I had to do a seminar, an oral presentation (pretty crazy idea when you’re an external student) for a subject at Uni, Screen Studies, - the topic - Genre - and the film we had to look at - Destination Moon (1950). So what do I do? Ratatouille in a spring roll. This is a script of what I would have said had I been there:

When you leave this classroom, when you head home, many of you will probably be thinking “What will I have for dinner tonight? What will I do tonight? Will I eat a meat dish or vegetarian? Will I watch TV; go to a club; the cinema; hire a video; read a book?” To answer these questions, you are making decisions – decisions based on factors such as: energy levels, budget, availability, and personal taste. Though it may be fantasy for many of you to disregard budget and availability in your choices, and it certainly is for me, let’s just consider, for a moment, that you are in a world where the only factor of relevance is that of personal taste. Will you eat beef, pork, chicken, lamb, red lentils, tofu or couscous? If you switch on the telly, will you watch comedy, drama, soap opera, or perhaps, now remember, this is fantasy, reality television? Want to go out? Will it be the local pub, a coffee shop, disco, gay bar, cinema? If you go to the cinema, would you choose to see action, science fiction or adolescent slap-stick? All of these choices and the decisions you make will depend on your preference for a particular type or category – for a particular genre. And that is, quite simply, what genre is – a type or category (Bordwell & Thompson 2004, p. 108). But quite often, particularly when referring to texts of popular culture, such as films, the genre, category or type, is not firmly fixed (Bordwell & Thompson 2004, p. 109). While there would be little dispute that beef belongs in the category of meat, what of the tomato? Is it a fruit or a vegetable? It can easily be used in the construction of a meal as either. It has a flexibility that permits it to move between categories – and genres are just as fluid.

Tonight, I’m making spring rolls for dinner. I enjoy making spring rolls, perhaps more than actually eating them, given I don’t have any top teeth – but that’s another story. What I enjoy about making spring rolls is that they can be different every time. The only constants are: the spring roll pastry and the oil to fry them. The last time I made spring rolls, I used chicken mince, capsicums and peas; this time I might try pork mince, mushrooms and bean sprouts. Regardless of what ingredients or elements are used, the end result is still a spring roll. In many ways, film genres are like spring rolls. Let’s leave the kitchen now and go to the cinema. Indeed, let’s go to a multi-plex. There are six films screening: Total Recall (1990), Blade Runner (1982), Back to the Future III (1990), Mad Max (1979), Aliens (1986), and Destination Moon (1950).

At first glance, one might think this particular multi-plex caters only to fans of science fiction, but each of these films, which are generally considered texts of that genre, can also wear at least one other hat. As David Seed (Kincaid 2003) argues, “science fiction, rather than being one genre, is actually a series of sub-genres that have come together”. Cunningham and Miller (1994, p. 9) state that genres are formed by “collocating similar kinds of texts that share certain characteristics”. Altman (1999, p. 219) refers to these “common traits” as “building blocks”, iconic or semantic elements. But Altman (1999, p. 221) claims that to accurately posit any text into a genre, a dual approach, a “semantic/syntactic approach” is required. The semantic approach is a consideration of the actual elements or signs within a text – the mince, the mushrooms, the bean sprouts. A syntactic approach considers how these ingredients are arranged – the narrative system or overall theme – or the spring roll pastry.

If we consider the films on show at our multi-plex – both Total Recall and Back to the Future III contain semantic elements, icons, of the Western. Back to the Future III is, for the most part, set in the American West of 1885, with Indians, the Cavalry, tombstones, buggies, a stage coach, the swinging saloon doors, ‘bad guys’ wearing black – even ‘Clint Eastwood’, the identity adopted by Marty (Michael J. Fox), the key protagonist. But the primary premise of this text is time travel, certainly a concept not realised to this day, but perhaps a possibility in the future. Throughout the film, there are several references to the writings of Jules Verne, the theories of Einstein and Copernicus, science, physics, and the concepts of Time and the Future. These are the syntactic threads that braid the Western iconography into a text that sits quite well in the genre of science fiction. Similarly, Total Recall contains icons of the American West – the frontier-style town of the mutants, complete with the swinging saloon doors and the flowing dresses of the ‘ladies upstairs’, yet these semantic elements appear on the planet Mars. The audience has been taken there with Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who is on a ‘virtual’ holiday for which he has assumed the role of a secret agent – or has he? Elements of psycho-drama, espionage, conspiracy and action are all included in this text, but can we still call it science fiction? The technology, the mere concept of an induced reality, the space travel to a Martian landscape – these form the syntax that answers that question. These same semantic/syntactic analyses can be applied to all texts of popular culture.

The key protagonist in Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is reminiscent of Bogart’s Sam Spade, the sleuth in the film noir classic, The Maltese Falcon (1941) – the trench coat, the voice-over – a character who is given a task akin to that of Lieutenant Gerard (Barry Morse) from The Fugitive (1963). The costumes, the rain-drenched, dim cityscapes take the audience back to the 1930s. But the fugitives in this particular text are ‘replicants’, androids who have escaped from an ‘off-world’ colony. This is not the 1930s, but rather, the future - indeed, quite a dystopic future. Another film presenting a dystopic future is Mad Max, a film that is played out on the road, with the leathers and bikes of other road movies such as Stone (1974) or Easy Rider (1969). The film’s narrative is concerned with good versus evil and the biblical nemesis – ‘an eye for an eye’, retributive, vigilante justice – not dissimilar to either Stone or Easy Rider. However, this narrative is not told in 1960s America or 1970s Australia. It is told in a post-apocalyptic, desolate land – a land that many adherents to ‘Cold War’ paranoias believe to be in our future.

Aliens – now this is a text that many may feel could be nothing but science fiction. The title alone gives justification for such a claim. But then, the film does include the monster element, an icon of the horror genre, aided in that regard by the lighting and sound techniques that both hide and pre-empt the ‘beast behind the door’, ‘beyond the wall’ or ‘under the bed’. The sets, with their claustrophobic pressure; dripping, gas-hissing pipes might be more familiar in the dank, dark alleyways of Jack the Ripper’s industrial London of the late nineteenth century, or the seedy urban landscape of Clive Barker’s Candyman (1992). And squarely dumped into this ‘other world’ are the marines of a Chuck Norris ‘m.i.a.’ rescue – only this jungle is metallic and the enemy is a creature from another planet, whose internal fluids are certainly not compatible with the solidity of this Earth. So yes, despite the presence of icons from other genres, the theme of a team of ‘would-be’ heroes travelling to another planet to rescue ‘off-world’ colonists from an alien predator posits this text firmly into the category of science fiction.

But genre is not just about categories or types. It is not just merely being able to say this text is science fiction, action or mystery. Placing texts into particular genres enables an understanding of how those texts relate to other texts (Thwaites, Davis & Mules 2002, p. 99). This relationship is referred to as intertextuality (Thwaites, Davis & Mules 2002, p. 96). Let’s just duck back into the kitchen for a moment. Instead of mince, mushrooms and bean sprouts, what if I use diced eggplant, grated zucchini and chopped tomatoes? These ingredients can be rolled in pastry to make a spring roll, but I’ve ‘borrowed’ this combination of elements from another text – indeed, another genre – the classic Italian dish, ratatouille. Many purists may baulk at such an act, yet this ‘borrowing’, this intertextual usurpation, is, as we’ve seen from the films at our multi-plex, a common trait in the construction of popular texts. Intertextuality not only provides familiarity, but can also provide an insight into the context of a text’s production (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler 2002, p. 113). Intertextuality, the usage of or reference to other elements, ingredients or texts within another text can help in an analysis by providing pointers to social, economic or political contexts relevant at the time (Thwaites, Davis & Mules 2002, p. 114). By looking back, producers of popular texts can analyse the present in order to predict the future (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler 2002, p. 317).

But then what of Destination Moon? Surely this simple tale of pre-Apollo travel to the moon is nothing but science fiction from the opening credits, quite similar in style to Flash Gordon (1936), to the final shot of planet Earth as our intrepid explorers make their return, with the overlayed closing title, “This is the end of the beginning”, a beginning, presumably, of the space age. Certainly, it has the icons, the semantic elements, of science fiction – the space ship, space-suits, the technology – the switches and dials – the trip to the moon, which in 1950 was little more than a glint in the eye of a scientist or science fiction novelist. But a continuous theme, a syntactic thread, throughout this text is that of American industrial supremacy against the threat of opponents in the ‘Cold War’ era. Little actually happens in this story, save for the claiming of the moon by industrialists “in the name of the United States of America”. The task of getting to the moon is claimed to be one that “only American industry can do”. The lead industrialist claims: “Not only is this the greatest adventure awaiting mankind, but it’s the greatest challenge ever hurled at American industry”. The general, who seems to have broken ranks to join the industrialists, says:

We are not the only ones who know the moon can be reached. We’re not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on and we’d better win it, because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space. The first country that can use the moon for the launching of missiles will control the Earth. That, gentlemen, is the most important military fact of this century. (Destination Moon 1950)

That, fellow students, is not science fiction. That is propaganda – hidden within the guise of a space fantasy, just as I might attempt to hide a dish of European origin in the wrappings of an icon of Asian cuisine. Thank you for your time this afternoon. Now it is time for me to head home to my kitchen for what may well be the greatest culinary challenge I have ever undertaken – ratatouille in a spring roll? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was science fiction. So whatever you choose to dine on this evening, whatever genre of activity you choose, bear in mind the intertextual qualities of that cultural exercise – and bear in mind that genres are as fluid and flexible as would be any spring roll that contains tomatoes.

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