At the Movies with Genre

In "Genre as a Social Action", Miller deals with the concept of genre. While reading, I felt like I was struggling a bit with the concept of Miller's theory of genre as a “situated action" (Miller 155). From taking Writing and Editing in Print and Online and other EWM courses, I know what genre is and how different mediums and stories could be divided into different genres. I understand that several genres can overlap all at once, but I was still not sure that I fully understood the concepts Miller was bringing up. I decided to watch a few of the trailers posted on the blog and see how I could apply Miller's ideas about genre to them. After watching the posted trailers and their rememediations, I tried to apply Miller's theory. I think that the trailers make her concepts much easier to understand. All these movies are very fully entrenched in their specific genres, and many of them are used as classic examples of those genres. However, with a bit of simple re-editing, an entirely new product is created.

I have just watched the original trailer for The Shining in a film class; one of the most terrifying trailers I have ever seen. The original trailer is simplistic, but extremely effective, using only one scene from the entire movie after a rolling line of credits set to music specifically designed to put you on edge.  The words Stephen King are shown multiple time in order to let the audience, specifically those familiar with the name Stephen King and what genre he writes, what to expect from the movie. We are given no other information about the movie than what is in the credits. The remake, of course, re-cuts several scenes of the movie to make the film see more happy then it really is. Editing different scene together in a certain way and adding a voice-over, makes The Shining seem like a happy, feel-good movie.

In the mashup of the Mary Poppins trailer, one of the musical’s most iconic songs, what was originally a nice ullaby, is changed in tune and is paired with rushing wind and the chiming of Big Ben, giving it a much more ominous, sinister quality that is closer to a demonic nursery rhyme from some horror film. All the light-hearted, child moments of the film typified in the original trailer, such as toys coming to life, are re-cut to seem more menacing than playful.

By changing key aspects of a trailer, like the music, the movie's entire genre is deconstructed and remade into something different. Miller would understand this comparison as a recognition of genre, presented through the medium of the trailer. This is what it means, Miller says, "to take seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves" (Miller 155).What she calls a recurrent rhetorical situation (having viewed trailers similar) creates a typified rhetorical action (lumping a film into the preconceived understanding of such trailers). The remakes are based on other genres, and thus, it is our prior understanding of other trailer genres that allows us to see the change.


Work Cited
Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-169.