Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 301

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characteristics of both medieval literature and genre film that I enumer-
ated earlier. But they are also thematically allied with Hollywood cinema
in some striking ways.
I turn now to four of the thematic nodes that have occupied me on both
the medieval and the film fronts: revenge; trials; the frontier or terra nova
origin story; and, of course, gender.
* * *
of these, revenge is the most blatant. We all know how the workings of
honor and vengeance play out in sagas — how systematically, richly, and
intelligently the sagas parse not just bloody confrontations, but lawsuits
and all manner of political and social encounters. I think of the sagas as
treatises on getting even.
Much the same can be said of american genre films overall. there
are the obvious, hard-revenge genres: action, gangster, war, and so on.
and then there are soft-revenge movies, in which a character gets morally
even, or socially or politically even. Soft revenge runs the entire gamut of
american cinema, from bio-pics and musicals and courtroom dramas to
romance and even melodrama. Many of these are films that don’t seem
on the face of it to be revenge stories, but if you look past the surface plot
to the underlying logic, you’ll almost always find a getting-even template.
I’d go so far as to say that the getting-even template is a sine qua non of
american cinema.
one of my favorite movie lines is spoken by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty
Harry in the movie of that name. “revenge,” Harry says, “is the oldest
motivation known to mankind.” Getting-even stories, soft or hard, are
indeed old, and they are also widespread, perhaps universal. Wherever
the Cinderella tale-type is (almost everywhere), a revenge plot is. Which
brings me to another Hollywood quote, this one from alfred Hitchcock
in the 1950s: “If you want to make movies for the world, make movies
in america; america is a nation of foreigners.” add Hitchcock to Dirty
Harry and you get something like this: “If you want to make movies for
the world, make getting-even stories; revenge is universally intelligible, a
kind of a cross-cultural bottom line.”
this is why I’ve put at least one saga on the reading list of just about
every film course I’ve ever taught. I switch around, but it was commonly
SAME FRAME