“Films”, according to Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 12), “transcode the discourses … of social life into cinematic narratives”. They play, argues Pearce (2006, p. 33), “a notable role in the placement of particular ideologies and values” into social thinking and debate. Films, as a popular cultural form, can, as Kuhn (1990, p. 15) suggests, “be regarded as a gauge of social attitudes and change”. If we accept that Hollywood cinema is, through its prolific production and overwhelming synergetic marketing, the dominant force, in Western societies at least, in the development of filmic texts, how accurate a gauge can films be? Particularly, as Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 1) claim, “Hollywood film operates to legitimate dominant institutions and traditional values”. Indeed, Kellner (Pearce 2006, p. 38) “argues that most Hollywood films … tend to promote versions of the American Dream and dominant American myths and ideologies”. Pearce (2006, p. 38) suggests, for examples of those myths and ideologies, “that money and success are important values, [and] that heterosexual romance is the proper social form”.

How then has Hollywood reacted to changes in attitude regarding sexuality since the ‘enlightenment’ decades of the sixties and seventies, which saw, as Benshoff and Griffin (2004, p. 4) state, people who did not identify with heteronormativity “coming out of the closet”, particularly after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York? If popular film does reflect the attitudes and concerns of society, as Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 12) suggest, what evidence does contemporary film provide that more fluid attitudes to questions of gender and sexuality are becoming more widely examined and accepted? A brief look at the history of Hollywood cinema from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, and a consideration of two films, both released in 1999, Boys Don’t Cry and Summer of Sam, suggests that although contemporary cinema may appear to be more open towards, even supportive of, non-heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality, it still insists on presenting the ‘normal’ heterosexual relationship of man/male and woman/female as the proper - and safest - sexual practice and expression of gender and sexuality.

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Narration, according to Thwaites, Davis and Mules (2002, p. 118) is the “process and effects of representing time in texts”. Narratives, as stories of a sequence of events occurring over time are texts structured by time (Thwaites, Davis & Mules 2002, p. 118). Two filmic texts seemingly separated by time, style and ideology are The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Through a textual analysis, this paper compares and contrasts the filmic styles employed in these two texts. In doing so, it is concluded that although these films have quite different approaches, they are both concerned with the construction of narrative over time. The former, as a modernist text, tends to lead its audience through time in an anticipated linear fashion, while the latter, as a postmodernist text, deliberately disrupts normative notions of how time, and therefore, narrative, passes.

Each film begins with a written text, a blueprint of sorts for what is to come. The opening shot of The Maltese Falcon is of the falcon itself – a black statue of the bird – emphatically Gothic in appearance. Lighting casts a dense, domineering shadow behind the bird, suggesting otherness. The words which scroll over this shot provide a brief history of the bird’s origin and its theft by pirates, but do not reveal what became of it. Indeed, the final words of this passage claim “the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day”. Is this the beginning of an end to that mystery? Or is this, as Abramson (1988, p. 115) suggests, just another “episode in the falcon’s colorful written history”? As it turns out, Abramson is correct, but the film becomes less a tale of the falcon and more a humanist narrative that “confirms”, as Mules (2007, p. 180) claims, “the good of human existence … despite the fallenness of the world”.

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The Macquarie dictionary (1997, p. 720 & p. 1668) clearly delineates between erotica and pornography, with the former referring to “literature or art dealing with sexual love” and the latter defined as “obscene literature, art, or photography, designed to excite sexual desire”. Further separation is evident when one adds the definition given by that same lexicon of Australian English for obscene, that is, “offensive to modesty or decency; indecent; inciting to lust or sexual depravity; lewd” (The Macquarie dictionary 1997, p. 1487). From these definitions, it could be concluded erotica might involve emotion, trust, caring and consideration, whereas pornography may be blatantly physical, deprived of passion, perhaps even immoral. But is such a dry dictionary distinction between these two terms legitimate or even practical? Is it possible, given, as Lopez and George (1995, p. 275) claim, pornography and erotica “are often used as interchangeable terms”, there are cultural values that might inform, or conversely, subvert, such a distinction? D. H. Lawrence (Sanders 1998, p. 1) argues “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another”. Sanders (1998, p. 1) ventures to extrapolate on Lawrence’s deliberation, claiming “what is erotica to one man or woman is the agony of boredom to another”. A consideration of Delta of Venus, a collection of short stories by Anaïs Nin, written in the 1940s for an anonymous client who demanded she “leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex”, lends credence to those afore cited assertions of Lawrence, Sanders, Lopez and George (Nin 2000, p. xiii). Just as beauty may be claimed to be in the eye of the beholder, a determination of a text as either erotic or pornographic may similarly be in the mind and heart – and loins – of the spectator.

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Popular films, according to Mules (2007, p. 71), “provide sites for the exploration of fears, pleasures and desires”. Brosnan (1991, p. 85), referring to the science fiction and monster movies of the fifties, regards those texts as “metaphors for the anxieties” prevalent in American society at that time. Turner (1998, p. 78) avers films exist within “a social context”. Kuhn (1990, p. 16) goes as far as to propose that “social trends and attitudes in a sense produce films”. Not only a site for entertainment, contemporary cinema has something to say. Films convey meaning. That meaning, as this paper will elucidate by way of a reading of two recent science fiction films, The Matrix (1999) and I Robot (2004), is produced through the codes of genre, narrative and character.

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Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is a love story which challenges not only how the love or sexual desire of one person for another may be expressed or experienced, but how heteronormative society anticipates and expects a determination and categorization of sex or gender as a guarantee of sexual identity. Many critics have debated the gender of Winterson’s narrator to the point where it has become, as Rubinson (2001, p.219) points out, “the component of most interest”. Some, such as Annan, Miner and Kendrick (Rubinson 2001, p. 219) suggest the narrator’s gender ambiguity is a “gimmick”. Others, such as Sutherland, Sheehan and Stuart (Rubinson 2001, p.219) assume because the author is female, so too must be the narrator. Kendrick (Rubinson 2001, p. 219) determines the potent and passionate veracity of the narrator’s love for Louise could be nothing other than heterosexual, and therefore, the narrator must be male. But, as Rubinson (2001, p. 220) asks, “What motivates the desire to know the narrator’s sex? And How would the knowledge affect our reading of the text?” Is the awareness of gender difference – or sameness – a necessary prerequisite for who, how or why we love?

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