Understanding Screen Audiences – Uses and Gratifications of Genre

Jan 13, 2012
Valerie Williamson

Audience response demonstrating gratification - Sonia Pieper

Find out how students in filmmaking school can understand how the movie industry uses knowledge of consumer expectation to induce attention to new products.

Uses and Gratifications theory suggests that media products such as films meet perceived needs of the individual. Related to genre consumption, uses and gratifications theory suggests a range of aspects of cultural formation around a specific category of story. Audiences deploy both aesthetic and ritual approaches to choosing which new movies to watch, knowledge of which may assist both the filmmaker in the manufacture or marketing of new products and the student in filmmaking school to understand how genre works.

Pleasures of Genre Characteristics

Familiarity with generic characteristics repeatedly attracts viewers to a particular genre. Pre-knowledge of the genre is necessary in order to follow a plot. These expert viewers enjoy their recognition of detail, knowing what is likely to be important or not as the story unfolds. Film distributors aim at this expert audience in planning promotion campaigns ahead of movie completion.

Emotional pleasures of fiction consumption, such as empathy and escapism (diversion from everyday problems), have been recognised since Aristotle. Particular emotional responses are linked to different genres and, as noted in theories about melodrama, the deferral of the main character's gratification provides the pleasure of anticipation.

Rituals Reveal Cultural Uses of Film

Prediction and expectation provide satisfactions based on prior knowledge, derived from understanding genre rules and the dual challenge of reading the signs or clues during the tension provided by suspense. Readers enjoy forming hypotheses and the suspense of wondering how the characters will solve their dilemmas. Audiences derive pleasure from both the way that their expectations are finally realised and from surprises delivered through individual auteur treatments of generic plots, for example:

Notting Hill (1999) which both subverts the tropes of the traditional romance and positions it within an empathetic social diegesis. It's positive spin on disability emphasises the significance of love in everyday life.
Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010) conformed to a contemporary expectation of hard-boiled detective television series fiction, freshens it with time-slip features, and delivers both huge surprise and emotional satisfaction at the end.

Repetition and difference, then, are both expected from genre products, as Steven Neale suggests. Viewers seeking relaxation relish the repetition so long as there is a promise of novelty, the twist. Too repetitive a plot or too unique a new product will result in disappointment and, from the filmmaker's point of view, since word-of-mouth is a powerful promoter of movies, disappointing cinema attendance, such as:

Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001) was not the expected Spielberg/Kubrick Gothic dystopic action-adventure, but bestowed unique genius on a blend of melodrama with solid science fiction, grafted onto a mawkish fairytale ending that clinched the fans' disappointment.
The Village (2004) where the signifiers are all of chiller/horror within the archaic fairytale frame, only to transform into a rather lame futuristic dystopic fiction ending which viewers found frustrating.

Social Uses of Film and Television

Value judgements, unwelcome in academic criticism because too personal and too commonplace, are a source of the everyday pleasure of media consumption. Making moral and emotional judgements on the actions of characters is exploited in media promotion to the soap opera audience, for instance, but the thriller in all its guises is particularly characteristic of how generic fictions routinely embody such judgements.

Shared experience is an important source of pleasure; whether or not the audience member is socially acquainted with other consumers of a genre, they are regarded as being part of an interpretive community. This can include the social groups to which movie industry marketing deliberately appeals, such as the family, the age group or the experience group (e.g. teens and metrosexuals). The post-classical cinema, mass television viewing era generated the more random and spontaneous formations of expert fan groups, most famously around:

Star Trek: TOS (1966-1969), which group generated a long-term movie and television influence and stimulated growth and development of the generic formula. More important, the Star Trek audience revealed propensity for identity formation through creative extrapolation from the fiction.

Uses and Gratifications Theory Indicates an Active Audience

In a film industry context, the audience exists both before the screening of a movie and, at that stage, forms a target for film marketing, and after the screening of a movie finding social and cultural uses for the material they have just seen. While accused of ignoring the need to make content analyses which may reveal a certain denial of agency, uses and gratifications theory at least allows that they are active rather than passive.

Audience theory has developed in complexity and multiplicity of focus since this basic theory was formed. Fan theory, reception theory, theories of spectacle, of spectatorships being diffuse, etc., have all given rise to further detailed understanding of how media consumption groups are constituted, and how to meet their needs.