Keith Barry

If you’re constantly being zapped by the idea that you can’t do something, or that you’re stupid or less important than somebody else, then eventually you’re going to start believing it.

category “a” (the one most populated) typified a “zero degree” state of textual politics; these films act only as conduits for and perpetuators of existing ideological norms, both in content (for instance, as they salute the institutions and premises that define “the American way”) and in form (accepting the conventional system of depiction in the cinema). An

“e” film, on the other hand, though appearing supportive of the ideology that conditions its existence, hampers the straightforward expression of it through the production of a formally impelled rupture with the veneer of its own premises. The cinematic framework of “e” films “lets us see

[the operative ideology] but also shows it up and denounces it,” producing “an internal criticism. . . which cracks the film apart. . . [creating] an internal tension . . . simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film.”

es the rumbles that shift the hidden foundations of a society and . . . begins the displacement of its characteristic and dominant system of values and beliefs”; Robin Wood writes of seventies horror that it gives “the sense of civilization con-demning itself . . . a negativity . . . not recuperable into the dominant ideology, but constituting the recognition of that ideology’s disintegration, its untenability”; and Thomas Elsaesser comments on the way in which fifties melodramas portray the “demise of the affirmative culture.”9

such beliefs as the inviolability and/or ultimate benevolence of the law, and the family as an institution of social and sexual “salvation” for the individual members of a couple, especially women. The law and the family are two institutions that come consistently under the remonstrative gun in these films, mainly through an hysterical exaggeration of and attack on their repressive and deforming principles

In film noir, the law is depicted as corrupt and/or ineffectual, and the family, as Harvey indicates, is absent, depicted in either a too-sunny glow of banality or as sterile and monstrous. In the melodrama, the psychic destructiveness of social institutions, often centering on the heterosexual couple, results in a ram-pant representation of ambition and of romantic love, disquieted through expressions of nymphomania, impotency, suicidal tendencies, obsessions with paternity, and the lik

There is, in short, no longer any restful identity to be found in the family in these films; the center of hope in most narratives, the romantic couple, is shown as either cloyingly insipid or deranged, two spectral expressions of the same impulse to denaturalize and explode the myth of the happy, unproblematic founding unit of the family.

The parallels wrought by the structural complexity of these films create ambiguity that prevents both easy identification and separation of systems of “good” and

First, the overall narrative structure is refined toward an exposure—

rather than a suppression, as in the classic text— of ideological contradictions and tensions

The progressive film must escape the compromising forces inherent in the conventional procedure of closure

The progressive film genre conversely departs from the let-ter of the classical system by either paring it down to its barest essentials (as does the exploitation film) so that cause and effect exist, but merely as the most minimal acknowledgment of that system of construction more than as a systematic illumination of the narrative flow; or by maximizing and exaggerating its principles (as in the structure of reversal in melodrama or the circuitous jungle of cause and effect in film noir), so that the logic of the system is overdetermined in such a way as to stretch its credibility and legibility.