flynn

Whether it's the cute guy or girl at Starbucks returning your glances, or you're trying to tune-up a marriage, this book offers a way to begin a conversation ("what are your favourite movies?" Easy!) that will give you instant clues as to compatibility and likely goals and principles of a longtime partner or a new flirtation. Have ytou ever had an argument that just doesn[t seem to be about what it's about? chances are your "genre narratives" are clashing. You're saying "tomatoe" and she's saying "tomahto". Both of you are hearing statements as threats, even if you intend them as neutral declarations of your point of view on a given topic. Understanding your preference for one Hollywood genre over another can shed light on commonly unexplored—yet vitally important—aspects of your personality personality. By identifying with characters who are like us and by empathizing with characters who are completely different from us, we gain insight into ourselves and into the way we interact with others. We also see what happens when characters make important choices: some knock them off balance, and others help them regain balance. At the heart of nearly every Hollywood hit ever made – be it a Romance, Melodrama, Film Noir, Horror, Western, or Science Fiction movie – is a quest for balance Typically, the narrative begins when the lead character is knocked off balance by a chance encounter with a person or event that challenges the status quo. Depending on the genre, this might be an encounter with a soul mate, a financial crisis, a femme fatale, a monster, an enemy, or an alien/machine. The protagonist then spends the rest of the movie either regaining his/her balance and finding a clear resolution (offering us a solution)or going into lock-down in some destructive pattern that virtually guarantees death (offering us a cautionary tale).

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987806215

Book preview

Copyright © 2011

By Garry Leonard and Deirdre Flynn

All rights reserved

The Library and Archives of Canada has catalogued the electronic version of this book under the following

ISBN: 978-0-9878062-1-5

The Library and Archives of Canada has catalogued the trade paperback version of this book under the following

ISBN: 978-0-9878062-0-8

Printed in the United States of America

By McNally Jackson Books

Set in Times New Roman Script

Photography by Elizabeth Salib

For

Raymond,

Marshall,

Flynn,

and

Brian

May you live the way you love

and love the way you live.

Also By Garry Leonard

Let’s Get Fiscal: Hollywood Romance and the Modern Economy in Film International

Monsters and Mortgages: Hollywood Horror Films as a Prime Economic Indicator in Film International

"Technically Human: From Apes to Astronauts in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey" in Film Criticism

Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce

Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective

Also By Deirdre Flynn

The McGraw-Hill Handbook, First Canadian Edition

An Uncomfortable Fit: Joyce’s Women

in Joyce and the City

Virginia Woolf and the Fashionable Elite

in Virginia Woolf and Communities

Proust’s Fashion Sketches,

in The Bulletin of Proust Studies

Contents

List of Films Discussed

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1

Living and Loving Just Like You Wrote It

Chapter 2

What’s Your Genre? A Self-Assessment Survey

Chapter 3

If You Tend Toward Romance

Chapter 4

If You Tend Toward Melodrama

Chapter 5

If You Tend Toward Film Noir

Chapter 6

If You Tend Toward Gothic

Chapter 7

If You Tend Toward Westerns

Chapter 8

If You Tend Toward Science Fiction

Chapter 9

Five Exercises To Find Your Genre Balance

The Subjective Shot

The Voice Over

The Flash-Forward

The Flashback

The Shot Shift

Chapter 10

Five Exercises To Find

Your Genre Balance Together

The Chance Encounter

The Shot-Reaction-Shot

The Jump Cut and Fade-Out

The Genre Balance

The Happy Ending

Appendix

Sixty More Great Genre Flicks to Enjoy

Additional Information

List of Films Discussed

Romance

It Happened One Night (1934)

Pretty Woman (1990)

Enchanted (2007)

Melodrama

Now, Voyager (1942)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

American Beauty (1999)

Film Noir

Citizen Kane (1941)

Double Indemnity (1944)

Detour (1945)

Gothic

Dracula (1931)

Psycho (1960)

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Western

High Noon (1952)

Shane (1953)

The Searchers (1956)

Science Fiction

Star Wars (1977)

Blade Runner (1982)

The Matrix (1999)

I think it is good to be excited by seeing a movie. To some extent you can enjoy the movie because you know that it is a movie. Even though you have no idea of the screen, still your interest is based on an understanding that this is a movie with a screen and there is a projector or something artificial. So you can enjoy it. That is how we enjoy our life. If you have no idea of the screen or the projector, perhaps you cannot see it as a movie.

[Meditation] is necessary to know the kind of screen you have and to enjoy your life as you enjoy movies in the theater. You are not afraid of the screen. You do not have any particular feeling for the screen, which is just a white screen. So you are not afraid of your life at all.

Shunryu Suzuki,

not always so: practicing the true spirit of Zen

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many people who responded to our rather personal interview questions with such remarkable candour and generosity. We would also like to thank the hundreds of associates, students, colleagues, friends, distant acquaintances, acquaintances of distant acquaintances, family members, neighbours, and every one in between who took the time to complete our genre survey, helping us refine each and every question and encouraging us with your enthusiastic responses to the survey results.

Special thanks go to Sociology Professor Ann Mullen, a wonderful friend and admirable researcher and writer, who helped us make our genre survey sociologically compelling and individually resonant—not to mention entertaining—for all who complete it. In addition, we thank Psychology Professor Gerald Cupchik, whose many clinical tests on audience responses to film and whose ongoing professional collaboration have helped us formulate some of our fundamental premises about the ways in which distinct genres both reflect and affect their viewers.

For our title and other well-tuned turns of phrase, we thank Casey Mickle, accomplished fiction writer (under a pseudonym) and devoted family friend for over thirty years. We also thank Cathy Jacobs, tech-savvy super-mom with a spicy writer’s wit, whose ongoing confidence and impressive editorial skills have helped us develop and synthesize our ideas, showing us again and again how they can enable individuals to put their lives and loves in perspective. In addition, we thank Dr. Bridget Walker—sister, sister-in-law, aunt, dressage champion, and psychologist par excellence—who has supported us in our publishing adventures, sharing her own writing and publishing saga, not to mention her agent’s advice, as she completes her forthcoming book, How To Conquer Your Child’s Anxiety. Finally, we give our heartfelt thanks to the thousands of students whose excitement, interest, and engagement in the ideas that follow have inspired us to put them down in this book.

Introduction

One of the more memorable scenes to emerge from Hollywood over the past thirty years involves Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) simulating an orgasm at Katz’s New York Deli. Watching Sally writhe around on her chair, many moviegoers were squirming themselves. Some were embarrassed. Others found Sally’s escalating oohs and aahs funny, if not downright hilarious. So how does one interpret the response of the uncomfortable viewer, chuckling nervously, versus that of the person still laughing as the credits roll? And what does it mean?

In fact, how we respond and relate to films and their characters reveals much more than the skill of the actors or the cleverness of the plot. A preference in cinema can shed light on a commonly unexplored—yet vitally important—aspect of an individual’s personality: emotional intelligence (EI). Although the basis for EI dates back to Darwin, it has only been in recent decades that researchers have sought to define and qualify its importance. Dr. Daniel Goleman’s bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ argues that success in life may depend more on EI than on the more easily measured IQ. EI fosters qualities such as initiative, empathy, compassion, adaptability, and persuasive-ness. These qualities play a key role in all relationships, and the ability to nurture and improve them can lead to a more fulfilling life.

Fortunately, movies provide us with a perfect, and very entertaining, way to hone our EI. By identifying with characters who are like us and by empathizing with characters who are completely different from us, we gain insight into ourselves and into the way we interact with others. We also see what happens when characters make important choices: some knock them off balance, and others help them regain balance. In times past, before the advent of movies or the hustle and bustle of modern life, various communal traditions were built into the fabric of everyday life, intended to help us restore balance in our lives.

As mass-media proliferated, and people became more and more individual—which is also to say more and more separate—overall communal strategies for restoring balance disappeared in their traditional form but reappeared in the public ritual of attending genre films, en masse, to discover strategies for recovering balance in love relationships, in parenting and at work, to name the most fundamental. You might not know the person sitting next to you, much less the person watching the movie in another city, but you were all watching the same movie. That means there is a sort of de facto shared ritual going on and the strategies you are witnessing and incorporating into you own life will be recognizable to others.

To pick one example, it is not mere happenstance that couples who have recently met go to movies together, the way couples might have attended the same church (not to say that never happens now, just that it is not a given). How the couple reacts to the movie is not only a talking point, but also a way to compare and assess each other’s value systems, as well as a attend together a demonstration via the couple on the screen, on the latest configurations of acceptable flirting or demonstration of affection.

Balancing on the Silver Screen

At the heart of nearly every Hollywood hit ever made – be it a Romance, Melodrama, Film Noir, Horror, Western, or Science Fiction movie – is a quest for balance. Typically, the narrative begins when the lead character is knocked off balance by a chance encounter with a person or event that challenges the status quo. Depending on the genre, this might be an encounter with a soul mate, a financial crisis, a femme fatale, a monster, an enemy, or an alien/machine. The protagonist then spends the rest of the movie either regaining his/her balance and finding a clear resolution or going into lock-down in some destructive pattern that virtually guarantees death . . . or a sequel.

Watching this bumpy ride from chance encounter to resolution or lock-down, we spectators are able to identify with characters who more or less skillfully manage the ups and downs. In the process, we are able to reorient ourselves relative to our own choices and priorities. Whether they are about cowboys on the high plains or women fighting to keep their families together, genre movies actually depict our own stories, borrowed from us by the Hollywood studio system. Hollywood genre films tell us tales we recognize, give us characters with whom we identify, and show us how the choices characters make generate their stories. We may get different actors, settings, and details, but in genre films, we get the same story, re-told again and again.

While we watch this story, we get to envision our own life story for ourselves. For instance, when we watch a Romantic Comedy, we envision our ideals of courtship, romance, and love. When we watch a Western, we envision our ideals of strength, work, and integrity. We see our Romance or Western heroes face challenges and find resolutions, and we see them generate their story as they do so.

Empowering Yourself with Genre Intelligence

In this book, you will read examples of how this story is told, with variations, in six of the most popular movie genres, and you’ll see what happens when real people—hundreds of whom were interviewed for this book—transfer these narratives to their unscripted, off-screen relationships. By completing the genre survey and reading about how movie characters in each genre respond to crises and regain their balance, you’ll learn to recognize the movie genres that most closely reflect your personality. In addition, by seeing how real people begin to notice their internal scripts and use this awareness to improve their lives and relationships, you will learn how to recognize your own scripts—both the productive ones and the destructive ones. In so doing, you will gain insights into how to make decisions that allow you to find your balance when you falter.

You will also see how the various genres respond in partnership to one another. For instance, what happens when a Melodrama type marries a cowboy or when a Romantic falls for someone who tends toward Film Noir? When you know your partner or potential partner’s genre tendencies, you can look ahead to potential challenges and, ultimately, maintain a more comfortable, sustainable, and loving balance with your sweetheart.