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Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood filmmakers developed a set of formal and stylistic conventions that came to be known as the classical Hollywood style. (Recall that film form refers to specific cinematic elements such as mise‐en‐scène and editing; the term style refers to a specific way in which those formal elements are arranged.) Classical Hollywood style is not rigid and absolute – slight variations can be found in countless Hollywood films – but this way of cinematically telling stories is basically the same today as it was in the 1930s. And because Hollywood’s business practices have dominated both American and global cinema, classical Hollywood style is often considered the standard or “correct” way to make fictional films.

The main objective of classical Hollywood style is to “spoon feed” story information to the spectator, thus keeping everything clearly understood by the audience. Hollywood filmmakers believe that that if some plot point or stylistic maneuver is too different or challenging, the audience will become disoriented, dislike the movie, tell their friends not to see it, or even demand their money back. Classical Hollywood style is sometimes referred to as the invisible style, because it does not call attention to itself as even being a style. It permits the viewer to stay emotionally enmeshed in a film’s story and characters, instead of being distracted by obvious formal devices (or thinking too much about the ideological meanings of the text). Indeed, when classical Hollywood style is working at its best, audiences are barely aware that any formal choices are being made at all: most untrained spectators don’t consciously notice the lighting of the sets or the edits between shots. Obscuring the formal decisions not only keeps the viewer centered rather unthinkingly on following the story, but also limits the viewer’s choice in what she or he is meant to find important. Say, for example, a film shows a white business tycoon praising American capitalism while his black butler brings him a mint julep. A viewer might be interested in learning the butler’s reaction to the tycoon’s statement. However, if the camera does not keep the butler in focus, or never cuts to show the butler’s reaction, then it becomes impossible to see what his reaction might be. In helping to keep things understandable, Hollywood’s invisible style subtly eliminates complexity, and in this example, implicitly makes the white tycoon more important than his butler.

All of the formal aspects of cinema under the classical Hollywood style work to keep the story clear and characters simple and understandable. Lighting, color, camera position, and other aspects of mise‐en‐scène consistently help the audience remain engaged with the story. The most important details are the ones most prominently lit, kept in focus, and framed in close‐up shots. Hollywood films also employ various rules of continuity editing, a system of editing in which each shot follows easily and logically from the one before. If a person looks over at something, the next shot is of that something; if a person walks out of a room through a door, the next shot is of that same person coming through the door into a new room. Sound design in Hollywood films also keeps audiences aware of the story’s key points, often by making the main characters’ dialog louder than the noise of the crowd around them. And the Hollywood film score is there to tell an audience exactly how they are supposed to feel about any given scene.

Style is thus subordinated to story in classical Hollywood style. The way Hollywood films structure their stories is referred to as (classical) Hollywood narrative form. Hollywood stories usually have a linear narrative – they have a beginning, middle, and an end, and story events follow one another chronologically. (Flashbacks are an exception to this format, but they are always clearly marked – often with a shimmering dissolve – so as not to confuse the viewer.) Hollywood narrative form usually centers on a singular character or protagonist, commonly referred to as the hero. Sometimes the protagonist might be a family or a small group of people. The narrative is driven by carefully and clearly laying out the goals and desires of the protagonist – the desire to get home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) or to kill the shark in Jaws (1975). Obstacles to this desire are created, usually by a villainous force or person, called the antagonist (the wicked witch, the shark). Hollywood narrative also usually pairs the protagonist with a love interest, who either accompanies the main character in reaching the goal, or functions as the protagonist’s goal.

The differences between heroes and villains in Hollywood film are obvious and simplified. Sometimes, as in old‐fashioned Westerns, the good guys even wear white hats while the villains wear black. Even when dealing with complex social issues, Hollywood usually reduces them to matters of personal character: in Hollywood films there are rarely corrupt institutions, merely corrupt people. In seeking to make conflicts as basic and uncomplicated as possible, the antagonist is often “pure evil” and not the bearer of his or her own legitimate world view. Protagonists and antagonists are not the only ones simplified in a Hollywood film, as other roles are also represented by quickly understood stock characters such as the love interest, the best friend, or the comic relief. Such “instant characterization” often draws upon pre‐existing social and cultural stereotypes. Some may seem benign, like villains wearing black. Others, like repeatedly casting Asians as mysterious mobsters, or Hispanics as gang members, can have vast effects on how those identified as Asian or Hispanic are treated outside the movie house.

In the linear design of Hollywood narrative form, each complication in the attempt to reach the protagonist’s goal leads to yet another complication. These twists and turns escalate toward the climax, the most intense point of conflict, wherein the antagonist is defeated by the protagonist. In the final moments of the film, all the complications are resolved, and all questions that had been posed during the film are answered. This is known as closure. Hollywood’s use of the happy ending, a specific form of closure, ties up all of the story’s loose ends and frequently includes the protagonist and the love interest uniting as a romantic/sexual couple. Even when the couple is not together at the end of the film (as in Titanic [1997]), the narrative is designed to make that separation acceptable to the audience. In Titanic, the ending may be sad, but the mystery of the diamond necklace has been resolved, and the film suggests that Jack and Rose will reunite in heaven. Closure is a potent narrative tool in managing ideological conflict, because closure makes it seem as if all problems have been solved. Any actual ideological issues or social strife that may have been raised by a film are allegedly resolved by narrative closure, and thus there is no longer any need for spectators to think about them. Closure in Hollywood film tends to reaffirm the status quo of American society.

Since the ideological status quo of American society is white patriarchal capitalism, it should come as no surprise that most Hollywood films (throughout its history and still today) encode white patriarchal capitalism as central and desirable via both Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. First, the protagonist of most Hollywood films is constructed as a straight white male seeking wealth or power. He emerges victorious at the end of the film, proving his inherent superiority over those who challenged him. In consistently drawing audience attention to and celebrating his acts, the invisible style reinforces his “natural” abilities while not allowing the audience to think about the often far‐fetched qualities of those heroics. Since the white male commands the most narrative attention, the (usually white) female love interest is relegated to a minor or supporting part. Whereas the male is defined by his actions, job, and/or principles, the heroine is defined chiefly by her beauty and/or sex appeal. Their romance affirms patriarchal heterosexuality as well as the desirability of same‐race coupling. If homosexuals or people of color appear in the film at all, they might be associated with the villains or relegated to smaller supporting parts, in effect supporting the dominance of the white male hero and his female love interest.

Imagine any of the “Indiana Jones” movies as typical of this formula. Our hero or protagonist, Professor Jones, is a straight white man of charm, wit, intelligence, and social standing. He is opposed by evil male super‐criminals or antagonists who are out to destroy or dominate the world. Frequently the villain is from another country or is non‐white: in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Professor Jones must first battle double‐crossing Asian gangsters and then face off against a corrupt cult of Indians who enslave children and practice human sacrifice. Good and evil are thus reduced to simplified and racialized stereotypes: white male hero versus villains of color. In this particular film, Professor Jones is accompanied on his adventures by a small Asian boy who idolizes him, and a dizzy blonde heroine whose screaming distress is meant to be a running gag throughout the film. The film proceeds in a linear manner through a series of exciting twists and turns (action‐filled set pieces) until the climax, when Jones saves the woman and the child, destroys the Indian temple, and restores harmony to the land. The closure of the film sets up a symbolic nuclear family, with white man as heroic patriarch, woman as helpmate and romantic/sexual object, and the Third World quite literally represented as a child under their protection. Among the film’s basic ideological messages are that straight white men can do anything, that women are hysterical nuisances, and that non‐white people are either evil or childlike.

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the white male hero protects both his white love interest and Third World children from the villainy of an evil Asian cult. In this still, he is figured as a symbolic father of all the other characters.Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,

copyright © 1984, Paramount.

But haven’t Hollywood representations of women and minorities changed over the years? Haven’t the formulas been adapted to be less sexist and racist? Yes and no. There are now Hollywood films made in which the hero is not white, not male, or (more recently) not heterosexual. Recent films like Wonder Woman (2017), Black Panther (2018), and Captain Marvel (2019) have been understood by filmmakers and audiences alike as real game changers on that front. And Hollywood has always made a type of film that features female protagonists, the so‐called woman’s film or chick flick (discussed more fully in later chapters), but these stories usually emphasize the female character’s desire for a man, and thus reinforce patriarchy in their own way. It is true that black and Hispanic actors in Hollywood have made gains in the last few decades and now regularly play the hero part in a handful of movies every year. But even then, these are hegemonic negotiations within the dominant white patriarchal ideology and not inversions of it: most African American protagonists are still male, and most female protagonists are still white. The very few homosexual protagonists in recent Hollywood film are usually male and white. While the real world is comprised of people of all different races, genders, classes, sexualities, and physical abilities, the world depicted in Hollywood film usually posits straight white men as central and heroic, and everyone else as peripheral (or even non‐existent).

The drive for simplicity and obviousness in the classical Hollywood style has other implications for Hollywood narrative form. Not only are Hollywood storylines excessively linear, using simplified stock characters engaged in clear‐cut struggles ending in closure, but Hollywood often consciously reuses popular (that is, already understood) storylines and characters. The proliferation of remakes and sequels guarantees that most audiences are already familiar with many main characters and basic narrative situations. The Saw and Paranormal Activity film franchises, for example, rely on audience knowledge not only of the previous films in the series, but also of the specific formal elements that go into making a scary movie. Many Hollywood films are thus identifiable by their genre, a term that this book uses to refer to a specific type of fictional Hollywood film such as the horror film, the Western, the war movie, the musical, or the gangster film. As will be explored in future chapters, racial and ethnic markers are activated within genres in unique and interesting ways. For example, Americans of Italian descent (and more recently Americans of African heritage) have been closely tied to the gangster film, while the representation of Native Americans in Hollywood film is almost exclusively tied to the Western.

A genre can be identified by its surface structure or iconography – what the genre looks and sounds like. (The iconography of the horror film might include monsters and mad scientists, blood and gore, dark woods at night, screams, and so forth.) Genres can also be defined by their deeper ideological concerns, sometimes referred to as their thematic myth. Genres are popular with audiences when these thematic myths in some way relate to current social concerns, and as such, genres function as a sort of feedback loop between filmgoers and filmmakers. Certain genres make money and flourish when their specific thematic myth correlates to something the public is interested in or wants (or needs) to see dramatized. Other genres “die” when their thematic myths are no longer thought valid within the ever‐changing spheres of history and culture. For example, the musical was once a staple of Hollywood filmmaking, but it grew generally unpopular after the 1960s. Today, many audiences reject the classical genre’s convention of characters spontaneously breaking into song and dance, and our cynical age sees their simple thematic messages of love and harmony as outmoded. Contemporary musicals that are successful tend to be either animated films for kids (like Frozen [2013] or Trolls [2016]) or live‐action Broadway adaptations that explore darker thematic material (such as Chicago [2002] or Les Misérables [2012]).

Thus, the popularity (or unpopularity) of certain genres can tell the film historian interesting things about the culture that produced them. Genre films reflect social concerns, but only rarely do they challenge the underlying ideological biases of Hollywood narrative form itself. (Most genre films, being Hollywood films, still feature straight white able‐bodied male protagonists, while women and people of color are relegated to peripheral roles.) Rather, popular Hollywood genres often attempt to shore up the dominant ideology by repeating over and over again certain types of stories that seem to resolve social tensions. For example, the horror film’s emphasis on the threat posed to “normality” by the monstrous reinforces social ideas about what is considered normal. Not surprisingly, in classical Hollywood horror films, “normality” is conventionally represented by middle‐to‐upper‐class, white, heterosexual, and able‐bodied couples and patriarchal institutions. Monsters and villains, on the other hand, are often coded as non‐white, non‐patriarchal, non‐capitalist, and/or differently abled.