Real to Reel: A New Approach to Understanding Realism in Film and TV Fiction

INTRODUCTION

THE REALISM PROJECT

What happens exactly when we watch feature films or TV dramas? What determines whether we see the occasion as an ‘appointment to view’ or look for the remote control to switch over to something else?

Many of our responses to moving image fiction texts make mention of ‘realism’ or ‘truth’. We might say to ourselves, or to others around us, ‘It’s so real!’ or, ‘It’s unbelievable!’ But what are we responding to, and how exactly is our notion of reality or truth to be understood? Even a superficial glossing of internet user comments as well as classroom interaction with films and TV throw up a multitude of different, conflicting coinages of realism. Can there be a common, accepted standard, a currency of realism or truth?

As everyday consumers of fiction, the very question can be considered redundant because, before we’ve paused to reflect, we are either immersed in what we’re watching or we’ve zapped over or clicked onto something more involving, something more ‘realistic’. But for film and media students and for makers of moving image fiction in new digital forms, the question of how to get a more objective, rigorous handle on realism has ever greater relevance, not least in the interests of media literacy.

In this book I shall propose a set of seven codes of realism in an attempt to plot this muddy, trampled field of enquiry more systematically. The codes are offered not as an easy ready reckoner of realism in fiction texts but rather to provide a helpful tool with which to analyse and compare such texts and, crucially, bring text readers’ widely varying understandings of realism into the equation too.

This venture is indebted to John Ellis who at the start of Visible Fictions begins to theorise realism and sketches out four spectator expectations of a text that correspond to different and possibly conflicting notions of realism:

The particular representation (film or TV programme) should have a surface accuracy; it should conform to notions of what we expect to happen; it should explain itself adequately to us as audience; it should conform to particular notions of psychology and character motivation. (1982: 7)

In this Introduction I want to build on this rather fleeting foundation (Visible Fictions makes no further reference to realism) by consolidating these expectations into codes and adding some of my own. Subsequent chapters will then test drive the codes by applying them to specific pairs and groupings of texts: feature films and TV dramas.

But before outlining the codes and their workings, it’s important to dig deeper into the very concept of realism.

WHY REALISM?

The enquiry into realism is so relevant because the codes connect texts to all the key ways in which the texts can be seen to work for their makers and for their audiences. The disciplines of Media and Film Studies have systematised these ways of working into four established key concept areas:

•   the forms of texts (eg mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, editing, performance) and their conventions (how they are conventionally used) such as genre and narrative;

•   institutions: the producers of texts working in particular industrial conditions;

•   audiences: a wide term comprising targeted audiences as well as individual spectators;

•   representations/messages and values/ideology: the meanings of texts and how they represent us and the world.

Fundamentally, to ask about truth and realism in a given text is to key in to what keeps us watching and makes us rate it highly – or not. In so doing it will also put these key concepts to work on the text bringing both text and concepts into new light.

So which concepts are most central to the realism enquiry? There can be many different reasons for our film and TV fiction preferences and they certainly don’t always make explicit mention of realism. The enquiry needs to widen out to questions like:

•   What’s the text about?

•   How does it hang together?

•   Why have its producers made it like that?

•   What makes it work for us as individual spectators?

•   Why is it relevant for us and for today?

•   What’s it saying to us?

All these questions connect to the central one of how the text makes meaning. This in turn depends on who reads it and how that reader perceives reality. The question of how realistic a text is becomes a question about how the text represents the real world for that reader or member of the audience.

So representation and audience lie at the heart of the enquiry into realism and they lead us on to the other key concepts featured above.

COMPARING TEXTS

Just as judging a colour is easier when comparing it with another, apparently similar one, so comparing realism between two or more fiction texts sharpens our focus on key audience understandings and key textual operations. How does a continuing soap like EastEnders differ in terms of realism from a drama series about working class lives like Shameless, for example?

Subsequent chapters will therefore examine textual operations and audience understandings across a pair or cluster of texts grouped loosely around their adherence to one or more of the seven realism codes.

A further vital dimension of this enquiry is that of endings – or, indeed, for soaps and continuing drama series, indefinite suspension of endings. Real life does not end neatly or even at all – so a drama that does so is in a particular sense deviating from ‘reality’. How it ends will resonate with its audience members very strongly – especially if there has been a build-up of suspense and expectation through the hours of screening or weeks of broadcast. How will a drama into which we as viewers have invested time and personal engagement end? Will it chime with our understandings of real life or satisfy our expectations of fictional pleasures – or will it come to a compromising stop somewhere in between?

Film and media students often tend to shy away from considering endings with a muttered ‘I don’t want to spoil it for everyone’. I propose to transgress this concern for their fellow students and include plenty of observations on how the films under discussion end. To do otherwise would be absurd given the aim of this study: to explore the workings of realism.

In addition a final postscript on endings will consider the implications of code no 7: the ‘counter-realism’ code of institutional constraint.

So be warned: spoilers ahead!

AUDIENCES READ TEXTS IN DIFFERENT WAYS

It should already have become abundantly clear that audiences read texts in many different ways. Realism is not an absolute quality or quantity that we can point to and highlight. It is how audience members read a text that confers realism or reality status on it. Hence the intrinsic link to the key concept of audience and to the question of how we as individual spectators understand a text: different readers will understand and appreciate the same text differently.

However as reception theorists have been at pains to point out (Turner, 2006: 163-5), there cannot be an infinite number of possible readings. Textual meaning cannot be seen as cast adrift on a limitless sea of relativity. What constrains the ‘infinity’ of possible readings are, as I hope to demonstrate, those reader understandings that are traceable to the operations of the realism codes. In other words, the viability of a particular reading depends on how successfully it can demonstrate a route through the codes.

HISTORICAL OR CONJUNCTURAL READINGS

A key question that needs to be asked here is whether such a proven reading, once established, remains so through the passage of historical time. How does the passing of time affect our readings of realism – both in terms of texts and of the audience?

Some dramas that once seemed realistic because they reflected their times now often no longer seem so. This can be classically illustrated by the development of the British ‘gritty realist’ TV police series.

From Dixon of Dock Green (1955–1976) through Z Cars (1962–1978) and The Sweeney (1975–1978) to G. F. Newman’s unflinchingly grimy and depressing Law and Order (1978) the necessary re-invention of realism in portraying criminals and the law against a recognisable and convincing social/political setting has been a continual and commanding project – and in Life on Mars (2006–2007) where noughties Detective Sam Tyler wakes up after an accident back in the Sweeney-like seventies, this re-invention has itself taken centre-stage as a central, self-reflexive, ‘postmodern’ motif. Its success suggests that now in the noughties we love to marvel at Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt – but less, I imagine, at the historical truthfulness of the character than at his mad, bad policing methods and insanely unreconstructed male chauvinism.

Realism, and how audiences read it, seems to be specific to a particular historical moment or conjuncture in social, political and cultural life.

In reverse the process is not so much one of re-invention than of rediscovering realism from the past. ‘Truer now than ever’ could be an imaginary poster tagline for certain films of a bygone age. Audiences of today can rediscover realism or perhaps more accurately a social truth for their time in texts of a previous historical conjuncture.

For example in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), Mildred (Joan Crawford) cuts loose from her unfaithful husband and attains economic power over men through her successful ownership of a restaurant chain. However, she pays for it by being subjected to the male hierarchy at the end of the film when a judge orders her to return to her husband and to the marital fold. Today’s audiences might well find truth and thus realism in Mildred’s struggle for self-empowerment whereas at least some post-second world war audiences are perhaps more likely to have seen an ideological and thus emotional truth or closure in her return to her ‘rightful’ place in the family. Intervening history has seen the arrival and negotiation of feminism into today’s social, political and cultural conjuncture and thus has crucially affected our preferred reading of realism in the film. Todd Haynes’ 2011 reworking of Mildred Pierce as a HBO mini-series for TV enabled contemporary audiences to revisit the story in a version that focused on the domestic, recessionary aspects of the early 1930s and how it played out for women rather than on the film noir elements of the 1945 film that show Mildred trapped in the resurgent male order prevailing after the second world war.

TECHNOLOGY AND REALISM

Also belonging in a historical timeline and impacting on our understandings of realism are the technologies employed in the making of moving image texts. Unlike the backwards/ forwards, re-invention/rediscovery dichotomy outlined above, audio-visual technologies seem always to march forwards, to a tune of inexorable historical ‘progress’, as far as realism is concerned.

This is essentially the story of miniaturisation and of YouTube: the development of ever smaller and cheaper cameras and with it the rapidly growing ubiquity of mini-camcorders that record almost everything that moves in our contemporary world. These cameras are not necessarily in the hands of professional experienced film-makers but of amateurs indulging in a newly found free-for-all of indiscriminate moving image making. ‘The less professional it looks and sounds, the more convincingly real it is’ would seem to be realism’s new pop-digital currency.

It is in novel ‘reality’ forms that span the fiction/non-fiction divide that the current roughand-ready techniques first make their impact. The very ordinary and everyday married to the freak show is their subject matter. Their ‘realism’ is spawned from the comic grotesquery and the misfit antics of life as lived or invented by a few and rendered for the eyes and ears of the many. These ostensibly non-fiction forms are then adapted for fictional, drama scenarios that are often spoofs of popular genres and that use their nonfiction docu-realist techniques to often extreme anti-realist effect.

There is still a wide gulf between the fictions commissioned by regulated broadcasters whose paymasters, employment practices and established audiences require professional finish and high-end production values and those posted every minute on YouTube. But the gap may be narrowing rapidly due to two powerful forces at work in the current conjuncture.

One is the force of viewer expectation in the predominantly young YouTube audience. Their digital practices and thus viewer expectations have ‘upped the ante’ in terms of the forms and conventions of the texts their peers make and they themselves watch. The forms of instant ‘no-budget’ movie-making lead the way and the ‘slacker’ conventions they adopt are constantly being re-invented in the interests of cheapness, immediacy and the prospect of reaching a huge internet audience in a very short time. New stories are told in new, extremely compelling ways. This leads directly to the second force, that of commercial constraint.

On the one hand, viewing figures show a continuing drop in ratings for conventional TV. It seems more exciting for younger viewers to spend time on YouTube than on the costly high production value drama of the terrestrial channels. In addition to falling ratings, increased competition amongst the plethora of digital channels signals a catastrophic reduction in production budgets. The result is a growing adoption of YouTube and MTV-style techniques. On the other hand expensively produced American TV series such as The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) and Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) have opened the door to box-set viewing habits which even threaten the cultural supremacy of cinema going.

The horror/ disaster movie genre has recently exploited new low-tech ‘realism’ to schlocky effect in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) a successor of sorts to The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999). This is a film shot entirely by amateur camcorder, or so it would have its audience believe. The horrors it conveniently captures on the streets of New York are, surely not accidentally, very reminiscent of the real phenomena of 9/11. Audiences were primed, as it were, for this spectator experience by the observational camcorder documentary footage of the collapsing Twin Towers shot by the Naudet Brothers who happened to be attached to the New York Fire Service on that day – see 9/11 (CBS TV, 2002).

However, the history of audio-visual technologies and their resulting forms shows that the new realisms soon grow stale and are themselves overtaken and replaced. An example might be the ever shifting, almost palsied camerawork employed in the 1996–7 BBC drama series This Life. At the time this seemed a realist trademark, distinguishing it from traditional mundane soaps; since then, some would argue, it has worn thin and obtrusive like a surface mannerism, almost akin to a facial tic. This phenomenon is not exclusive, however, to new-fangled forms. Realism has always had to re-assert its reality status by breaking previous conventions. As John Ellis expressively put it:

In not conforming to conventions of portrayal, it [a pathbreaking film] has found reality from behind the dead weight of representations. (1982: 9)

REALISM IS A CONSTRUCTED EFFECT

From everything that has been argued so far, it becomes very clear that realism is an effect or set of effects constructed by film – and programme-makers, whether consciously or not. Realism is not a given reflection of the world but rather a construction that must, often laboriously, be worked at.

This applies to non-fiction that purports to document reality directly just as much as it does to fiction. But it is when filmed drama apes the techniques, say, of newsreel footage that we need to be especially on our guard against attributing the realist effect to the depicted events themselves, lazily assuming that documenting reality is simply showing it like it actually happened. So when a film like The Killing Fields (Roland Joffe, 1984) takes its cue from the techniques of 1940s Italian neo-realism, for example, and pitches the spectator into a violent, bloody melee on the streets of Phnom Penh with people, vehicles and body parts seeming haphazardly to fill the frame, we need to remind ourselves that this is an event as carefully arranged for the camera as the still, artfully composed tableau that served as the film’s poster.

My argument here is precisely that there is not just one single ’real world’ realism, but many constructed ones – depending on the criteria of the seven codes introduced below.

One of the fundamental precepts of media literacy is the need to be on our guard against what Paul Kerr (1990) has called ‘the cliché of clichés about television […] that it is a window on the world (that phrase was once the subtitle of Panorama); the medium is seen as a mirror, as transparent, reflective, neutral. It is of course none of these things’.

In my own media and film studies teaching I have indulged in a horrible but hopefully memorable coinage: anti-window-on-the-world-ism. This is in order to express the critical approach to TV and film representations that effective media literacy requires. So often it is politicians, teachers and other public sphere authority figures who refer to such representations as ‘windows-on-the-world’ – using them transparently as evidence of the truths and realities of events and people in the real world.

TWO KEY DIMENSIONS: REALISM AND TRUTH

Emerging clearly from my arguments so far should be a distinction between realism and truth.

In one dimension texts can be constructed in varying ways that encourage us as spectators to see them as realistic. ‘This is what the world is really like’ we think or merely unconsciously assume in order to submit to the workings or pleasures of the text in question.

In the other dimension texts can be constructed to convince us that they are vehicles of truth – or better particular truths – whether philosophical ones about the world or truths subsumed within the narrative or the character interplay of a drama.

In practice these two dimensions do not generally jar one with the other but work in tandem – an operation that the realism codes can help to put into clearer perspective. However, the codes come with a strong health warning: applying them to moving image texts can never be an exact science. This is despite imagining them as seven test tubes filled to varying levels with different coloured liquids to represent varying degrees of differing realisms or truth effects. The test tubes would then show how a lower level of perceived realism or truth in one code or tube would result in higher levels in others.

Just as there is no one single realism, so there is no one single, definitive set of ‘test tube’ readings of realism for a text. It is vital to remember that different viewers can read realism and truth differently. One text reader’s ‘test tube levels’ may differ from another’s. But because it is also vital to be able to support a reading convincingly, that reading can lay claim to be a preferred, best substantiated one.

Because there is not just one realism but many, any one text can be read as containing elements that engage several of the codes. The key question is, which code is dominant in that text for which reader and why?

In unpacking this, the relationship of the codes to one another in a particular text reading will come into focus. That is what is fundamental to this analytical method.

One further health warning remains: the codes must serve texts in the full complexity and specificity of those texts. Analysing texts should never become a self-serving, simplifying exercise aiming to illustrate the codes. It is always the codes that should be employed to illuminate and better understand the texts. For this reason, even when singling out each of the codes in turn as in the following exposition, it is rarely one code alone that engages the gears of a debate over realism but its relationship with one or more of the others.

THE SEVEN CODES

1. The Code of Surface Realism (or ‘surface accuracy’ as John Ellis puts it)

Criterion: does the representation look and sound to you like the real world it claims to show?

This code, inherited from John Ellis’s taxonomy, is the weakest, most minimal category of realism. It is also a negative code in that it is cited only when found wanting. It demands merely that the external reality of a fiction look enough like its equivalent in the real world for us to suspend our disbelief, to use Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term. For example, the East End of EastEnders (BBC1) should convince us sufficiently that it can stand in for the East End of London for us to continue watching and eventually get carried along by the characters and storylines. Nevertheless, a Guardian article suggests that the gap between soap and real East End may have stretched too wide:

Dominic Treadwell-Collins, EastEnders’ executive producer [in 2014] wants Albert Square to look like a real-life east London neighbourhood in 2014. ‘It should feel more like London. It’s been frozen in aspic for too long… It’s got to reflect the modern world.’ (Jason Deans and John Plunkett, The Guardian 28 January 2014)

This example points up not only how thin and insubstantial this code is but also how other codes of realism, principally those of genre and narrative, take over to enrich the mix. Moreover, this example and the code it illustrates also raise a key debate over realism in contemporary popular British TV: the debate over the representation of ethnicity.

For a growing number of viewers (or, rather, potential viewers), EastEnders lacks a convincing surface realism. It is far whiter-skinned than London’s actual East End, as any real-life East End inhabitant would testify – despite the efforts of the programme makers to inject it with more ethnic diversity. These efforts are both a response to audience complaints over inadequate realism and to the BBC’s statutory requirement to be accountable to all its licence-fee payers. And yet the insufficiency persists – presumably less because of direct ‘institutional racism’ from its makers than because of the need to satisfy the genre code; in other words, to satisfy long-established audience expectations of the soap genre. These may, however, contain traces of intrinsic, inherited racism: soap audiences are accustomed to their soap stars being white.

For John Ellis, a fisticuffs over surface accuracy is typically relished by nerdish sticklers who complain about, say, uniforms having the wrong buttons in a period war drama – but as we can see from the EastEnders example, the issues raised by differing audience perceptions of surface accuracy can be edgier and can penetrate far deeper.

Typically, those who actually live closest to places that have served as the locations of fiction drama (documentaries too, sometimes!) complain that they have been grossly misrepresented – notably in the case of working-class estates that appear on screen trashed and daubed with graffiti out of proportion to the lived experience of the residents. A good example is the estate in Ballymun, North Dublin that features in Family (Michael Winterbottom, 1994) a four-part drama written by Roddy Doyle and screened on RTE and BBC2. The series was critically acclaimed as a ‘realistic’ portrayal of the Dublin underclass but its surface accuracy was bitterly contested by the Ballymun dwellers who failed to recognise their estate on TV. For those viewers living in ever-widening circles away from the chosen location this problem fades into insignificance, particularly if the representation of the estate confirms their generalised assumptions of its squalor and degradation. So we have to ask, whose ‘realism’ counts the most – particularly if that of the majority merges seamlessly into a stereotypical, undifferentiated view of the working-class?

Issues of surface realism can extend to deeper, more problematic questions of representation than squabbles over period uniforms. Illustrated by examples like Ballymun, above, they can in fact be seen as negative aspects of the second code, that of social or documentary realism.

2. The Code of Social or Documentary Realism

Criterion: does the representation present social reality ‘like it really is’? or ‘as it really was’?

This code is engaged by fictional representations that claim to show the world unadorned – indeed ‘to tell it like it really is’.

There is a strong connection here with the sixth code, the code of discursive or ideological truth. This is because social realism aims to lift the lid on surface reality, very possibly to reveal how social forces work at a deeper level so as to suppress certain truths or sets of power relations. To do this effectively such realism must prompt the audience to recognise the truth of the power relations or ideological forces at work in a particular representation.

Categorisation purists might detect a glitch here in the identification of social realism as a discrete code. This is because, it would itself appear to constitute a familiar type of film and television fiction: a genre. Can a code be a genre? And if it is, should it not then be subject to the genre code?

My immediate response to this challenge will, I hope, gain focus when I come to discuss the genre code directly. Social realism is a genre that would claim for itself an intrinsic lack of fiction genre conventions altogether. More than other, more traditionally accepted genres like action-adventure or sci-fi, it seeks to invoke the ‘real’ world directly, even transparently and shockingly, in terms of its seamier aspects. Hence its secondary label of ‘documentary realism’. And here, more than in any other genre territory, we need to invoke a vigilant, critical ‘anti-window-on-the-world-ist’ perspective. In chapter 2 I discuss the fiction/non-fiction divide as it impinges on both audiences and producers of ‘true story’ accounts of the world.

However, the passage of time as well as world-weary critical reaction has tended to stymy social realism as ‘gritty British realism’ or, going back to the 1960s, ‘kitchen sink’ drama. In effect such reaction has regarded features like high levels of ambient noise on the soundtrack or washed out colour palettes in the mise-en-scène as negative genre tropes or trappings. Such disparaging value judgments can dent an audience’s readiness to read persuasive realism and truth in such representations. As with other more recognised genres, realist film-makers need to re-discover reality from behind the ‘dead weight’ of British working-class drama. Just how this is being done in specific films that seek to reinvent social realism will be discussed in a later chapter.

It is Ken Loach’s influential body of work that has most readily and consistently engaged the code of social realism. From Cathy Come Home (1966) to The Angels’ Share (2012) Loach always finds his subject matter in the travails of working-class men and women and their usually unavailing struggle to survive and succeed. Unlike Mike Leigh, with whom he is sometimes misleadingly bracketed, Loach’s films always point to social forces as the ultimate cause of their protagonists’ coming to grief. And yet ironically the narrative predictability of this deep-rooted societal cause and effect can be seen by more jaundiced spectators as militating against his films being read as genuinely effective, live-wire conductors of social truth.

However, there are plenty of factors in Loach’s work that do testify to the potency of the social realist code. One telling testimony to the strength of audience reaction to his work is recent research¹ into the effects of screen violence that screened two contrasting scenes to audience focus groups. The scene in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) where Marvin is accidentally shot in a car by John Travolta’s character, Vincent, spattering it with blood and brains was shown to them, followed by one in Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird (1994) where central character Maggie is physically assaulted by her partner but without any visible bloodletting. The study’s focus groups found the Loach scene infinitely more disturbing and realist in its effect than Tarantino’s gore fest.

An IMDb user comment – the user’s grammatical and spelling mistakes are retained here and elsewhere – for Loach’s film states:

Ladybird Ladybird is by far one of the most shocking films I have seen in my life… The fact that the film is so good is because of it’s realism. Sometimes you forget that your watching a film, it feels like your watching real life unfold. The characters seem so real, the film itself felt like a documentary on more than one occasion to me.

Such a comment is characteristic for audience reactions not only to Loach films but also to social realist dramas that spurn crowd-pleasing genre tropes in favour of a stark ‘documentary’ style. Docu-drama is an appropriate label for output that engages the social realist code – as long as it is not confused with a related but distinct form: drama-documentary (see chapter 2 for further discussion of the divide between the two.)

But the irony here is that although, as has been stressed above, the documentary effects are all highly written, constructed and performed, they function like windows on the world in their power to provoke reaction from affected parties in the real world. On the one hand Crissy Rock’s commanding performance as the central protagonist, Maggie, is widely recognised as the key to Ladybird Ladybird’s effect on the audience. On the other, as has happened frequently with Loach’s work, the film unleashed a frenzy of protest from social workers who felt under direct attack from its documentary-style representations of their working practices.

‘Based on a true story’ is the tagline for countless, usually mainstream and predominantly Hollywood offerings. Needless to say this alone in no way qualifies a text to be seen as engaging the social realist code. Not only do such dramas often play fast and loose with historical truth but they also typically feature A-list stars along with high drama and high production-value set pieces – all of which arguably detract from a genuinely realist effect. (See ‘the counter-realist’ code below.) An example up for discussion in chapter 2 is In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) starring Daniel Day Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson. This film claims the IRA Guildford bombings in October 1974 as its real world context but in fact puts a highly dramatised portrait of a fractured father-son relationship at the heart of a significantly simplified and sensationalised political backdrop. This Hollywoodisation, I would argue, has the effect of shifting readings of realism away from the criteria of social realism and towards those of the genre code: its representations (however hard-hitting) satisfy certain genre expectations in the audience rather than use docu-drama techniques to give audiences an uncompromising account of social, historical and political forces… unadorned.

3. The Genre Code

Criterion 1: Is the representation what you’d expect to see and hear in this sort or genre of text?

Criterion 2: Does it make you suspend your disbelief?

This code is fundamental to the way that notions of realism depend on audience expectations. If a horror film or indeed a historical drama satisfies its audience’s expectations of that genre then it will qualify as ‘realistic’. But this is a very different kind of realism to the one just discussed. It implies realism in accordance with genre conventions as loosely understood at any one historical conjuncture by its audience members. Rather than measuring what they see on screen against external objective criteria, for example historical fact in, say, Rob Roy (Michael Caton Jones, 1995), an audience will tend to accord realism to the degree of thrills and spills and spectacle that they expect of a swashbuckling historical and romantic romp.

The criteria that operate the genre code are twofold. The first is the notion of genres as combinations of repetition and difference, a formula derived from Steve Neale. Genre realism needs to be constantly refreshed or indeed reinvented – through innovations to the genre itself or through growing new shoots via a process of genre hybridisation. Otherwise representations can ossify, translating audience expectations into experiences that are predictable and that ironically lack ‘realism’. But genre realism is less defined and more elusive than that of any other code.

Genre realism as read by audiences is in fact generated precisely by the chequered, much debated development of popular genres that pass through endless inflections, hybridisations, recyclings and parodisations on their chronological route to resurgence or demise. In turn it is charted by the continuous, strenuous and often vain efforts of film studios and their distribution arms (as well as TV production houses) to sustain and replicate the profitability of their genre productions – in contemporary Hollywood terms, the profitability of their major, high-concept, would-be blockbusters.

An example closer to home and thus closer to Anglophile measurements of realism than Hollywood’s periodic re-appraisals of, say, the Western is the British gangster movie. Its iconography revolves around violence and ‘shooters’ but also knives, razors, flash cars and flashy women and a working-class, often cockney, macho defiance of class-bound social mores. However, these ingredients have undergone countless remixes since the 1950s: from the then gritty exposure of small-time crooks in Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947) to the macho posturing of Get