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.

Appendix

Sixty More Great Genre Flicks

You've heard the joke: A boy stops an old man on the street and says "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" And the man answers, "Practice, practice, practice."

Below we have listed an additional ten movies in each of the six genres. Each list spans fifty or more years, but there's no need to see them in any particular order, or even for any particular reason. They are all fun, interesting, entertaining movies. They will all rise up to meet any ideas you wish to test, but they are also masterpieces of entertainment, and need not be approached with a particular goal in mind. Instead, enjoy them as they illustrate some of the most dramatic incidents and situations we face through our lives.

Realize that whether you are enjoying these films alone or with others, thousands and thousands of people have shared this enjoyment, and all of us together continue to build a sort of collective memory of these films, developing what we have referred to as Genre Intelligence (GI). This GI is what allows us to season our discussions with illustrative asides like, "it's like that scene where," or, after reading this book, "I'm approaching this from a Romantic perspective, and you’re going all Noir on me. Maybe I'm missing something and need to be more cautious, or maybe a little spontaneity would be safe and fun, too. What do you think?"

We hope you enjoy honing your GI and EI by watching more great Hollywood hits, sixty of which are listed on the following pages.

Romance

City Lights (1931)

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Roman Holiday (1953)

An Affair to Remember (1957)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

Love with the Proper Stranger (1963)

Annie Hall (1977)

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Melodrama

Blonde Venus (1932)

Stella Dallas (1937)

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

All that Heaven Allows (1955)

Ben-Hur (1959)

Imitation of Life (1959)

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Ordinary People (1980)

Field of Dreams (1989)

American Beauty (1999)

Film Noir

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Laura (1944)

The Big Sleep (1946)

Out of the Past (1947)

The Third Man (1949)

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Touch Of Evil (1958)

Vertigo (1958)

China Town (1974)

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Gothic

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Omen (1976)

The Amityville Horror (1977)

Halloween (1978)

The Shining (1980)

The Cat People (1982)

Dracula (1992)

Dark Water (2005)

Western

Stagecoach (1939)

Red River (1948)

The Searchers (1956)

Gunfight at O.K. Corral (1957)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962)

Hud (1963)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

The Unforgiven (1960)

True Grit (2010)

Science Fiction

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

2001, A Space Odyssey (1968)

Soylent Green (1973)

Logan’s Run (1976)

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

The Terminator (1984)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Minority Report (2002)

The Island (2005)

District Nine (2009)

Chapter One

Living and Loving
Just Like You Wrote It

What’s your story? What would it really mean to live life like you wrote it? For most of us, it would mean realizing our hopes and dreams. But, hopes and dreams aren’t just ideas that pop into our heads. They arise as we journey forward in our lives. This journey is a story. We tell our stories not only to understand and share our experiences, but also to find allies and friends who might join us in our journey—our life story. For example, Odysseus tells his story to Nausicaa, who then helps him get home to Ithaca, while Dorothy tells her story to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion, all of whom join her and help her in her journey along the yellow brick road toward The Emerald City, then back home. In both cases, it’s actually the telling of their stories that lets the heroes form valuable relationships. These relationships, in turn, enable them to achieve their hopes and dreams.

Every time we go to the movies we see characters live out their stories in ways that either take them toward their hopes and dreams or take them away from their hopes and dreams. In other words, we see characters write the scripts of their lives. In the process, we learn to make better choices and to enjoy more rewarding relationships, thus increasingly living and loving like we wrote it.

Who Actually Did Write It, Anyway?

When it comes to popular Hollywood genres, we actually did write the stories, at least indirectly. Genres evolve because specific types of films attract a lot of us, often to the surprise of directors and studios. Take, for instance, the classic Romantic Comedy, It Happened One Night, a film that itself happened nearly overnight due to a series of lucky flukes. First, a young, little-known director, Frank Capra, ran into an uninspiring script. At the same time, studio pressure managed to entrap two reluctant superstars, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, to play the main roles. Both actors went into hiding after production, fearing they had tarnished their careers, only to find that the film swept the 1934 Academy Awards. Romantic comedy was born! With the film’s success came a cinematic code for visualizing “true love,” and showing the power of this love to transcend the wear and tear of our busy, impersonal time. And virtually every romantic comedy since It Happened One Night follows the rules for success that were established in this film.

So who, ultimately, created this code of “true love” that still keeps so many Romantics swooning? We movie-goers did. We influenced producers to make more of what worked and less of what flopped, and we keep up the pressure every day through our choices at the box office.

What do our choices at the box office say about us? They say that most of us want movies that do what we expect them to do and that take us where we want to go. Whatever the story, genre movies do what Greek epics did in the past and what religious stories and rituals still do for many people: they give us what we want and expect, even as they put the struggles of their characters into perspective in light of some predictable outcome. We know Dorothy will find her way back to Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, just as we know Isaac will be rescued from sacrifice in The Book of Genesis and Odysseus will find his way home in The Odyssey. Like the myths of the past and the stories of religions, classic genre films help us see where we are, imagine where we’re headed, and, if appropriate, alter our direction so we end up where we want to be.

Cinephile or Cine-phobe?

Even those of us who don’t see lots of movies are influenced by popular genres, for better or worse. Take, for example, one woman we interviewed whom we’ll call Sara. Sara and her husband, whom we’ll call John, are both lawyers. They met while working at a prestigious Philadelphia firm. Sara stopped working when her two daughters, now 7 and 5, were born. Now they have a pretty traditional situation: she runs the house, and John gets up at dawn, works out, and is at his desk by 8. He gets home at 7 and sacks out by 9, so he’s ready to go the next day.

We interviewed Sara early on in our book-writing process, when we still asked overly general questions like, “what movies do you prefer to see when you go on dates?” We quickly learned that these types of questions were often met with blank stares. This is much the reaction we got from Sara, who looked up from her triple skim latté and asked, “Dates?” then, half a second later, “Movies?” After some groping, we managed to get more specific, “Do you remember the first movie you saw with your husband?” Sara took another sip of caffeine, then, to our relief, nodded: “Yeah, the first one was a late screening of The English Patient. Actually, it was John’s idea, since he was working so hard at the firm that he could only go on dates really late, if at all. I remember we went to the 8pm show, and left straight from the office. Anyway, he fell asleep in the first fifteen minutes.” Sara rolled her eyes again and laughed: “I guess he needed a nap, because he sure woke up once we got in bed.”

Sara then said something telling: “We don’t go to movies much these days.” “No time,” she added, “not to mention the fact that I argue with John every time we do—especially if we go to a Romantic Comedy.” She explained that she loves John deeply and especially appreciates his strong work ethic, his commitment to the family, his trustworthiness, and his let’s-get-it-done attitude. Still, even 15 years into this “solid marriage,” as she put it, she can’t help but stew whenever she sees a romantic movie. Often, she finds herself saying to John, “Why don’t you say I’m beautiful? Why don’t you sweep me off my feet once in a while?” To us, she said, “I am such a basket-case after these silly movies. It’s actually kind of embarrassing. So, why bother?”

Our answer? Romantic movies can provide Sara with some important information about herself, but they can only do this if she stops dismissing them as “silly” and starts noticing how they make her feel. Even if they seem trivial, these movies magnify certain desires that Sara may well have also dismissed as “silly”—desires that lie there, dormant, squirreled away during all the movies and stories she watched and read as a little girl.

The kicker? Sara’s husband falls far outside the Romantic spectrum of genre tendencies. He is, we quickly surmised, more of a cowboy, and while cowboys tend to be committed, hard working, principled folks, they also expect you to understand their commitment and to share their values without requiring constant demonstrations. Really, they don’t go much for any kind of demonstrations at all. If you mistake their silence on this point for distance and withdrawal and amp up your insistence that they prove right now that they love you, they may think you are a little bit nuts, but even this won't cause their commitment to waver—though they might leave you alone for a while the way they might lead a spooked horse back to its stall, make sure it has plenty of straw and water, and figure it will have calmed down by the morning.

So, here’s what we suggested to Sara: watch a few Westerns, with or without John—he’d probably rather be working or watching sports, so it might be hard to saddle him with a 90-minute movie, but you can always try. Once you really watch a few cowboy classics, noticing what drives the good guys and the bad guys, you may just find that you understand John’s priorities a bit better. You may also find that you can appreciate his apparently un-romantic, workaday expressions of caring . . . at least up to a point. Finally, you’ll likely see what we discovered after watching virtually every Western ever made: if you're with a cowboy, at least if you’re with a good-guy-type cowboy, then you’ll have to let him know what you need. Don't make cowboys feel like it's what they have to do, but rather what you need them to do—for you; after all, they may not need it for themselves, and cowboys can't tolerate other people telling them what they should and should not feel or do. Still, they'll do it for you.

By putting this genre clash in perspective, Sara was able to begin finding a better balance with John. When we spoke to her a few weeks later, she told us that she was trying to notice what John did well and to compliment him a bit more, without harping on what he didn’t do as well. She even managed to tell him she wanted to go out to dinner with him alone, and he told her to book a babysitter for that very Saturday. He took her to a little French Bistro in Queen Village, then, after dinner she suggested that they sneak home early to have sex before they got too tired—and before the babysitter left. He was game, and they had a great date. The next weekend, they actually went to see Enchanted with their daughters, and John didn’t text work once. Better yet, Sara didn’t get mad or cry as they walked out of the movie theatre. Instead, they all talked about the rat-and-roach scene, wondering how on earth the director managed it. Ever the romantic, Sara added that she’d love to walk through Central Park with John, like Giselle does with Robert. We’re hoping John got the hint and tried to book a getaway for two, but, knowing John, it’s likely Sara will have to be a bit more straightforward if she really wants a romantic NYC weekend.

Movie Omnivore or Movie Herbivore?

We are not suggesting that partners need to enjoy seeing the same types of movies together in order to find satisfaction and harmony. In fact, seeing movies of diverse genres enables us to empathize with characters who are different from us and thus to appreciate others’ strengths and weaknesses. In this way movies can help us do what Sara did: namely, shift from silent annoyance at her partner’s cluelessness to growing understanding of his perspective and increased respect for his abilities, different as they were from her own.

In addition, when we watch diverse movies we can learn how to notice and monitor our own strengths and weaknesses, paying particular attention to habitual trigger-modes to which we return under stress. We can gradually learn to manage these trigger-modes consciously, so they don’t push us to lash out, run away, or stew when we’re faced with inevitable, even chronic, genre clashes with our loved ones. By appreciating one another’s strengths, we can also begin to capitalize on these strengths in ways that bring out the best in us—and in our mates. We can, in other words, find a genre balance that enables us to maximize our potential as individuals and as a couple.

Hollywood-Inclined or Hollywood-Averse?

Identifying our genre tendencies can be particularly useful when we find ourselves confused about our love life. Whether married, dating, or single, many of our interviewees told us that they feel “sort of” dissatisfied with their love life—or lack thereof. A general confusion rang out in their explanations. Some were vague: “We don’t really see the point of going out on dates anymore” or “I’m seeing someone monogamously, but I still don’t think I’ve met the one yet.” Others were more specific: “We enjoy our time together, and I’m not going to rock the boat, but I know our religious differences make long-term commitment impossible”; “He says we’re soul mates and that he’ll leave his wife when his kids go to college, but he still breaks our dates last minute whenever she needs him”; “I really don’t know how to date in this country, since it was so different in the country where I grew up, so I guess I’ll just keep learning and wait for the first wave of divorces to see if I can try again then.”

Each of these statements points to a different situation, but they all reveal a similar experience, one many of us know well: we want things to be one way, but we talk ourselves into accepting things the way they are, and, in the process, we tie ourselves up into knots that seem impossible to untangle. The good news is that when we are the ones tangling the knots, we also have the power to disentangle them. Better still, this de-knotting does not have to involve years of therapy, past-life recognition, extreme acupuncture, or any other deep-tissue pricks. It can be as simple as watching movies with the kind of lens this book offers, so we can begin to notice the competing fictions that are creating a muddle for us, then start making more constructive choices that line up with the kind of love and life stories we want to experience . . . in real life.

Take, for example, Mary. Mary is an attractive, sporty woman in her early 50s. When we interviewed her, she had been working at the same Toronto insurance company for twenty years and had just purchased a two-bedroom bungalow east of the downtown centre, where she lived with her five-year-old granddaughter. Since her late teens, she had married twice, divorced twice, raised her now-20-year-old-son, and adopted the daughter he and his then-girlfriend had when he was 15.

Mary answered our question—“If you thought of the past few years of your life as a movie, what kind of movie would it be?”—with a combination of confusion and good-humour: “I guess it’d be Melodrama, at least given your definition of Melodrama, not the ‘weepies’ verson.” When asked to explain, she said that her current life was utterly focused on raising her granddaughter and keeping herself financially and physically healthy as she did so, something that seemed to be getting harder since she started having trouble sleeping when Menopause hit: “I’ve never been so tired in my life. I’ve always been so energetic. I’m getting really concerned. I just don’t have any time to take care of myself.” She thought for a moment, and added, “You know, Melodrama has not necessarily been a positive guiding light in my life. I think of it more as the cause of a lot of my problems.”

Mary explained that both times she married, she fell for what she now calls “bad-boys,” men who seemed to have it all, but who left her in the lurch when things got tough. After years of therapy and decades of hard work as a single mother, she realized that her fantasy of a white-picket fence and a traditional family (pure Melodrama) had blinded her to the very un-Melodramatic tendencies of her ex-husbands. In their scripts, they were devil-may-care rock stars who could get what they wanted the way they wanted, regardless of the rules (Film Noir with a dash of Romance). In her script, they were remarkable men who got her closer to her white-picket-fence-dreams at warp speed. Melodrama heroes on steroids, they managed to get her a house, a wedding ring, and even a child in no time at all. Unfortunately, they did this all so fast and easy because it gave them a rush . . . for a while. However, when the rush passed, they didn’t have the staying power to work with a long-term view. At that point, they just took what they could get and moved on to new digs.

These days, Mary said, she was “doing the right thing,” as she always had, at least by Melodrama standards: she was raising her granddaughter, who otherwise would have been given up for adoption, and she was utterly focused on giving her a happy, loving home. She adored her little girl, and she wouldn’t trade in the life they shared for anything, but, she added, “forget about dating . . . or even working out. There just isn’t time with the commute and the daycare closing at 5:30. And I’ve never been so financially strapped in my life. . . You know, this Melodrama thing can really take its toll when you’re going it alone.”

Mary hit on a vital point here: characters in a Melodrama, Romance, or any other genre film for that matter, are, by definition, characters within those specific genres. That is, they act according to the codes and values of that genre. For example, in Now, Voyager, both Charlotte Vale and Jerry Durrance (Bette Davis and Paul Henried) are pure Melodrama, so they share the same family values and sacrificial tendencies. For this reason, Charlotte can adopt Jerry’s little girl without fearing that Jerry is going to use the girl as a pawn to blackmail Charlotte down the line. They can also each make life-altering commitments without fear that the other will renege on the deal or go nuts. Similarly, in TitanicTitanic