Pulp, exploitation, noir, & melodrama

2004.05.04 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Analysis | by Andrew Cole

With Hellboy and Kill Bill in the theaters, and with more on the way, I figure the time is right for a primer on the movie genres of pulp, exploitation, noir, and melodrama.

What is melodrama?

Melodrama comes from the French term for drama accompanied by music and became popular as soon as it became possible to add audio to movies (it had already been used on stage for decades). It began as a clumsy form of drama that used music as well as camera and lighting trickery to sell a moment that is otherwise weakly written, directed, and acted. Think of the big dramatic moment in an old black and white movie when the heroine realizes the duplicity of her lover and a musical sting punctuates the scene. Or when the music swells to engulf us in their love when the lovers reunite and all is forgiven.

Of course, all movies today use music this way to some degree, but it's usually more subtle and thematic than obvious and pointed. Melodrama today is generally thought of as any use of heightened emotions, sudden revelations, and sweeping dramatic movement from one emotion to another. The best films of melodrama, like Casablanca, are truly great movies that use those conventions to enhance the story instead of to tell the story.

What is noir?

"Film noir" is French for "dark film," a style of cinema that arose in Europe in the 1920s and 30s that used low-key, dramatic lighting (to keep costs low) as opposed to high-wattage, deep-focus Hollywood filmmaking. The films became known for their dark themes of isolation, fatalism, cynicism, shame, and violence (hey, Hitler was knocking on the door).

The term "noir" began to be applied to pulp fiction that dealt with the same themes, especially the crime and detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (both of whom first wrote for pulp magazines, then novels, then film). These authors invented some of the characters made famous by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft in films like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Glass Key. Some consider Double Indemnity to be the first real American film noir because it focuses on bad people doing bad things as opposed to the good-hearted folks of melodrama who struggle against them (this is largely the difference between "crime fiction" and "detective fiction").

Pulp art often imitated the dramatic lighting effects of film noir. A band of light across a character's eyes, a killer's shadow on the wall, a face lit from below, the shadow of prison bars on the floor, etc. became trademarks of both.

What is pulp?

Pulp arose from pulp fiction magazines (that is, magazines that carried short stories and novellas and that were printed on cheap pulp paper) of the early 20th century. Pulp offered adventure and horror stories, romance and intrigue, thrills and chills, often set in exotic locations and featuring near-superhuman heroes and villains, such as the Shadow and Doc Savage, altho pulps also covered science fiction, romance, sports stories, war, and (longest lasting of all) westerns.

Pulp fiction gave rise to both exploitation fiction and comic books and influenced early cinema, especially gangster and western films. Pulp asks its audience to suspend their disbelief a little more to include truth serums, laser blasters, copious sprays of bullets, and gravity-defying stuntwork.

The Star Wars and Indiana Jones films are new versions of pulp adventure, and other films directly remade pulp heroes like The Phantom, The Saint, Zorro, and The Shadow. And of course, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction re-explored the world of the crime pulps with elements of 70s exploitation. In fact, all of Tarantino's other movies (Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill) also straddle the pulp and exploitation genres, with heavy influence from the pulpier side of Asian cinema, such as kung fu and "gun fu" (Chinese) and samurai (Japanese) films.

What is exploitation?

Exploitation novels and magazines grew out of pulp fiction. They were popular "trash fiction" in the 1950s and 60s and evolved into "true crime" magazines in the 70s. The stories exploited violence, drugs, and sex, especially promiscuity and lesbianism, but rarely delivered the kind of salacious detail their cover art implied (and usually included a moralistic ending).

Exploitation fiction led to exploitation cinema in the 60 and 70s, which typically featured posters and trailers that boasted about wild teenagers, drug parties, casual crime, cheap sex, and other salacious subjects.

Sexploitation cinema quickly followed, typified by Russ Meyer films like Wild Gals of the Naked West and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! This in turn led to blaxploitation cinema, such as Blackula, Foxy Brown, and Shaft, which combined sex, violence, and drugs with black urban life.

21st century adventure

Today, exploitation has pretty much gone the way of the dodo, since the porn film industry can produce sexually-explicit movies and the mainstream film industry can produce violent and gory films and still get an R rating. (You can argue that the porn industry exploits sex, but it's just not the same as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS). Noir and melodrama are relatively rare and usually quite self-conscious when they are done.

But pulp is alive and well. With the popularity of comic book heroes in film as well as the continued popularity of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and James Bond franchises and the copies they spawned.

Movies like Wild Wild West, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Spider-Man, Hellboy, Kill Bill, and the up-coming Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are all pulp. These are films that appeal to our sense of wonder and adventure, and that's the essence of pulp.

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