Genre

The distinctive textual properties of a genre typically listed by film and television theorists include:

• narrative - similar (sometimes formulaic) plots and structures, predictable situations, sequences, episodes, obstacles, conflicts and resolutions;
• characterization - similar types of characters (sometimes stereotypes), roles, personal qualities, motivations, goals, behaviour;
• basic themes, topics, subject matter (social, cultural, psychological, professional, political, sexual, moral), values and what Stanley Solomon refers to as recurrent 'patterns of meaning' (Solomon 1995: 456);
• setting - geographical and historical;
• iconography (echoing the narrative, characterization, themes and setting) - a familiar stock of images or motifs, the connotations of which have become fixed; primarily but not necessarily visual, including décor, costume and objects, certain 'typecast' performers (some of whom may have become 'icons'), familiar patterns of dialogue, characteristic music and sounds, and appropriate physical topography; and
• Filming techniques - stylistic or formal conventions of camerawork, lighting, sound-recording, use of colour, editing etc. (viewers are often less conscious of such conventions than of those relating to content).

              Some film genres tend to be defined primarily by their subject matter (e.g. detective films), some by their setting (e.g. the Western) and others by their narrative form (e.g. the musical).

Constructing the audience

Genres can be seen as involved in the construction of their readers. John Fiske sees genre as 'a means of constructing both the audience and the reading subject' (Fiske 1987, 114). Christine Gledhill argues that different genres 'produce different positioning of the subject... Genre specification can therefore be traced in the different functions of subjectivity each produces, and in their different modes of addressing the spectator' (Gledhill 1985, 64). And Steve Neale argues in relation to cinema that genre contributes to the regulation of desire, memory and expectation (Neale 1980, 55).
Tony Thwaites and his colleagues note that in many television crime dramas in the tradition of The Saint, Hart to Hart, and Murder, She Wrote,
Genteel or well-to-do private investigators work for the wealthy, solving crimes committed by characters whose social traits and behaviour patterns often type them as members of a 'criminal class'... The villains receive their just rewards not so much because they break the law, but because they are entirely distinct from the law-abiding bourgeoisie. This TV genre thus reproduces a hegemonic ideology about the individual in a class society. (Thwaiteset al. 1994, 158).
Mass media genres play a part in the construction of difference and identity, notably with regard to sexual difference and identity (Neale 1980, 56-62). Some film and television genres have traditionally been aimed primarily at, and stereotypically favoured by, either a male or a female audience. For instance, war films and westerns tend to be regarded as 'masculine' genres, whilst soap operas and musicals tend to be regarded as 'feminine' (which is not, of course, to say that audiences are homogeneous). However, few contemporary theorists would accept the extreme media determinism of the stance that audiences passively accept the preferred readings which may be built into texts for readers: most would stress that reading a text may also involve 'negotiation', opposition or even outright rejection.