Robin Wood's
Robin Wood’s article “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” suggests that instead of looking at movies in only one perspective, one should combine different approaches to assess the movie as a whole. By collectively looking at the ideologies, the methods, and the director, one will get a more accurate sense of the movie. He states that his concern is “to suggest something of the complex interaction of ideology, genre, and personal authorship that determines the richness, the density of meaning, of the great Hollywood masterpieces” (Wood, 289). Wood is concerned with the ways in which ideologies are communicated in films. Ideologies are a set of beliefs that serve to normalize or naturalize a particular part of life, be it social, political or economical. Concentrating on American films, he lists twelve ideological certainties that permeate the classical Hollywood film. These include: capitalism in respect to ownership and enterprise; the work ethic and the idea of honest labour; marriage as legalized heterosexual monogamy; the allure of success and wealth; and America as the epitome of prosperity and happiness. Wood sees these ideological concepts “riddled with hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions” (291). He suggests . . .
Wood indicates that genres stem from the contradictions in ideologies and should be studied “in terms of ideological oppositions” (291) such as film noir in a world of a small-town domestic comedy. that on their own, analyzing ideologies are unreliable as a form of evaluative criterion because of the inconsistencies and conflicts within the ideologies themselves. Yet he renders Capra’s reaffirmation as “magnificently convincing” (293) and Hitchcock’s as “completely hollow” (293). It is therefore unclear whether Uncle Charlie murdered these women because he is sick, or because he sees a sickness in society. He notes that each film has a “clearly defined artistic personality in an ideological generic structure” (293) and both films have a common ideology of “the reaffirmation of family and small-town values which the action has called into question” (293). Wood refers to Hitchcock as a “bourgeois entertainer” with limited vision (302) and a “jocular façade” (298). Uncle Charlie says he has no interest in money, calling the widows “greedy and fat” for spending their husbands money, but he has no qualms about flaunting the money he has stolen, giving expensive gifts and making large cash deposits at the bank. Hitchcock successfully shows sexual pathology within the home, discrediting the ideology of the wholesome American family. It is these ideologies that develop the genre theory. At the dinner table he says that these widows are comparable to animals, “greedy and fat”, who carelessly spend all of their dead husband’s money. Hitchcock does in fact undermine the fundamentals of family, money and the law. Wood is accurate when he states that Hitchcock’s use of the “accident” as a rationale for the murders is “a rather beautiful example of the way in which ideology, in seeking to impose itself, succeeds merely in confirming its own subversion” (301). The film does not stay consistent because of this. The “author” of a film is determined as the one who has the most control over the creative aspects and instills a personal style into their work. He successfully darkens the representation of wholesome small-town America by making the home a place where evil, lies, and secrets live undetected.
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Acceptance Essays
