Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory

FILM AND STEREOTYPE

FILM AND CULTURE SERIES

A Challenge for Cinema and Theory

J Ö R G   S C H W E I N I T Z

Translated by Laura Schleussner

Columbia

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Columbia University Press

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Originally published by Jörg Schweinitz as Film und Stereotyp.

Eine Herausforderung für das Kino und die Filmtheorie.

Zur Geschichte eines Mediendiskurses, copyright © 2006

Akademie Verlag GmbH, Berlin.

Translation copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52521-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schweinitz, Jörg

[Film und Stereotyp. English]

Film and stereotype : a challenge for cinema and theory /

Jörg Schweinitz ; translated by Laura Schleussner.

    p. cm. — (Film and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes filmography.

ISBN 978-0-231-15148-1 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-231-15149-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-231-52521-3 (e-book)

1. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.S6956S3413    2011

791.43’6552—dc22                                                                       2010044342

Designed by Lisa Hamm

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

PART I. STEREOTYPE THEORY: CONCEPTS, PERSPECTIVES, AND CONTROVERSIES

1.  THE STEREOTYPE IN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMANITIES

2.  SOME ASPECTS AND LEVELS OF STEREOTYPIZATION IN FILM

3.  THE INTELLECTUAL VIEWPOINT VERSUS THE STEREOTYPE IN MASS CULTURE

PART II. A DISCOURSE HISTORY: THE TOPIC OF THE STEREOTYPE THROUGHOUT FILM THEORY

4. PRELUDE: WALTHER RATHENAU’S CULTURAL CRITICISM, HUGO MÜNSTERBERG’S EUPHORIC CONCEPT OF FILM AS ART, AND THE NEGLECT OF THE STEREOTYPE

5. BÉLA BALÁZS’S NEW VISUAL CULTURE, THE TRADITION OF LINGUISTIC SKEPTICISM, AND ROBERT MUSIL’S NOTION OF THE FORMULAIC

6. THE READYMADE PRODUCTS OF THE FANTASY MACHINE: RUDOLF ARNHEIM, RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER, AND THE DISCOURSE ON THE STANDARDIZATION OF FILM

7. THE STEREOTYPE AS INTELLIGIBLE FORM: COHEN-SÉAT, MORIN, AND SEMIOLOGY

8. IRONY AND TRANSFIGURATION: THE POSTMODERN VIEW OF THE STEREOTYPE

PART III. FILM ANALYSIS: CRITIQUE AND TRANSFIGURATION—THREE CASE STUDIES

9. MCCABE AND BUFFALO BILL: ON THE CRITICAL REFLECTION OF STEREOTYPES IN TWO FILMS BY ROBERT ALTMAN

10. ENJOYING THE STEREOTYPE AND INTENSE DOUBLE-PLAY ACTING: THE PERFORMANCE OF JENNIFER JASON LEIGH IN THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1 Fictional film posters from Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. (Germany 1931)

FIGURE 2 Stereotypization of visual representation: views of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome

FIGURE 3 Facial expressions of horror (1886)

FIGURE 4 Gestures of horror (1886)

FIGURE 5 Study of facial expressions featuring Albert Bassermann

FIGURE 6 Conventional grand gestures of horror and desperation in Weihnachtsgedanken (Germany 1911)

FIGURE 7 Stereotypical film images: two series of images from Vladimir Nilsen; mother-and-child shots from three films of the 1930s; six close-ups from different American films

FIGURE 8 The ritual of driving in the spike as visual and narrative stereotype

FIGURE 9 The ritual of driving in the spike in the hybrid-genre film Wild Wild West (1999)

FIGURE 10 Adolf Behne refers in 1929 to this satirical series of images from Punch

FIGURE 11 The distraught hero on his way to leap off the skyscraper

FIGURE 12 Gesture of superiority: Katherine Hepburn and Jennifer Jason Leigh

FIGURE 13 Smoking as provocation: Katherine Hepburn and Jennifer Jason Leigh

FIGURE 14 Hectic activity at the typewriter: Rosalind Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh

FIGURE 15 Fainting as pretense: Jean Arthur and Jennifer Jason Leigh

INTRODUCTION

Isn’t a stereotype a still image? Do we not have a dual relationship with platitudes: both narcissistic and maternal?

—ROLAND BARTHES, UPON LEAVING THE MOVIE THEATER

The stereotype can be evaluated in terms of fatigue. The stereotype is what begins to fatigue me.

—ROLAND BARTHES, ROLAND BARTHES

In his film Die Koffer des Herrn O. F. (The Suitcases of Mr. O. F., Germany, 1931), Alexander Granowski presents an ironic fairy tale about the modern capitalism of the era and reflexively touches on the world of cinema. The director of a fictive film company explains his business strategy: Problems make you go broke. Comedies bring dividends.… Why are we a world-class company? Because we produce comedies! I beg of you! A song follows, sung from off-screen, as a coloratura in the style of an operetta aria referring to the popular film genres of the period. Sound film comedies and sound film operettas (Tonfilmkomödien und Tonfilmoperetten, the German counterparts to the American film musical) always depicted the complications of a love story, and they did so with frequently recurring narrative and visual motifs. This is alluded to the lyrics from Granowski’s film:

He loves,

she loves,

we love,

they love,

they all, all, all, all love.

While the song is sung, a series of six fictive film posters with extremely similar compositions appears on screen. All show an embracing couple from the waist up, the woman always holding a guitar. The motifs differ only in superficial detail, mostly in a different hat or pair of glasses.

The effect is immediately repeated, whereby the song, now sung to a marching rhythm, refers to the military comedies (Militärschwänke) popular in Germany at the time.

Barracks air,

Barracks smell,

Barracks magic.

Marching is such fun.

Another series of posters appears, each depicting an officer and a woman with a horse. These images too are almost identically composed and vary only in a few minor details, most obviously in the form of the helmets.

The current of filmic self-examination running through this sequence widely epitomized the contemporary discourses on cinema of German film critics and theorists around 1930. In this example, a motion picture from the period addresses a characteristic trend of its own medium. Only peripherally does it concern a satirical take on the cinematic glorification of military ritual, which was also ridiculed by the progressive film criticism of the time. First and foremost, the sequence from Granowski’s film caricaturizes the stereotypization of film. This is perhaps the first time in the history of film that a motion picture explicitly conducts a brief reflexive discourse on this theme, which constitutes the main topic of this book.

Incidentally, in its satirical display of stereotypes the film employs the device of synchronic, intratextual serialization, a standard technique used for visual and self-referential representations of the phenomenon. This will be described in more detail further on.

Not even a decade prior to Granowski’s persiflage of the film business’s repetitive and reductive compulsions, in the first half of the 1920s intellectual aficionados of cinema such as Béla Balázs had associated the medium with very different hopes and utopias. Euphoric ideas about the future of film as art were based on the idea that cinema was destined to cultivate a new visual culture: the long-deplored conventionality and abstraction (arising therefrom) of the culture of language and writing—asserted under the banner of language skepticism (Sprachskepsis)—could be overcome by the visual and concrete medium of film.

Toward the end of the decade, such euphoria had given way to disenchantment, including among film critics. Intellectual observers now became aware of the medium as an all the more powerful agent of the conventional. They now realized that conventionalization of cinema did not fail to affect the sphere of gestural and visual expression. Through the constant repetition of patterns reduced in complexity it standardized the imaginary of large masses of people, even on an international scope. Cinema tended to create globally widespread visual imaginations and forms of expression.

FIGURE 1 Series of fictional film posters from the motion picture Die Koffer des Herrn O. F. (The Suitcases of Mr. O. F., Alexander Granowski, Germany, 1931).

Fixed schemata were now observed everywhere in the worlds of narrative and in their visual composition. They reoccurred in extended series of films and were progressively automatized and conventionalized, thus becoming intersubjectively established. This concerned patterns of plot structure (including the macro- and microstructures of narrative) and character construction as well as patterns of acting, visual style, the combination of image and music, and so on. Around 1930, the great majority of German commenters massively criticized this trend, either from the standpoint of ideological critique or, predominantly, in terms of aesthetics and style.

A major cause for these serial tendencies was soon found: film’s industrial mode of production, which was associated with the reigning capitalistic conditions of commodification and distribution. The second half of the 1920s was pervasively marked by rationalization and full industrial mechanization, and the New Objectivity blossomed in Germany. Against this backdrop, metaphors from the spheres of industrialization and mechanization were popular in cultural discourses and ultimately entered into thinking on cinema. Long before Horkheimer and Adorno criticized the culture industry (particularly Hollywood) and its tendency toward the intertextually and culturally conventionalized schema—the stereotype—critical observers around 1930 described cinema as a dream factory (Ilya Ehrenburg) and fantasy machine (René Fülöp-Miller) or talked about the standardization (Siegfried Kracauer, for example) and Taylorism (Willy Haas) of film, or even the ready-made film (Rudolf Arnheim).¹

Some theorists recognized even then that the much-repeated schemata that had developed into stereotypes were not only based on the routine of cyclical production but also were repeated because they functioned so well. In other words, they were evidently (reciprocally) coordinated with the dispositions, expectations, and desires of a wide audience. With film, entertainment had finally become standardized manufacturable goods² that could be traded worldwide, and spiritual needs could be satisfied "with a standardized article which would not only be manufacturable but which would also offer each customer something that suited him,"³ as René Fülöp-Miller concluded in 1931. In this conception, stereotypes function as audience-coordinated product standards with obvious parallels to the satirical statement of Granowski’s fictional film mogul.

During the period around 1930 when the topic of the stereotype was discovered by film theorists and critics, the assessment was overwhelmingly clear—and negative. The stereotype, usually described as standard, was considered the absolute opposite of positive critical terms such as artistic, creative, nuanced, true, individual, or original. Today, such a Manichaean view seems overly simplified, at the very least. A limited perspective, it has meanwhile become practically unacceptable.

In the media world of the early twenty-first century, the trends toward filmic—or more generally speaking, audiovisual—stereotypization and conventionalized patterns of (visually or narratively) reduced complexity have assumed such quality, quantity, momentum, and ubiquity, with corresponding schemata having taken over our imaginary worlds to such an extent, that the idea of creating films untouched by such factors seems truly anachronistic. Whereas even before film, popular storytelling was considered to great extent an art of repeating and reduced forms and also had the function of promoting popularity, in our contemporary world of media there is no form, no image, no narrative idea, and no structure that, once it has caught on, remains without an extended series of successors. Digital imaging pushes these trends to the extreme. Once conceived and developed at high cost, digital design schemata that produce a certain effect (for example, a dissolving figure or other transformations through morphing) are repeatedly employed—undergoing only superficial changes in appearance—through the use of the same software. Indeed, an aesthetic schema can even be patented and legally copyrighted via the usually extremely costly software used to generate it. Countless television channels, videos, DVDs, and multimedia applications additionally ensure the constant presence and availability of already similarly structured or even identical productions shown repeatedly.

Even singular, actual events—media images of catastrophes, terrorist attacks, royal weddings, funerals, and so on—are today, once they have initially attracted mass interest, followed by an endless succession of medial replays of all kinds, from direct recapitulations to all possible sorts of paraphrases and even fictionalized reenactments such as docudramas or major motion pictures. Usually this practice is pursued to the point of completely wearing out any original emotion. This mechanism also characterizes the stereotypization of fictional structures (especially in their late phase). Previously stirring images are transformed into mere semiotic signals, which, like hieroglyphs, now refer only symbolically and in a strangely abstracted manner to an original event, which now may be recalled by the mere quotation of fragments. With respect to the omnipresent serialization of narrative media products Umberto Eco emphasizes the sense of being transported into an era of repetition,⁴ and Roland Barthes describes the media as repeating machines.⁵

In the cinema, the audience mostly inhabits imaginary worlds whose regularity, coherence, and reductive simplicity are produced by repetitive forms that have become conventional and are used in a more or less automatized manner. Spectators of genre film or TV series are familiar with the repeating and similarly constructed figural types and stereotypical plot elements attached to them; they know the conventional type of music that is employed, when, for example, danger looms in a thriller or horror film. The audience is aware of the customary visual staging of chase scenes. It knows how a saloon is supposed to look in a Western, how aliens appear in a science-fiction world, and what kinds of rituals unfold in these locations. It also knows that it does not bode well if during an embrace one partner demonstratively stares straight ahead (in the direction of the camera) over the other’s shoulder. The audience has learned all this not through experience in their everyday lives outside the media (insofar as such an existence is still possible) but over the course of many years of spectatorship in the intertextual space of filmic imagination. The latent knowledge gained here constitutes what is generally described as media competence. The underlying stereotypes form and structure the intersubjective imaginary world of our time. The stereotypes of popular film therefore simultaneously become cultural signs.

Anyone making fiction films must do so in relation to current stereotypes. Those aspiring to emancipate themselves from such stereotypes and demonstratively formulate difference cannot forgo at least taking these patterns into account. Stereotypes are powerful because they are based on well-functioning structures coordinated with recipient dispositions, with previous experiences, wishes, and expectations, and these structures themselves have shaped viewer dispositions on a mass scale. Today, far more common than the attempt to demonstrate difference, however, is the ambition to use, not merely reproduce, the world of stereotypes and thus to achieve some measure of confident mastery over them. Often this amounts to simultaneously using the patterns as symbolic forms while playing with them creatively on another level. The interplay of stereotype and difference is as much of an issue in this case as emblematic or allegorical composition. The latter seems appropriate to the stereotype, but repetition successively leads to such emotional wear that, in the sense already indicated, an abstract perception of the given form as a symbolic entity is consolidated.

Another potential creative approach to stereotypes that strengthens their symbolic employment lies in their filmic reflection, or reflexive use of stereotypes. In this case, the film conducts more or less pronounced discourses—sometimes critical or satirical, sometimes mildly ironic or even transfiguring—about the world of stereotypes it now inverts. Originally comic or carnivalesque, this approach was later adopted by the avant-garde and is now widely established in mainstream cinema and fictional forms of television such as soaps. This particularly characterizes productions identified as postmodern. This treatment of stereotypes is part and parcel of the post-1980s TV style that John Caldwell terms televisuality.⁶

All in all, the stereotype seems to have particular significance for the age of audiovisual mass media. The latter produce their programs in historically unprecedented quantity and seriality, thus maintaining their virtually constant presence; they thereby address formerly inconceivably large and often global audiences. Processes of stereotypization are thus precipitated in large number and concentration, with a dynamic that is highly accelerated in comparison with previous societies. Furthermore, they gain an incredibly broad intersubjective base among recipients. In sum, all these aspects have inspired the idea of undertaking a nuanced, comprehensive, and detailed study of the stereotype from the point of view of film studies.

But why from the perspective of cinema? As the first audiovisual mass medium in history, film set the pace of this development, which was reflected upon by film theorists, practitioners, and critics—already before the widespread use of television and other media—in accompanying discourses. As a cultural and aesthetic institution having evolved over the course of over a century, cinema today is still affected by the various phases of intellectual response to the stereotype phenomenon, to which it presents the most diverse range of practical approaches. Thus, the general idea of this study readily presented itself: to investigate the connections among the development of the medium, stereotypes, and the mechanisms of their formation with a focus on film. This approach makes it possible to outline a paradigm of audiovisual media culture in the twentieth century.

This study will examine different aspects of stereotype and film, as reflected in the organization of the book. The initial focus of part 1 (in chapter 1) is to specify the key concept of the stereotype in theoretical terms. Here, one confronts the problem that the term is used in various academic discourses and thus refers to quite a diverse range of subject matter, research interests, and theoretical concepts. In psychology, the concept of the stereotype is predominantly associated with conventional images of people who belong to certain groups or classes. Situating the concept within the study of the idiom, one branch of linguistics regards stereotypes as recurrent utterances that have become conventional. In the study of literature, when the term is not primarily used in referring to the literary presentation of images of the Other (in the sociopsychological sense), it often denotes conventional patterns, for instance of style. And in art history one finds stereotype defined as a highly reduced, conventionalized schema (sustained in part by the imaginary) of visual representation.

Within a theory of the stereotype not strictly adhering to any of these given lines of questioning it is necessary to explore structural similarities among all of the individual concepts and circumstances while remaining acutely aware of the differences among them. One must look for similarities and links that would explain why in each case the use of the term stereotype is valid to a certain extent. Here important facets will be established in grouping such similarities together.

Stereotype formation is understood as a special conventionalized form of schematization. A fundamental objective of this inquiry is to comprehend stereotypization in line with pragmatics and constructivism as a process indispensable to cognition, communication, and behavior and as one that intervenes in many different levels and areas of these activities—as a mechanism, however, whose tendency toward stabilization always has a downside as well as critical issues that require a creative, self-critical, and reflected approach. Once repertoires of similarities among discourses on the stereotype have been outlined, then on this basis it will be possible within the scope of the discussion on the stereotype and cinema to widen the examination to discourses operating with other terms, including standard, pattern, schema, formula, the formulaic, the ready-made film, cliché, and so on, while remaining closely tied to the classical issues and concepts of stereotypes. This latter step will be essential, for one, because in contrast to theoretical discourses on film and aesthetics carried out in French, and to a certain extent also in English, in German the term stereotype long remained associated with the more restricted sociopsychological usage, with the above-mentioned terms often employed instead, especially regarding stylistic devices and related aspects. In sum, the aim of the approach pursued here is to free the theory of the stereotype from disciplinary constraints without leading to arbitrariness.

Chapters 2 and 3 of part 1 deal with the specific significance of the topic for film and illuminate the forms and functions of stereotypization within cinema. These sections concern a number of questions such as: How are tendencies toward stereotypization manifested in film, and in what way is this reflected on the different structural levels of the medium? How can one explain the specific origins and functions of the affinity of popular films to conspicuous stereotypes? How are film genres, including hybrid genres, to be understood on this basis? And to what extent does the concept of the stereotype provide a helpful perspective on cinematic genre theory? Also, why was the fundamental response to the stereotype among critics so vehemently negative, especially in the early German discourses on the topic?

Which brings us to another aspect, namely, the intellectual or film-theoretical discourse on the stereotypes of popular film. The present survey gives particular consideration to this topic, largely by tracing its theoretical and historical development. Part 2 provides a close examination of different historical phases of film theory’s discourse on the stereotype and its prevailing paradigms. These not only include the fundamentally critical position of classical German film theory, which emerged against the backdrop of an aesthetic rejection of all things conventional, as a legacy of both the romantic aesthetic tradition and language skepticism (Sprachskepsis). They also encompass the later appreciation for stereotypes—precisely as conventional forms with a tendency toward abstraction—within the incipient semiotic thought of the filmologists Cohen-Séat and Morin. Finally, this history also includes the postmodern, reflexive celebration of stereotypes as free-floating semantic material readily available for hybrid (re)construction.

Media-theory discourses always maintain multiple relationships to the practical media developments of their periods. It is not necessary to subscribe to all of New Film History’s lofty demands when assuming that the historical study of film theory may transcend a purely theoretical framework. Cross-references between the film-theoretical discourse on the stereotype and different filmic uses or the practical treatment thereof, and the exploration of interactions between them, are programmatic for this study, regardless of their theoretical or theoretical-historical focus.

The final segment of the book, part 3, contributes two case studies on three films that conduct discourses on the stereotypes of film—as examined up to this point from the perspective of film theory. The first analysis comprises two films from the 1970s by Robert Altman that critically address the stereotypes of the Western genre. The second deals with the acting technique of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Coen brothers’ film The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which reflexively presents and celebrates stereotypes in a postmodern sense by adhering to a strategy of reflexive transfiguration.

Illustrating two basic variations of the reflexive approach to stereotypes, these two film analyses conclude the survey and, by way of pars pro toto, also represent its guiding principle. Although the historical and theoretical analysis of this final section was developed by following multiple stages or paradigms of the theoretical approach to the stereotype, it too, like the book as a whole, is not obsessed with completeness or the ambition to create a closed system, an endeavor that would be questionable from the start. More important than any pretensions to exhaustiveness or definitiveness are the inspiration and threads that this book may provide for further reflection and additional analysis.

EDITORIAL NOTE

This book was prepared in the second half of the 1990s and written just before and after the year 2000, although its inception and early research dates further back. The study was presented in 2002 as the author’s second thesis (Habilitation)at the University of Konstanz and was published in slightly revised form in 2006 by Akademie Verlag Berlin. The translation largely corresponds to the German edition (at the time of going to press in 2005). With respect to the American readership, some text passages have undergone minor modification, and additional selective reference is made to more recent secondary literature in English, without any claim, however, to being exhaustive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for generously funding the study with a research grant. Special thanks go to Wolfgang Beilenhoff, Heinz B. Heller, Knut Hickethier, Tom Gunning, Thomas Koebner, Thomas Y. Levin, Karl Prümm, Irmela Schneider, Hans Jürgen Wulff, and Peter Wuss, who graciously supported my work during the phases of conception, research, and writing with research facilities and provided me with numerous opportunities for developing and testing some of the book’s core ideas in classes and in exchange with students, namely as visiting professor or research fellow at the Universities of Freie Universität Berlin, Chicago, Klagenfurt, Marburg, Potsdam, and Princeton.

Without the many talks and discussions with friends and colleagues, their suggestions, encouragement, and assistance, the long haul of the project would have been hardly manageable. On this count, I am especially indebted to Margrit Tröhler, Anne Paech, and my fellow editorial board members of Montage AV, above all Britta Hartmann and Frank Kessler.

Special thanks go to Eberhard Lämmert and Joachim Paech for their continuous support during the second-thesis procedure at the University of Konstanz.

Peter Heyl and Sabine Cofalla of Akademie Verlag Berlin expertly saw the manuscript through to its German publication. In 2008, the book won the Geisteswissenschaften International Award, a prize for the promotion of translating German works in the humanities, donated by the Thyssen Foundation, the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, and the German Foreign Office.

I am indebted to Christine Noll Brinckmann for her suggestion of the series of images on the cover of this book, which show the visual stereotype of women behind the window.

I would further like to thank Henry M. Taylor for our joint discussions concerning appropriate English professional terminology and for his useful suggestions of specialist terms while intently accompanying the translation process; Mona Salari for her bibliographical research; and, above all, Laura Schleussner for her dedication and precise translation work, her intensive search for hard-to-find sources of English quotations, and her abiding patience with the author’s requests.

PART I

STEREOTYPE THEORY

Concepts, Perspectives, and Controversies

ONE

THE STEREOTYPE IN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMANITIES

The systems of stereotypes may be … the defenses of our position in society…. No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.

—WALTER LIPPMANN, PUBLIC OPINION (1922)

The word stereotype is used in various theoretical disciplines. Upon closer examination, one finds that the term refers to quite heterogeneous phenomena in each respective field. In one, it signifies prejudiced and socially widespread ideas about foreigners. In another, stereotypes are associated with linguistic formulas that take the form of standardized expressions, and in still others they are considered standardized images and even naturalized recurrent patterns of narration. These kinds of semantic oscillations do not only occur along the dividing lines between disciplines. In many cases, they cut straight across specific discourses. In light of this and the tendency of stereotype to convey multifaceted meanings, the theoretical significance of the term and its historical development are worthy of some attention. This not only makes it possible to clarify different concepts of the stereotype, but it also simultaneously delineates a horizon of questions and positions that directly or indirectly shape the discourse on stereotypes in film. Films, after all, are complex phenomena, and as such they can be examined from the perspective of various disciplines. As a result, stereotype concepts from almost all fields have been applied to film and related audiovisual media. One can certainly study films as documents that reflect socially current conceptions about people (Menschenbilder), but one may also—more in the sense of film aesthetics or narratology—analyze stock formulas of images and sound design, or character and plot construction, and so on. The term stereotype may be applied in all of these different cases, in each instance with a shift in theoretical perspective, which is not always noticed. An examination of the different theoretical orientations of stereotype concepts promotes an awareness of these shifts and prevents the concepts from simply being lumped together—as the use of one and the same term might suggest. At the same time, this approach also offers the opportunity of a more generalized theoretical and conceptual reflection of stereotypes, which may also be of conceptual use for a theoretical approach to film.

CONCEPTS OF THE STEREOTYPE

IN SOCIOPSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

Social psychology stood out in its ability to claim and circulate the term beyond a narrow circle of experts. Social-psychology studies—or, more generally speaking, those in the social sciences—dealing with the topic of the stereotype number in the thousands. However, a close look reveals that there is no clearly circumscribed, consistent, and generally shared concept even within this field. Given that different conceptual approaches offer quite disparate constructs of what is considered a stereotype, even within social psychology a lack of certainty predominates about the discursive object.

Sociological theories on the stereotype were inspired and strongly influenced by a book on public opinion by the American journalist Walter Lippmann, which was initially published in 1922.¹ The term features prominently in the book. Even today there is hardly a relevant work that successfully avoids mentioning this book when proposing a specific use of the expression. Lippmann merely developed very broad ideas and generally investigated the nature of the stereotype in terms of the pictures in our heads,² that is, our thoughts as contributing to an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world.³ However, the concept was soon more narrowly defined: normative ideas, attitudes, or expectations concerning people and used to make judgments about them. This more limited definition still persists in the social sciences today. Studies published in the early 1930s by the American scholars Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly⁴ on racial stereotypes proved to be very influential in terms of promoting this more restricted meaning of the term. For their studies, the two psychologists developed their famous attribute-list procedure.

To simplify and without going into the many conceptual differences among adherents to Katz and Braly’s line of research,⁵ stereotypes are standardized conceptions of people, primarily based on an individual’s belonging to a category (usually race, nation, professional role, social class, or gender) or the possession of characteristic traits symbolizing one of these categories. This concept focuses on belief patterns and emphasizes their guiding influence on attitudes and perceptions.

The different approaches within the social sciences attribute to these belief patterns an entire battery of optional characteristics weighing in differently on individual definitions. Stereotypes are thought to be (1) the relatively permanent mental fixtures of an individual (stability); (2) intersubjectively distributed within certain social formations, for which they assume the functions of consensus building and standardization (conformity); therefore, (3) they do not, or only seldom, rely on personal experience but are primarily socially communicated (second-hand nature); in addition, (4) they are limited to the simple combination of a few characteristics (reduction) and (5) accompanied by strong feelings (affective coloration). Finally, (6) functioning automatically, stereotypes are considered to substantially interfere with the processes of perception and judgment, which they influence and even determine (cliché effect). Regarding the function of stereotypes, the term is therefore generally associated with making judgments, and (7) stereotypes are often ascribed the status of inappropriate judgments (inadequacy).

Katz and Braly also laid the groundwork for this final point—merely by the nature of their experimental setup, which was clearly focused on judgments about people based on individual characteristics. Another contributing factor was their choice of subject matter, that is, their primary interest in negative attitudes toward other races. For the two psychologists a stereotype was therefore a firmly rooted impression of another person, which conforms very little to the fact it pretends to represent, and results from our defining first and observing second.⁶ The theoretical construct thus derived from Katz and Braly was targeted at investigating warped, malicious, and, to an extent, even pathological⁷ aspects of perceptions and judgments about people. It soon became an established reference for progressive concepts. Stereotypes were largely understood in the manner suggested by the title of a later study: stereotypes as a substitute for thought.⁸

The masses were considered particularly susceptible to stereotyping. According to theorists influenced by mass psychology, such as Adam Schaff, the masses seemed to consist of people who spontaneously do not account for the role of prejudice in behavior. Given that these are the so-called masses, this phenomenon assumes special and often socially threatening significance.⁹

It was thought that one could exert a positive influence on the social climate by didactically creating an awareness of the fallacy and irrationality of stereotypes. However, there was a conceptual turnaround in the 1950s, and the work of a number of theorists took on a pragmatic orientation.¹⁰ There was a greater inclination to raise questions about the possible benefits of stereotypes—still considered to be stabilized conceptions about people—and to consider their causation. A number of theorists now also emphasized the productive, regulatory functions of stereotypes for cognition, social orientation, and intersubjective behavior—functions that were only to be gained at the expense of deficient representations of reality.

Apart from the continuing thematic focus on the stereotype as conceptions about people, this conceptual shift was more in line with Lippmann’s original intentions. Close in this regard to the philosophy of pragmatism, Lippmann considered the existence of stereotypes, for all intents and purposes, an ambivalent phenomenon. He simultaneously emphasized both the deficient and the functional nature of stereotypes—and argued that they were contingent upon each other. In order to account for this ambivalence he made a number of now classic arguments, which are restated here in some detail, because Lippmann’s extraordinarily influential position is often presented in an oversimplified and sometimes biased manner.

Lippmann’s point of departure and first argument was the functionalism of stereotypes as stabilized cognitive systems of individuals. Citing John Dewey, Lippmann saw the world as one great, blooming, buzzing confusion¹¹ that was too complex and dynamic for human perception and cognition. In order for things to take on meaning, he further quotes John Dewey, it is necessary to introduce (1) definiteness and distinction and (2) consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering.¹² Stereotypes thus make a substantial contribution to introducing this kind of definiteness and consistency into the world of perception.

What cognitive psychologists would later address with terms like cognitive structure or cognitive schema is basically already implicit in Lippmann’s concept. He established the idea of stereotypes as structured mental concepts with a simplifying function, which, as deeply ingrained impressions, are particularly persistent and which guide and even enable perceptive, cognitive, and judgmental processes. On the one hand, they function like symbolic mechanisms. When a trait is recognized and perceived as a core attribute, this data is quickly allocated to a certain preexisting complex of ideas. Thus, we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images.¹³ Afterward, we see what our mind is already full of¹⁴ in the thing just categorized. On the other hand, from this perspective stereotypes appear to be a kind of screening filter that provides cognitive relief. They organize one’s necessarily selective gaze, which tends to emphasize everything that repeats itself in similar form and satisfies the stereotype, while other things that do not correspond to the stereotype tend to be played down or even overlooked: For when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is called to those facts which support it, and diverted from those which contradict.¹⁵

One can certainly observe the complementary effect, in which discrepancies with firmly entrenched expectation patterns may heighten a sense of difference. Nevertheless, later theorists, for whom the word stereotype was synonymous with prejudice, primarily referred to the mechanism of blocking out differences.

Although in Lippmann’s work the idea ultimately predominated that stereotypes were to be understood as pragmatic reductions made from a selection of real invariants in the outside world,¹⁶ in his thinking about the principles of this kind of reduction he often likened the idea of stereotypes to actively formed subjective constructs, which were always dependent on the disposition and interests of the subject. This becomes particularly apparent when he links his concept—if only in passing—with ideas about objects that are not part of an individual’s immediate realm of experience and that cannot be observed with one’s own eyes.¹⁷ He considered stereotypical ideas about such phenomena to be constructs based on social projections. In light of actual experience, these constructs always proved to be a kind of pseudoknowledge or at least hazy knowledge.

This is where his second fundamental line of argument comes into play. For Lippmann, stereotypes function as intersubjective systems of integration. Despite their deficits, he believed them to be patterns of cognition coordinated with cognitive or behavioral expectations that society or a group places on the individual. As social codes,¹⁸ stereotypes are thus subject to cultural standardization,¹⁹ which they in turn support. As a result, at the center of each [moral code] there is a pattern of stereotypes about psychology, sociology, and history.²⁰ As a consequence, stereotypes always also represent instances of intersubjective consensus and social orientation. For Lippmann this was essential to functioning interactions: In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.²¹

Nonetheless, in his view stereotypes are not simply rubber stamps applied from without, but rather they adapt themselves to an individual’s inner disposition, upon which they also exert an influence. They are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope.²²

In this context Lippmann ultimately regarded the function of stereotypes as systems for creating and maintaining identity—thus he formulated his third, now classic argument on the value of stereotypes. The degree to which stereotypes are appropriated and habitualized by the individual parallels the extent to which they shape the latter’s personality. Stereotypes thus ultimately become part of an individual’s defenses:²³ A pattern of stereotypes … is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights.²⁴ Lippmann adds: There we find the charm of the familiar, the normal, the dependable…. No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.²⁵ For this reason, stereotypes are also deeply rooted in the emotions, and their confirmation is experienced as positive.

When one steps back to survey Lippmann’s overall concept, it becomes clear that he did not represent the stereotype as a clearly defined object. It is no coincidence that his basic formulations, such as the pictures in our heads, operate on the level of metaphor. Hence, at first glance there seem to be valid objections to the hazy and noncoherent aspects of his stereotype concept, which integrates psychosocial functions or processes that are by no means synonymous. These objections, however, miss the point. On the one hand, Lippmann’s outline, with its vividness and diversity, proved de facto to be extremely influential (not only) in psychological research. On the other, it was obviously not his intention to articulate an unambiguous category.

What resulted instead is an open construct—a kind of fuzzy concept—about a complex of interdependent psychic mechanisms. A construct that is ultimately intended to represent a comprehensive epistemological problem: the discrepancy between the outside world and the world of perception, thought, and communication—broken down into relatively stable cognitive structures—the very world of the pictures in our heads and our repertory of fixed impressions.²⁶ Lippmann’s entire theory strives to raise awareness of the highly diverse nature of perception and thought as always culturally or socially constructed—and for the associated discrepancies between mental representation and reality. Figuratively speaking, he funnels the mental fallout from quite heterogeneous processes into a container called the stereotype.

Despite its rather diffuse character, Lippmann’s concept is implicitly structured around two inseparably linked motifs of thought, which provide coherency. One is the typological-schematic motif, which initially enables a selective and, in his wording, economic processing of information. The second is the motif of a special stability (habituality and conventionality), through which the results of adaptation processes—quasi-automatic in congealed form—can be reused to produce the already mentioned effects of identity and consensus.

Although he always described stereotypes in terms of cognitive losses or distortions, Lippmann considered stereotypes to be of an ambivalent nature and thus did not just emphasize their deficits in order to lament them. Instead, he sought to give this core dimension of loss and distortion a quite positive accent: it is the necessary price for the capacity of orientation. He basically did not consider perceptions of the outside world and ideas about reality to be conceivable in complete or absolute terms, nor to be void of subjective or cultural predispositions and interests, but always to be context-bound outcomes. Hence, the tendency of distortions or losses did not appear to be a problem, at least as long as the stable pictures in our heads functioned sufficiently in a given practical context. Here, Lippmann approximates the basic tenets of modern behavior-oriented cognitive science²⁷ as well as those of John Dewey and William James’s pragmatism, to which he explicitly referred. In principle, Lippmann wanted his stereotypes to be understood as productive variables helping individuals come to terms with their surroundings and stabilizing social behavior. He felt confident that the abandonment of all stereotypes for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life.²⁸

At the same time, he indicated the problem of the latent tension between the stereotype (as a fixed, context-based form) and shifting contexts, which could lead to errors in judgment. He therefore considered it desirable to have a reflected and flexible relationship to one’s own stock of stereotypes. Flexibility and reflection ensure that the latter are not confused with absolute knowledge. For as soon as we become aware of the relativity of our knowledge as a loosely woven mesh of ideas, then when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly.²⁹

While the revision of social psychology’s discourse on stereotypes in the 1950s resulted in a return to Lippmann’s more pragmatic point of view, the semantic scope of the term stereotype usually remained limited to the topic of conceptions about people. Since then, there have been ongoing attempts by individual authors to redefine the term and make it consistent or compatible with their predominant theoretical concerns and terminology. This has led in a number of quite different directions. Usually one coherent idea is plucked from Lippmann’s repertoire of arguments, placed in the spotlight, and interpreted or developed on the basis of new theoretical approaches. Precisely because he described more of a syndrome than a category, Lippmann has, in this regard, inspired a complex discourse, which has been continuously updated—and to some extent expanded upon in concentric directions—by the complex of themes, arguments, and intellectual ideas that he largely helped shape.

Below I will discuss two such trends in current social-psychological research on stereotypes—a field today so vast that it is almost impossible to survey.

In Germany around 1960, it was mainly Peter Hofstätter who reemphasized the value of stereotypes in terms of Lippmann’s functionalism. Building on Lippmann’s repertoire, his concept mainly developed the intersubjective integration system and linked it to the traditional focus of the term on conceptions about people. He thus treated stereotypes as notions that remain relatively uniform over time and that are held and communicated by a group about its own members or those belonging to a different group (auto- and heterostereotypes). These ideas appear to be preconceptions,³⁰ since they codetermine individual processes of perception and judgment as preexisting patterns. Like Lippmann, Hofstätter emphasized instances of loss or distortion, which he also justified as the cost of functionality; he was mainly concerned with the functioning of social interactions. The presentation of this argument takes up a remarkably large amount of space, in which he particularly stresses the problem of fictive, second-hand notions.

Stereotypes are considered by Hofstätter to be ideas for which the statistic validity has not been tested, although which we nevertheless nurture with a good degree of certainty.³¹ As a rule, they rely on formulaic fictions, which is why the knowledge that is manifested in a stereotype … deserves little respect in and of itself.³² As institutions of social consensus and as models for the identity consciousness of a group, stereotypes are nonetheless indispensable, because they do not have a descriptive but [in a social sense] regulatory function.³³ However, Hofstätter also adds a qualification: stereotypes of a invidious nature³⁴ must be combated.

While a main branch of social-psychology research and its stereotype concepts continued (and still continue) to foreground such intersubjective functions, group dynamics, and mechanisms of sociocultural adaptation, another line of research gained influence in the 1980s, which placed more emphasis on intrasubjective topics, namely the cognitive nature of the mental apparatus. Thus, authors such as Tajfel³⁵ or Lilli³⁶ based their concepts on Lippmann’s argument, according to which stereotypes, as cognitive patterns, are considered the necessary result of the human psyche’s limited ability to accommodate the dynamic multiplicity of information.

Lilli in particular sought to explain the process of stereotyping—and its accompanying distortions—as having a single basic psychic cause. The need to create cognitive transparency through the classification of stimuli is inevitably coupled with distortions. These distortions result from the human psyche’s affinity for accentuations: "Facts that contain the same orientational characteristic (label) and that therefore fall into the same class are considered to be more similar than they are (generalization)."³⁷ And: Facts that contain different labels" and thus fall into different classes are considered to be more different than they are (dichotimization).³⁸ The distortional effects" of generalization and dichotomization are thus systematically manifested in stereotypes or stereotyped perceptions.

Thus, understanding stereotyping primarily as