Professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley, critic Linda Williams proposes the idea that films are designed to elicit spectator response on a bodily level. With respect to film genres, she argues that horror, melodrama, and pornography all fall into the category of "body genres", since they are each designed to elicit physical reactions on the part of viewers.
Linda Williams
(1953 - )
In Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Williams analyzes past and present cultures with reference to the genres of film that came from the pleasures and values of society. By looking at the types of pleasure achieved through pornography, melodrame, and horror, Williams offered a Screen Theory of Excess which argues that when the woman looks, it is representational of excess, with particular emphasis on the excess of feelings.
Williams also advanced a Gender Theory that holds that female characters who are represented as powerful, are punished for possessing that power by the end of the film. Williams sees the power of body genres as essential to the taming of American audiences. Audience response to this "taming" is especially visible in ponography, melodrama, and horror films that people "cannot look away from," and the similar inability to get up and walk away from the film, which makes the visceral response a continuous occurrence driven by genre. Williams believes that the success of these types of films is due to the extreme that audience sensation imitateswhat is being seen on the screen.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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The three main categories of body genres are: Pornography, Melodrama, and Horror.
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The reasons for these body genres are: (1) convulsion or spasm of sexual pleasure as in pornography, (2) emotions such as anguished weeping as in melodrama, and (3) screaming and terror as in horror.
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All body genres tend to offer spectacles of female victimization.
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Women figured onscreen have traditionally functioned as the primary embodiment of pleasure, fear, and pain (Williams).
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In body genres, the female body is shown as the spectacle to the pleasure.
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Williams' theory of gender and excess occurs where spectatorship meets sexual perversion (voyeurism, scopophelia, fetishism, sadism, and masochism).
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Sexual saturation -- The state or process that occurs when a body (usually female) is heavily imbued with notions and implications of sexuality, to the point of objectification.
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Objectification -- The action of degrading someone (most frequently a female) to the status of a mere object through expressions of abstract sexual desire.
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Fetishism -- The exaggerated obsessive cherishing of a particular commodity as if it were a thing bearing great spiritual value (as an object of consumption).
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Scopophelia -- To derive pleasure from looking. As an expression of sexuality, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography, naked bodies, etc.