Jason
Mittell’s intervention into genre studies is situated squarely between two
fundamentally distinct methodological histories, two disparate
institutionalized approaches to text and context. On one hand, we have academic
film study, which has its origin in the kinds of literary formalism that
operate primarily via the analysis of centrifugal forces (i.e. Great Authors,
Modes and Movements, Styles) for which critics and scholars provide
historiographies as well as hagiographies. This approach is thoroughly textual,
so long as we’re willing to take instantiated authorship or style as textual in
itself (and I am). On the other hand, we have televisual studies as a component
of research on mass media industries and functions of media communications. Here
televisual texts are treated ultimately as, so to speak, precipitations of
prevailing industrial politics as well as nationalist, racialized, and gendered
discourses. In the latter instance, analyses of specific texts serve as
processes of adjudication, whereby stories and images serve up evidence for the
hegemony of particular institutions or institutionally-wrought modes of being
(i.e. ‘governmentalities’). In the former, such sociopolitical conclusions are
only ever secondary, derivative of ‘closer’ investigations that purport to explicate
the irreducible novelties or specificities generated by great authors or
radical formal movements. At best, discourse qua ‘discourse’ in the Foucauldian
sense is reproduced by a particular text and through that reproduction
transformed.
This
last understanding is, I think, where Mittell is headed, though having not read
more than his introduction, I cannot be certain. At the very least, it strikes
me as a natural endpoint for the intervention of someone who desires neither to
abandon wholesale any textual analysis or to deny the broad contextual
determination of generic forms. Respecting each potential methodology requires
a comparative and recursive approach in which one accounts for: 1) sociopolitical
discourses internal and external to television and other media industries; 2) genre
texts as bounded by recognizable iconographies and narrative structures; and 3)
genres themselves as more than nominal—as histories containing nodal points and
branching pathways.
It
is my contention that at least one genre, the gangster or organized crime
drama, thoroughly manifests the inextricability of these three modes of account,
at once injecting into its formal design broad and historical sociopolitical
discourses and thus prescribing its own mode of critical viewership. To
exemplify this, I’ve chosen the first murder committed in the first episode of The
Sopranos. (This is the point where I would show the clip in a class
presentation. If you’ve already watched it, that’s okay, I forgive you. CW:
Extreme Violence)
Tony
Soprano is in a bidding war with a Czech organization over a sanitation
contract, and his nephew Christopher Moltisanti has taken it upon himself to
send them a message by murdering one such Czech. It’s an execution style hit,
carried out in the back of Satriale’s Pork Store.
What
is so consequential about this scene is also what is so constitutive of the
gangster genre as a legacy and as a living phenomenon on television. Christopher
is not a career hitman but is instead a wannabe capo, getting a foot in
the door by coordinating a series of clichés as a makeshift rite of passage. He
begins the scene by gesturing in childish imitations of martial arts poses, and
finally does the deed while superstars of Hollywood’s past flash across the
screen. With these, legal discourses about the Mafia are internalized by the
pilot. Organized crime represents an ‘illegitimate’ and superficial form of
governing and distributing justice. Even more so than in the western, blurred
lines between lawfulness and lawlessness, with distinctly real historical
referents, pervade the gangster genre.
Moreover,
the images of stars signify an (at least) subconscious reckoning on the part of
Christopher, and a direct address on the part of David Chase and company, with
the legacy of Hollywood’s diegetic and non-diegetic connections to organized
crime. Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, two preeminent screen gangsters,
bookend Dean Martin, the legendary crooner who worked for bootleggers and
tended bar at speakeasies in his younger years. The import here is twofold. Given
that HBO’s turn toward original prestige programming is perhaps the most
enduring legacy of the Time-Warner merger, and that Bogart and Robinson were at
different moments leading contract players for Warner Bros., this scene
establishes explicitly the weight of the intertwined history of genre and
industrial brand-building. Just as the auras of Italian-American identity and
movie gangsters hover over Christopher, and inform his personal drives, The
Sopranos in its infancy and a revivified HBO attempt to measure up to a
consecrated screen history and to the economic powerhouse providing their
substrate.
The
gangster genre subsists on the integration of extra-generic and extra-diegetic
histories and discourses into what any close reading must take as its objects
of formal and thematic analysis. Organized crime was always a response
to shifting legalities, mores, and ethnic makeup in national populations.
Merely iconographic gangster tales lose what makes the genre tick, because what
makes it tick goes beyond both surface-level understandings of American history
or material fetishism. On TV, gangster dramas like The Sopranos and Boardwalk
Empire are reckonings with the intersections of aesthetic, discursive, political,
and historical change throughout the last two centuries, and the heightened
‘quality’ of their engagements, I believe, is directly tied to the production
cultures of the medium, in which screenwriters and auteurs are replaced by
writers’ rooms and directorial cadres of usual suspects.
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