Prologue to a Study of Myth and Genre in American Movies

Abstract

Myth and Genre are essential terms in the vocabulary of cultural historians. They refer us to the apparent continuities we perceive in the development of culture and of the various arts, professions, disciplines, and institutions that give culture its form. Myth has to do with the continuity of meanings: the transmission from generation to generation of a characteristic system of beliefs and values, embodied in a continuously evolving language of symbols, fables, images, and fictions. Genre has to do with the continuity of forms: the persistence from generation to generation of particular ways of telling stories, making symbols, structuring systems of representation. Each concept offers a special insight into the workings of cultural systems. Myth directs our attention toward the ways in which our material and social history shape our culture, and is in turn shaped by it. It highlights the aspects of our ceremonies and fictions that represent and preserve bits of history, deploying them as metaphors to interpret the present for us, enabling culture to serve as a kind of collective memory. It emphasizes the connection between cultural productions and ideology (in the broadest sense of that term), and it emphasizes the ways in which the historical development of our fictions reflects and justifies the social order as it changes over time. It suggests that the logic of ideology, in dialectic with the recalcitrant materials of the real world, is the informing logic of cultural history.