{"id":8,"date":"2007-02-02T13:12:21","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T20:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/2007\/02\/02\/when-is-a-musical-not-a-musical-when-it-has-elvis-presley-in-it\/"},"modified":"2007-04-22T11:55:22","modified_gmt":"2007-04-22T18:55:22","slug":"when-is-a-musical-not-a-musical-when-it-has-elvis-presley-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/2007\/02\/02\/when-is-a-musical-not-a-musical-when-it-has-elvis-presley-in-it\/","title":{"rendered":"When is a Musical Not a Musical? When it Has Elvis Presley in it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>All this talk about genre in out FTC books has got me thinking. Here is a quote that I believe can help to clarify what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to say:<\/span><span>\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><span><span>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153When is a musical not a musical? When it has Elvis Presley in it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Altman 681).<\/span><span>\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/span><span>And another one I just think is funny:<\/span><span>\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><span><span>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Genres were always \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and continue to be \u00e2\u20ac\u201c treated as if they spring full-blown from the head of Zeus\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Altman 682).<\/span><span>\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/span><span>So far it looks like all this talk about genre is a huge fight about semantic v. syntactic. Now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not going to say which is right or wrong. I have my own theory. I think that deep down, we all know innately what makes up a genre. Like the quote about Elvis. Okay, so his movies have lots of music in it. But we know those aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t musicals. Musicals are like <em>Singing in the Rain<\/em> or <em>Chicago<\/em> or <em>Newsies<\/em>. And innately we all know this. I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too difficult to try and list what belongs in a genre and then gauge films by some time of genre chart (think to the great scene in <em>The Dead Poet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Society<\/em> where Robin Williams has the class rip out the first page of their textbooks, the one with the chart on it for gauging the poem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s greatness).<\/span><span>\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><span><span>Besides, movies almost always fall into more than one genre. A perfect example, and those of you who took 245 with Dr. C ought to remember this: <em>Citizen Kane<\/em>. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a biography\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 no, wait, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a mystery\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 no, wait, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a romantic comedy\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a thriller\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and the list goes on and on. To use a more contemporary example: the TV show Firefly (and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s movie companion <em>Serenity<\/em>). It is quite obviously a Western. The Capitan, Mal Reynolds, is the perfect cowboy; stoic, troubled past, a desire to help people in need, an air of aimlessness, not always morally correct, never shows his true romantic interest. This list could be longer, but I think you get my point. He dresses the part, walks the walk, and talks the talk. Oh yeah\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but this all takes place in the future, in SPACE. Does that mean it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a Western? In my mind: of course not. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s both the semantic argument (cowboys, outlaws, desert-like atmosphere) and the syntactic (good v. evil). And when we see it we think Western. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really think Sci Fi, although they are on a spaceship hopping from planet to planet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All this talk about genre in out FTC books has got me thinking. Here is a quote that I believe can help to clarify what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to say:\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u0153When is a musical not a musical? When it has Elvis Presley in it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Altman 681).\u00c2\u00a0 And another one I just think is funny:\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Genres were always \u00e2\u20ac\u201c [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ftc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/lscot7ow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}