Luis M. Garcia-Mainar

Recent contributions to the study of genre have stressed the role of its internal laws, such as historical trends or industrial factors, in the formation and development of generic forms, while failing to take account of the interactions of these forms with social circumstances. This attention to the internal mechanisms of genre has spread and gained impetus as a result of the prominence enjoyed by historical perspectives of film studies in the past ten or fifteen years. These theories tend to disregard the possibility that cultural contexts may affect the configuration of genres, a tendency which has led Steve Neale, for example, to assert that genres are aesthetic forms with an intrinsic logic that remains unaffected by the real world. He argues that the impact of the social context is:

[A]lways mediated through existing institutions, conventions and forms, and that there is never a point — even at the beginning — at which real-world characters, conflicts and settings find their way directly onto the screen. There are always genres. There are always aesthetic forms. And they always possess their own logic. Even when films were new, they deployed generic and aesthetic conventions from photography, from the theatre, from popular stories, and from numerous other forms or art, entertainment and representation.[1]

Rick Altman exemplifies this tendency in what has perhaps become the most relevant attempt to reconceptualise the notion of genre in recent years. His most relevant idea is that genres are not stable but in constant change, not through the influence of their socio-historical context, but firstly through the promotion of genre cycles to full-blown genres, and secondly through the constant redefinition of generic boundaries effected by critics. Genres are thus not stable but in a constant process of change, which makes of each of them a set of overlapping maps that show the diverse areas they have designated in their lifetime.[2] As an example, by applying the metaphor of the overlapping generic maps, the different definitions of melodrama used by film critics can be explained. In early cinema, and as a continuation of the meaning it had in 19thcentury drama, melodrama meant crime, violence and suspense; the 1970s saw the term verge towards emotion, sentimentality and the family, only to then become attached to a very specific group of texts, the so-called women’s films; since the 1990s, critical work has tried to recuperate the original concept of melodrama by applying it to action cinema and in general to male genres such as the western or the war film.[3] The history of melodrama as a concept is thus best understood through these maps, which have designated different territories at each historical stage, some of which overlap one another. Generic maps are thus historically bound concepts that presuppose the, also historical, variation of genre, and to Altman this variation is brought about by industrial decisions or, as in the case of melodrama, by the decisions of critics.

Both Neale and Altman thus pose the intrinsic life of genres as the only determinant for their formation and development, in the process neglecting the social and ideological dimension of genre. Altman only considers the relevance of this social aspect in his formulation of what he calls the generic crossroads, when he asserts that genres work by providing both the pleasure of diverging from cultural norms and that of finally embracing culturally sanctioned values.[4] In this, he seems to return to the concerns of the ritual and ideological approaches to genre whose antecedents are to be found in works from the 1970s and early 1980s.[5] But this is only a minor argument in Altman’s theory of genre, since its core tries to explain genre development as the industrial practice of providing originality by expanding on previously tested formulas or as the critical practice of generic definition and redefinition. In this paper I propose to argue that generic maps aid not only the analysis of a genre’s diachronic development but also the synchronic study of generic mixture in individual films, and that in doing so they may both become useful tools for a social and ideological study of genre and help ascertain the impact of social change on generic evolution. While Altman uses generic maps as tools for his intrinsic analysis of genre, I argue that at the same time they disclose the relevance of extrinsic factors to the transformation and development of genres. The new meaning that I will be giving to the concept implies that in individual films it appears in the company of other generic maps and that they often overlap one another. Besides, they are not necessarily concepts of the same scope or rank, but some of them are often so broad that they include other, more limited, sets of expected representations. Films are thus to be understood as collections of generic maps which do not exclude one another, but very often share similar motifs or conventions, which produces areas for potential mutual reinforcement, for clash and for aesthetic and cultural transformation. In these processes, the influence of the social context on generic forms can be found.

I will be using Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) as an example of the ways in which the presence of generic maps articulates a discourse that echoes contemporary debates about the formation of identity, a discourse that in its turn changes the shape of the film’s generic form. This process ultimately shows the direction in which the genres of crime are developing in contemporary Hollywood. The study of the connections between film genre and society will thus centre on the way film conventions interact with identity discourses. Broadly speaking, discourses regarding identity are the core of the ideological work performed by popular culture, which makes them the most appropriate material in order to test the capacity of artistic forms to refer to our world. The standard positions about the identity of the self tend to distinguish between a modern period in which it was unproblematic and unified, and a postmodern one in which identity has become negotiable, multiple, flexible, or discontinuous. More specifically, I suggest that Collateral illustrates the state of contemporary identity as defined by the changing roles of class and work. In this context, modern identity has been explained as stable and fully allied with the activities of production, since work traditionally invested the individual with a unified identity. Postmodern identity is, however, not identified with production but with consumption, as the new individuals of postmodern societies inhabit a consumerist world that provides them with increased possibilities of identity formation: it is now personal style, shaped through the acquisition of goods, that becomes central to the contemporary self.[6] Implicit in these arguments is the idea, held by most recent social theory, that the role of production has diminished during the twentieth century, having been replaced by activities of consumption.[7] Consumption would be a response to the limits work has traditionally imposed on identity, since it introduces a cultural realm in which individuals can intervene in the process of formation of their own identity.[8] However, other social theorists argue that, although work-based society has certainly changed throughout the twentieth century, contemporary society has not changed completely and, while consumption has gained prominence, production still plays a decisive role in our lives. According to Paul Ransome, a society predominantly based on consumption has not yet appeared in the industrialised West at the beginning of the twenty-first century: consumption has increasingly become more central to contemporary Western societies, but the production side, and particularly work, still matters.[9] In some ways the intensity of work is still the same as ever or has even increased, as studies about the time US Americans, and in general citizens in Western countries, spend at work have shown.[10]  It is the tension between identity as rigidly based on class and work, and a liberated identity represented as not a material process but as a symbolic one orchestrated in a consumer society that I would like to explore in Collateral. Ransome formulates this tension, which pervades contemporary Western societies, as a struggle between the “ascetic psychology of Protestant notions of individualism” and a new individualism that is more hedonistic, feels comfortable about one’s sense of self, and has stopped feeling guilty about indulging in consumption.[11]  Since the crime film has capitalised on representations of individualism, of the empowered detective and the gangster or of the endangered victims, the study of one of its texts is a privileged ground for the analysis of the interaction between these social tensions and genre.

Collateral follows cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) around the streets of Los Angeles in the course of one night. It opens with a scene that includes almost all the ingredients that will be operative in the narrative, as Annie (Jada Pinket Smith), a federal attorney, hails Max’s cab and gradually engages with him in a surprisingly open conversation about the dreams and fears caused by their jobs. The scene qualifies Max as both a good professional and a good-natured person who, however, is shy with women and lacks the necessary initiative to take action not only with Annie but with his life: he has been driving a cab for twelve years, dreaming of starting his own limousine company, but he keeps postponing it. When Annie leaves the cab he feels that he has lost an opportunity to get a date with her, that he needed to act to make things happen, but he resigns himself to enduring the consequences of his personality and it will be Annie who makes the first move by returning to hand him her business card. She is described as a professional woman in the contemporary world of work, in which women have reached top positions, and self-confidence is as relevant as knowing how to do one’s job; but she is also human, insecure and innocent underneath, pointing to the stress of contemporary life on women and rounding off an introduction to the discourse on gender, professionalism and work that will be elaborated as the film proceeds. Action is then definitely introduced by Vincent (Tom Cruise), a contract killer who will force Max to accompany him on a spree of murder that will culminate, in a circular trajectory of the story, with the attempt to kill Annie. Max will have to learn that his initiative is necessary to kill Vincent and save her life.

The broadest and most basic layer of the film is the generic map of melodrama, a genre which has been the object of much debate in recent decades. Two of its reformulations are particularly useful to the analysis of Collateral. One sees melodrama as stories about victim-heroes whose virtue is recognised after a dynamic of pathos and action, narratives whose purpose is to delineate a moral conflict symbolised by the characters.[12] Another considers it a broad category that cuts across genres and functions through the creation of two different spaces, a social space that presents fantasies of power and disempowerment, and a space of adventure that features fantasies of violent self-assertion. Melodrama is about power and escape from a social space which is repressive and full of danger for the characters and which viewers experience as such.[13] These two definitions manage to include the representation of both suffering, with the moral charge and attention to virtue traditionally attached to it, and action towards self-preservation, precisely the stuff that characters and conflicts are made of in Collateral.

This map thus operates at the level of characters and narrative issues such as structure or space, and in Collateral it concentrates around Max, the paradigmatic innocent character who evokes the weakness of the protagonists of melodrama and whose virtue will be recognised in the end. The use of suffering in order to construct him as a morally virtuous character points to the presence of this melodramatic layer at the bottom of the classical forms of the thriller and most crime genres. The story follows a dynamic of pathos and action, of the loss of human lives and the promise that what has been lost can be regained, or at least partially alleviated, if Max finally decides to get involved at some point in the story. Melodrama also operates by posing the existence of a social space, the cab, in which we witness fantasies of power, mainly when Max’s working class ethics of perseverance and efficiency prevail, and disempowerment, as when he feels his incapacity to take action with Annie or when later Vincent makes him face his lack of initiative. The city becomes the space of escape through violence, a space in which Vincent loses himself to execute the witnesses for the prosecution and which Max will be gradually forced to enter. Max functions as the victim-hero whose flaws do not let him reach his goals but who will be healed through contact with the world of violence, which teaches him self-assertion and the moral lesson that evil can only be fought with specific actions against it. Melodrama thus brings to Collateral a definition of the male protagonist as victim, as a defenceless, suffering anti-hero who faces social disadvantage, a representation that coincides with the recent cultural vindication of the heterogeneity of masculinity, no longer exclusively designated as powerful and socially privileged but also as frail and marginal.[14]

Overlapping melodrama are the genres of crime, resulting in a mixture that has informed crime films since their early stages. Thomas Leitch has provided a cultural analysis of crime narratives that defines the several film genres of crime according to their capacity to voice ambivalence towards the law. According to him, the field of the crime film is characterised by a complex interplay between ideologies that exhibit differing attitudes towards social norm. It works by first setting clear-cut positions vis-à-vis the law — held by criminals, avengers or victims — which produce the genres of, respectively, the gangster film, the detective/cop movie and the suspense thriller. These genres then quickly trace the characters’ change as they approach positions which had initially been presented as antithetical. Cops/detectives tend to break the law while victims embrace violence, both thus becoming criminals, and gangsters are often revealed to be victims of their lifestyle: it is these shifts that make of ambiguity towards social norm the trademark of the genre.[15] The predominant crime generic map in the film is that of the suspense thriller, a genre in which innocent victims become inadvertently enmeshed in a criminal confrontation and feel threatened until they muster enough courage to react violently against their aggressors. According to Charles Derry’s classification of the genre, Collateral would be a suspense thriller of moral confrontation, one “organised around an overt antithetical confrontation between a character representing good or innocence and a character representing evil,” which is constructed in terms of oppositions that nevertheless emphasise the parallelisms between victim and criminal.[16] This basic structure associates Collateral with such recent thrillers as Panic Room (USA 2002), Phone Booth (USA 2003),Cellular (USA/Germany 2004), Red Eye (USA 2005) or Flight Plan (USA 2005), films that, influenced by television crime series like the popular 24 (2001-2007), deploy real or almost real time narratives and a sense of urgency in order to deal with post-millenial anxieties that literally or metaphorically evoke the threat of global terrorism. This sensitivity of the suspense thriller to its contemporary historical context combines with the promotion of traditional values like courage and personality since, in common with all crime films, it presents individualistic heroism as the solution to a similarly individualistic and antisocial violence that has caused the problems in the narrative, this being the crime film’s central paradox and its justification the central ideological function of the genre.[17]  The recourse to images of heroism has been considered part of the crime film’s, and thus also of the suspense thriller’s, function as repository of early story-telling traditions associated with the heroic romance and the adventure tale,[18]  an impulse to keep the past alive and oppose change that coexists with the genre’s capacity to reflect and adapt to surrounding social circumstances. Collateral illustrates both the potential for change present in the contemporary suspense thriller and its tendency to hold back cultural and social transformations, a contradictory pull that in this film derives from the influence of adjacent genres of different scope, such as melodrama, the buddy film or, another genre associated with crime, the gangster film.

The generic maps of the buddy and the gangster film also overlap melodrama, the buddy movie lending the film a structure that produces the realistic drama noted by critics in their reviews of the film.[19]  Built around a couple of male protagonists, the buddy film is a contemporary genre that works by both positing an all-male unit and at the same time focusing on the differences that make the buddy alliance impossible: differences of age, class and race which reflect anxiety about the possibility that friendship between men may contain a certain trace of homosexuality. In its attempt to emphasise those differences, the buddy film actually foregrounds the anxiety about homosexuality that the text wants to erase and which emerges in a performance of extraordinary virility that is meant to dismiss homosexuality but which in fact reveals anxiety about manhood itself, apparently in need of reaffirmation.[20] Whether these underlying meanings of the buddy film appear in Collateral can be debated, and actually the tendency to find traces of homosexual anxiety in almost every film with two male protagonists is a major shortcoming of some uses of this generic concept, but the film has certainly borrowed the components of the buddy film. This is most apparent in Collateral’s representation of the two male characters as bound by a solidarity in the workplace that, for example, leads Vincent to teach Max how to defend his rights before his boss. As in so many other buddy films, work functions as the basis of the male alliance and serves to articulate other, more personal, themes.

The film centres on the peculiar bond between an African American cab driver and a white killer with different class affiliations, a bond developed through the conversations they have in the course of the night, which make Vincent gradually gain consciousness about what he is doing, as he becomes more of a central character. Max’s plans, his meeting with Annie, his failed relationship with his mother, all of these evoke in Vincent similar experiences, through which he comes to reconsider the kind of life he leads. When he kills the jazz club owner (Barry Shabaka Henley) he seems to feel that he has done something wrong, and after the visit to Max’s mother Ida (Irma P. Hall) at the hospital the conversation moves to parents and how they project their flaws onto children; it is then that Vincent hints that he might have killed his father, from whom he had only received beatings and humiliation. He begins to appear as a sympathetic character, a victim like Max, an impression that is reinforced when, on the way to the Korean club, they bump into a pack of coyotes and the film concentrates on his dispirited expression, implying that he has realised he is like one of them, wild and lonely and lost in the city. After the killing at the Korean club, Max and Vincent engage in their most aggressive talk, as each speaks his mind about the other: Max says Vincent is low and has standard parts of people missing, and Vincent points out Max’s incapacity for action. Vincent has shown signs of self-doubt but it is his work ethic that keeps him on the job: to Max’s question about why he has killed Fanning (Mark Ruffalo), the only person who has believed his story, Vincent answers that killing is what he does for a living. Vincent is as trapped by his job as Max is because for both it is part of their identities. The bond between the two develops as they discover the details of each other’s lives, and this personal relationship is actually made possible by the fact that both have been thrown together while doing their respective jobs. At bottom, Collateral is using work as the underlying structure that sustains their bond, a representation of male alliance that makes the film approach the forms of the buddy genre while distancing itself from other crime films where resemblance between the hero and the villain is a staple trope but which show no emphasis on their sharing this solidarity between fellow workers.

This generic framework thus makes the film readable in terms of the action films of the 1980s, the Lethal Weapons and Die Hards that have also been considered buddy films[21] and with which Collateral shares an explicit discourse on the difficulties of being a man in the context of contemporary work: in the words of Manohla Dargis, “The film is about men and work, like all of Mann’s movies, and about how being a man is itself a kind of job. Mann’s characters risk everything to get the job done.”[22] Max and Vincent are defined by doing well what they do for a living, but work both provides them with identity and divests them of it, since they are denied any other personality than the one their jobs lend them. In the end their work traps them in circles of actions they cannot escape: Max can no more make his dream about the limousine company come true than Vincent can avoid the spiral of death he has started because killing is his way of life. This frustration results in Max speeding up the car and the ensuing accident, in a dynamic of tension-release that metaphorically both liberates and punishes the men, a trope of excessive virility that the Lethal weapons and Die Hards had already popularised. As a whole, the film shows great enthusiasm for the activities of the characters, as plenty of screen time is devoted to simply following their movements. Thus when Fanning appears for the first time to discover that Ramone (Thomas Rosales Jr.) has disappeared and only left a smashed window and broken glass in the street, a long time is spent following him as he drives up to the block of apartments, leaves the car, walks up the stairs, inspects the apartment, looks out of the window, and so on. The film is interested in process, in the way things are done by people, matching the concern about work present in the construction of the characters.

Max and Vincent are disempowered as workers, but there is also a kind of disempowerment that operates through gender. In this buddy film Max learns how to be a man from Vincent, the man of action who holds on to the values of traditional masculinity, while Max embodies the new feminised masculinity of contemporary times, a masculinity that is not active but loyal. By having Max taught by Vincent, the film cries out for man’s need to assert himself and regain an active, traditional manhood. This is presented as an existential issue, about responsibility and action, while at the same time the conventions of the buddy film qualify it as an issue about masculinity and being a man, as if being a man were an existential issue and men were equal to humankind. Work and masculinity are thus the two components of the bond between the two main characters, a bond that articulates fantasies of power and disempowerment inside the social space represented by the cab, this being the major area of overlap with melodrama. The two men are characterised as victims in a world of pathos which can apparently only be remedied through action. At bottom, the buddy film in Collateral makes it a nostalgic piece that dreams of traditional manhood and pride in work, where the identity of individuals rests on their jobs and being a good professional means being a worthy person.

The gangster film, and the significance of the criminal in it, brings in the violence, embodied in the character of Vincent. Like the classic incarnations of the gangster described by Robert Warshow and Jack Shadoian, he is the product of an advanced society which he nevertheless opposes as representative of those who refuse to play by its rules. He guides the spectator to an underworld, disclosing the corrupt and violent nature of daytime life, and embodies the American aspiration to a classless society where everyone enjoys the same opportunities, while at the same time pointing to such ambition as a chimera.[23]  Joining forces with the conventions of the buddy movie, the gangster film posits Vincent as Max’s doppelganger: both are apparently free to fulfil their dreams but something about them suggests that they never will. In Vincent, coherently constructed as the gangster hero, action predominates over reflection, his prominence reinforced by the casting of Tom Cruise, whose ability as a physical performer allows him to impersonate Vincent through his body. In his first conversation with Max the driver refuses to tell him about his plans for a limousine company and Vincent responds by saying that Max must be a man who does instead of talking, which is cool, in what is actually a description of himself, Vincent, and not of Max. The film foregrounds his prominence by following his point of view on several occasions, allowing the viewers to share his focalisation when he walks up to his first victim’s apartment, when he accompanies Max to visit his mother, when he talks to the jazz club owner whom he then kills, or when he enters the Korean night club to kill another witness. Furthermore, as the film progresses, Vincent becomes the centre of attention for the narrative since it is he who makes Max talk about his plans and about his lady friend, it is he who forces Max to talk back to his boss, teaching him self-respect, and it is he whom the film focuses on when the coyotes appear, a scene preceded by an account of his childhood that makes him a more sympathetic character. We are also led to share the heroic quality and competitive individualism of his exhibition of initiative, for example when, after Max is robbed while he is tied up to the steering wheel, he appears all of a sudden to shoot the thieves and get his things back.

Max is the protagonist of the story, since it is his process of learning to assert himself that we follow most of the times and his victimisation becomes the centre of the suspense thriller, but the dramatic structure of the film increasingly foregrounds Vincent. The concept of the generic crossroads would render Vincent’s violence as generic pleasure and his death at Max’s hands the final cultural pleasure of seeing evil punished. However, this punishment is not completely welcomed by viewers because Max’s transformation, which makes that cultural pleasure possible at the end, is presented as the result of a process for which we actually consider Vincent responsible. Vincent’s presence is thus too visible at the end for the viewer not to regret, at the same time as cheer, his death, since in our memory his self-confidence and readiness for action compete with Max’s change of nature. This is so because Vincent has introduced the conventions of the gangster film, which in the end have won the day because Max’s transformation to become the violent and individualistic hero of the suspense thriller is the result of the influence of the criminal ethics represented by Vincent. He may have been wrong in killing people but, after he is killed by Max, the idea that violence is sometimes the only way to bring about justice stands powerfully at the end of the film. The two posters that were used to advertise the film actually pointed to this centrality of both Vincent and Max, as each poster featured one of the main characters. As a conclusion, in Collateral the generic maps of the buddy and the gangster film partially overlap the map of melodrama, as they articulate the characters’ escape from a space of disempowerment and their self-assertion through violence.

In the world of the crime film there are traces of a parallel discourse on work, articulated through the conventions of the gangster film, a genre that has traditionally shown concerns about labour. The classical gangster represented a rejection of traditional forms of work, and his choice of crime as an activity denoted his desire to embrace an alternative way of earning a living.[24] Thus, we find in Vincent a certain pride in his proficiency at work, and in fact he defines himself to Max as a professional, but the film also qualifies him in more ambiguous terms, as he dresses in a fashionable way and his look is ostensibly fabricated through fashionable styles. He is visually associated with the main characters of other works by Mann, such as the detectives of Miami Vice and the slick criminals of Heat, all of them reminiscent of 80s trends that blended street and formal fashion.[25] The casting of Tom Cruise as Vincent further reinforces the character’s evocation of a self shaped through personal choice involving wholehearted participation in consumer society. For years, Cruise has been one of the main attractions of glossy magazines such as Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair which featured him twice on its cover between 2000 and 2002. The interviews were consistently accompanied by photographs that focused either on his naked torso or on his clothes, which combined the glamour of top designer firms like Helmut Lang, Carpe Diem, Yves St. Laurent, Christian Dior, Burberry, or Helen Uffner with the rough look of street fashion in t-shirts, jeans, leather jackets and boots. Furthermore, the articles invariably attempted to delve into Cruise’s commitment to Scientology, which in the words of the actor appears as a New Age humanitarianism that draws as much on popular psychology as on trendy lifestyles.[26] Coherent with this investment in consumer society is Vincent’s insistence, when he accompanies Max to visit his mother at the hospital, that they should buy flowers for her because “people buy flowers.” Vincent has assimilated the role of consumption and its capacity to intervene in the relation between individuals, here to express filial affection, to a point that Max has not. He is an exemplar of the tension between an identity based on class, work, and a liberated identity associated with personal choice and consumption.

In general, it is the visual and aural texture of the film that, in its exuberant smoothness, aids the depiction of Vincent and his alternative, free, and spectacular lifestyle, as his characterisation is partly effected through the film’s views of the city, the space that orchestrates the fantasy of self-assertion through violence. The city begins as the space controlled by Max but quickly becomes the space of danger and violence that Vincent turns it into. This space is beautiful to look at and the shots of the cab cruising Los Angeles at night have an aesthetic quality that makes of the city an almost abstract painting, with its criss-crossing roads, its high downtown buildings, or the helicopter shots that follow the cab around deserted streets lined by the lights of the adjacent buildings.[27] This stylisation reinforces the prominent presence of the city, which in turn contributes to the privileged role ascribed to the gangster film ingredients associated with Vincent, to the film’s romance with the criminal and the city. High definition digital video produces a subtlety of colour at night and in low light not available to previous filming processes, as the vaporous blues and greens mix with diffused oranges, reds and yellows that create the aesthetic of the new digital technology,[28] which in Collateral paradoxically combines with realism. The city is thus represented in very ambivalent terms, as the urban design and complexity of a developed megalopolis is conveyed in spectacularly beautiful and elaborate shots that produce the look of gritty realism. Digital technology itself plays an ambivalent role, since it represents the latest in visual innovation but here produces a lifelike effect, matching the mix of modern and postmodern that characterises the film. Music also reveals this fluctuation, in a soundtrack that combines Latin music and the ethnic specificity of Los Angeles with the intense electronic sounds typical of Mann’s films.

This ambivalence between stylisation and realism, resulting from the use of digital technology in the recreation of the city, pervades the generic structure of the film, articulated through the proliferation of generic maps that produce a grid of melodrama, the buddy film, the suspense thriller and the gangster film. The complex combination of, on the one hand, the buddy film and, on the other, the suspense thriller and the gangster film accompany the mix of industrial look, gritty realism, and postmodern aesthetics in the representation of the city, where the realistic drama blends with the fantasies of escape and crime. Collateral thus reflects the state of a contemporary society defined by its attachments to modernity and by the gradual transformation produced by postmodern phenomena. This liminal quality extends to the realm of identity, where one sphere is dominated by the buddy film and another by the suspense thriller and the gangster film: in the former, class identity is unproblematic, defined by work and one’s pride in it; in the latter, new identities are available through self-creation, investing consumption with the capacity to transform the self. This involves the coexistence of traditional class identity with a postmodern one that individuals can create through their lifestyle choices, new possibilities which the film associates with crime. While crime genres have usually channelled anxiety about the danger of an individualism which was posed as central to the establishment and defence of society, Collateral illustrates the anxiety caused by the emergence of a new individualism defined by a liberated notion of identity that challenges traditional parameters such as class and work. This new right to a liberated identity and expression finds a channel for its representation in crime, becoming part of the generic pleasure available to the spectator, but has to be repressed at the end.

The film is thus most significant in its representation of class and cultural responses to it, an interest Collateral shares with both the buddy and the gangster film, and with the latter’s envisioning of alternatives to the traditional world of labour. In this sense, Collateral departs from the concerns exhibited by the spate of suspense thrillers released in recent years, which evince the impact of recent global conflicts and threats, and approximates films like Heat (USA 1995), Traffic (German/USA 2000), Mystic River (USA 2003) or Miami Vice(Germany/USA 2006), crime dramas inspired by television productions like Miami Vice (1984-1990), NYPD Blue(1993-2005) or Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), which have traditionally emphasised lives affected by crime in an urban environment and concentrated on work as the site for the psychological definition of characters. This interest shows a reaction to the increasing disappearance of class, and traditional definitions of manhood attendant to it, from the social arena of today. These crime films are thus examples of the resistance of some part of contemporary culture to abandon a definition of male identity based on work at a historical time in which identity at large is no longer reducible to it. Collateral illustrates the anachronistic nature of the crime film, and the paradox of locating in contemporary settings its attachment to the traditional ideology of heroism, since the film combines the impulse towards the future of new identities with the desire to block change and return to well-known definitions of individual identity along material parameters such as class and work. The analysis of the complex web of meanings woven through these overlapping genres proves the relevance of Altman’s notion of the generic map for a social analysis of cinema. This notion helps isolate the conventions that shape each map and direct attention to their cultural significance, allowing for areas of coincidence and departure between the various maps that meet in one single text. It also facilitates the exploration of the impact of social contexts on representation by bringing to light the cultural forces behind the interactions of these maps. Rather than invoke the value of intrinsic generic concepts to deny the existence of such impact, films like Collateral confirm that the study of aesthetic forms should probe it.

Research towards this paper was funded by the DGI project no. HUM2007-61183. I would like to thank Celestino Deleyto and both the editors and referees of Screening the Past for their comments on previous drafts.

Endnotes

[1] Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 213.
[2] Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 49-82.
[3] Michael Walker, “Melodrama and the American cinema”, Movie 29/30, Summer (1982): 16; Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking genre”, in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 236; Neale, 196-202.
[4] Altman, Film/Genre, 145-152.
[5] Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95; John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 34; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1981), 11-13.
[6] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993 [1991]), 81-98.
[7] Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd edition. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005 [1995]), 1-2.
[8] Stuart Hall, “Introduction: who needs ‘identity’?”, in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 1-17.
[9] Paul Ransome, Work, Consumption and Culture: Affluence and Social Change in the Twenty-First Century(London: Sage, 2005), 183-189.
[10]  Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992), passim; Jonathan Gershuny, Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postmodern Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53.
[11] Ransome, 151.
[12] Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26-42.
[13] Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films (Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 2000), 9-18.
[14]  R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005 [1995]), passim.
[15]  Thomas Leitch, Crime Films, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 306.
[16] Charles Derry, The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 1988), 217.
[17]  Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 82-89.
[18] Martin Rubin, Thrillers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 266.
[19]  David Denby, “Thrilled to death: Collateral, The Bourne Supremacy, The Manchurian Candidate”, The New Yorker 9, 16 August 2004: 105-106; Roger Ebert, “Collateral, a Genre Thriller, but So Much More”, Chicago Sun-Times, 6 August 2004, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/ (December 2004).
[20]  Cynthia J. Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic”, in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London, New York: Routledge, 1995 [1993]) 194-195.
[21] Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (London, New York: Verso, 1995), 1-36.
[22] Manohla Dargis, “Killer in a cab, doing his job”, The New York Times, 6 August 2004, http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/movies/06COLL.html (December 2004).
[23]  Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), in The Immediate Experience (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 97-103; Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, 2nd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3-7.
[24] Fran Mason, American Gangster Cinema: from Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 16.
[25] Nick James, Heat (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 52, 88.
[26] Cameron Crowe, “Conversations with Cruise”, Vanity Fair, 478, June 2000, 90-93, 95-97; Evgenia Peretz, “Being Tom Cruise”, Vanity Fair, 497, January 2002, 73; Neil Strauss, “The Passion of the Cruise”, Rolling Stone, 956, 2 September 2004, 90-96.
[27] For an analysis of Mann’s attention to the visual and aural texture of cinema, see Anna Dzenis, “Michael Mann’s Cinema of Images”, Screening the Past, 14 September 2002. (August 2008).
[28] Mark Olsen, “It Happened One Night,” Sight and Sound 14, 10 (2004): 15.

Created on: Sunday, 12 October 2008