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THE AUTHORSHIP AND REPRODUCTION OF A POPULAR HERO J. DENNIS BOUNDS (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995) reprinted by permission of the author Chapter 1 The Lives of a Noble Counselor That’s what I like about the practice of law—it’s an adventure. You’re looking behind the scenes at human nature. The audience out front sees only the carefully rehearsed poses assumed by the actors. The lawyer sees the human nature with the shutters open. —Perry Mason1 INTRODUCTION In July 1965, TV Guide reporter Dwight Whitney interviewed Raymond Burr to get some idea of the motivation behind Burr’s many philanthropic activities. Whitney reported that Burr recognized a certain “duty” required of one who then portrayed America’s top television lawyer, Perry Mason. For Burr, Perry Mason was not just a television series. Burr considered both the show and its central character a “public trust,” with the actor serving as “chief executor.”2 This crusading defense attorney’s fictional adventures continued through television syndication, novel reprints, and made-for-TV movies, and Burr showed no signs of betraying that trust until his death in 1993. The use of the term trust serves as much more than a clever, throw-away line from the actor. A trust has a specific legal meaning that is, in effect, an agreement allowing an individual to establish how and to whom his or her estate is to be transferred. Though Burr would be more aptly termed “trustee” rather than “executor,” there are similar implications. Burr functioned as a trustee who would be sure that the estate was handled in the way intended by the originator of the trust, Erle Stanley Gardner. The trustee acts with some of the same powers that an owner would have over the estate, but acts in the interest of the beneficiary—who clearly would be the Perry Mason audience. The Perry Mason estate spans most of the twentieth century and has value that is both monetary and cultural.3 This estate contains eighty-two original Mason novels and three shorter works, all by Gardner. There are 271 television episodes, 3,221 radio episodes, more than twenty made-for-television films, six motion pictures, and the various spin-off items such as comic books and board games. Also mystery writer Thomas Chastain has written two new Mason novels. Ownership of rights to adapt the novels as well as rights over the characters that make up Perry Mason’s fictional world confers significant syndication fees and royalties. On a more basic level than the cultural products themselves, the essential component of the estate is the formula. I identify this formula as those basic conventions of narrative and production that are so clearly identifiable as belonging to Perry Mason. The framework for the Perry Mason formula is as simple as it is enduring. Each story is composed of not one but two narrative “movements.” The French critic Pierre Macherey identifies these two separate movements of any detective plot as a first one that “establishes the mystery while the other dispels it.”4 Narrative critic Tzvetan Todorov sees these movements as a distinct duality within the work. The first story tells the actualities of the crime; the second shows how the detective and audience/reader discover the circumstances of the crime.5 Even more to the point, Todorov argues that each story is not a separate entity, but “two points of view about the same thing.”6 In initiating the plot, the first movement presents new characters—some may die, some may become clients of Mason, and still others may even commit a murder or two (never Mason’s clients, though). It is in this movement that a “problem” is stated as the crime is committed. In the Mason formula this movement finds the most variation from episode to episode yet has its own level of formulaic elements that are necessarily followed. The second narrative movement closely follows the first. In it a client who claims innocence hires Mason. This compels Mason and his team to “solve” the crime. It is in this movement that the Mason formula finds its fewest variations. Both movements must coexist for the story to work. The formula follows this premise: What if an innocent man or woman, who has every reason in the world to commit a murder, has little more than a flimsy alibi to prove to the police that he or she did not, is implicated and arrested for that murder, and gets attorney Perry Mason to defend him or her. Taking these elements as a springboard, the plot continues in a trajectory toward the climactic moment—usually at a hearing or trial—where the actual murderer is revealed. For each media production there is an altered version of the Perry Mason formula. Thus, the formula is both a static and a dynamic pattern And it is this balance within each media production of Perry Mason that provides both stability and freshness to the narrative. Replication of this formula is a key reason for the endurance of the Perry Mason trust. Burr was right to reflect on the import of such a trust. Though Burr had been the actor most associated with Perry Mason by the public, he was only a single element in the overall production system of Perry Mason. The progression of that trust through time and through various media illustrates the seemingly eternal attraction of this series. What in 1933 began as a series of detective novels featuring a crusading lawyer-detective successfully shifted from one medium to another. What began as an effort to quit a full-time job as a lawyer to devote more time to hunting and travel became a lifelong career and association between author Erle Stanley Gardner and character Perry Mason. The association that began between fictional character and flamboyant creator in one medium shifted over time to another strong association between the series character and the actor portraying it (Raymond Burr) in television. This shift leads me to the governing question in this study: How have various media systematically created, produced, and reproduced the cultural product known as Perry Mason? PERRY MASON AS A CULTURAL PRODUCT Perry Mason is now most commonly known through syndicated reruns of the CBS television series that was first broadcast between September 1957 and May 1966, though this is only a part of the whole picture. Gardner created Perry Mason in 1933 while a practicing attorney in the Southern California towns of Ventura and Oxnard. As intended, Perry Mason made his debut in a series of hardcover detective novels. In all, Gardner wrote eighty novels and novelettes featuring his lawyer-detective beginning with the first in 1933 entitled The Case of the Velvet Claws. Almost as soon as the galleys were dry from the fourth novel, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Warner Bros. signed Gardner to a progressive, renewable contract to make a series of motion pictures based on any Mason novel he might write. Although this was neither the first nor last series character Gardner would successfully publish, Perry Mason was the only one covered under the Warner Bros. contract. Warner ultimately produced seven movies, the last in 1937.7 Although the film versions were not altogether successful, by the time Warner Bros. released Gardner from his contract, he was writing and selling at least two novels a year. He also had a growing national and international audience and was determined to maintain more control over what had become an industry in itself: the adaptation of Mason into different media. With the increasing popularity of radio dramas, Gardner inaugurated The Adventures of Perry Mason as a weekday, fifteen-minute daytime drama on CBS Radio in 1943. In 1951 through 1952 a comic strip version of Perry Mason was produced, though as a strong or influential narrative it was not successful. By 1955, with other dramatic radio shows such as Gunsmoke defecting for the higher financial promise of television, Gardner formed a production company of his own to produce the television version of Perry Mason for CBS. That series ran from 1957 until its cancellation in 1966, though it was reserved for syndication even before the last year of its network run wrapped up. It was signed up for syndication on twenty-five stations nationwide, for an initial total of $3,000,000, before the last episode aired.8 Since then, local stations throughout the United States as well as internationally repeatedly pay Viacom to rerun the series. The world of Perry Mason grew through something that could be termed collateral exposure. Burr, though no longer playing Mason, was available for viewing as the title character in the NBC-TV police series Ironside. An unsuccessful try at a revival was attempted in 1973 with The New Perry Mason (CBS-TV 1973–1974) with Monte Markham as Mason. However, the syndication of the original television series with Burr as Mason in a sense continued to be the “real” Perry Mason for many critics of the show.9 The appearance of the “original” television Mason (Burr) on another network (NBC) in the form of Detective Robert Ironside, along with a younger Burr playing Mason in the ever-present reruns, allowed for indirect, or collateral, exposure. I am not saying that this collateral exposure involving Burr doomed the Monte Markham version of the crusading attorney. It is just that this exposure, combined with stylistic elements such as casting, story line, and timeslot, weighed heavily against the new version’s success. The newer series spent too much time distancing itself from the older, Burr version. The strength of the older version relied on both a durable formula that guided subsequent plot structuring and the participation of Burr as the title character functioning as a clear visual and aural device. And as is shown in the current media venture of made-for-television movies, the strength of the formula relies more on recalling the familiar than replacing it. In 1985 Burr returned to his role as the lawyer/detective in Perry Mason Returns (NBC-TV Movie) with Barbara Hale reprising her role as his secretary Della Street.10 The made-for-TV movie proved so successful for NBC that the network continued to buy two or three a year from the producers Fred Silverman and Dean Hargrove. Since 1989, two new novels have been published featuring the Mason characters as crafted by mystery writer Thomas Chastain: Perry Mason in the Case of Too Many Murders (1989) and Perry Mason in the Case of the Burning Bequest (1990). Perry Mason is valuable as a continuing source of entertainment. Audiences tune in regularly, and advertisers pay handsomely to parade their wares in between courtroom scenes. Producers and writers continue to draw on a formula developed by Gardner for Perry Mason for both new Mason episodes and episodes of other series such as Murder, She Wrote (CBS-TV).11 Producers and consumers of the Mason-derivative stories must in effect deal with the trust handed them from Gardner through Burr and more recently through novelist Chastain and television producers Silverman and Hargrove. This book concentrates on the main feature of the trust, the formula of Perry Mason, and its permutation through different media organizations and industrial practices. So entrenched is the trust between producers and audience that it clearly establishes and shapes the narrative conventions of Perry Mason. To effectively examine the various productions, this book must necessarily deal with the key assumptions involved in the production of cultural products. WHAT IS CULTURE? Many critics (Chesterton 1932; Brazil 1981; White 1985, 1987; Newcomb and Hirsch 1987) have tried to make sense of cultural products by examining the interrelationship of the production process and the overarching culture. This includes the historical, societal, and economic aspects of the culture. Joli Jensen argues that the crucial assumption of production of culture analysis is that “mass mediation alters and transforms symbolic material.”12 Perry Mason is highly symbolic material in that it manipulates conventions of genre, form, and language to affect its commercial cultural product. It is very useful to connect the conventions of production to the resulting product. This works well with Perry Mason because it functions as both a product and producer of cultural conventions. As a type of culture analysis, the “production of culture” perspective identifies commercial cultural products as the result of a complex arena of production practices and historical influences. An originator of this production of culture tradition, Richard Peterson, identifies three ways of considering culture:
The main problem with Peterson’s method is that the separation of the culture from the production of cultural products is impossible. To take Peterson’s view, commercial cultural products would essentially be considered as artifacts—fixed in time and space for the critic’s dissection before proceeding to an analysis of the overarching culture. Separation serves to lessen significance of the cultural product by identifying it and the process whereby it was created apart from its culture. In contrast to Peterson’s somewhat neutral, nonideological stance, Janet Wolff argues that any discussion of the production of cultural products has to be a sociological discussion.14 Though decidedly Marxist, Wolff takes issue with many Marxist critiques of art. She develops a sophisticated view of the artist as active agent in the production of culture. She rejects what she calls an essentialist view of aesthetics—that there is some “universalistic or trans-historical” essence of cultural products15—in favor of an historical, sociological and ideological view. Sociology hinges on the idea that reality is a social construct. But unlike many Marxist critiques, Wolff points out the inadequacies of the single cause/effect model of base/superstructure by noting that it fails to deal effectively with the subtle dynamics of culture.16 Here she echoes the words of sociologist Vera L. Zolberg who notes that “as highly educated individuals (Marxist cultural critics) share a high regard for art that conflicts with their commitment to demystifying it.”17 Wolff’s analysis of culture production makes a cogent argument in consideration of art as a social practice. The first aspect of her argument identifies the “artist”—or “producer” of a work—as a real person with a real life beset with real problems and real activities. Wolff strongly points out that although the social/material environment (ideology) in which an individual artist or creator produces determines the atmosphere surrounding the production of art, the artist must analyze and choose what will serve as part of his or her art.18 This process of analyzing and choosing, the weighing of the information, history, desires—whatever—that influence the artist, places the artist under the influence of social-historical-economic pressures. The artist makes choices and acts as if an independent agent—though in Wolff’s view the artist is not truly independent but historically and materially situated. Each influence establishes for the artist a framework of choices. It is within this framework that the “choice,” or to use Wolff’s loaded concept “freedom of action,” of the artist produces the artistic product. Wolff further argues that no single artist is the creator of a work of art. Each work is as much a production of environmental determinants as it is acted upon by many individuals. In the case of a cultural product like Perry Mason, Gardner serves as the first active agent. Yet as we will see in the next chapter, Gardner’s work was heavily influenced by Thayer Hobson. As his editor at William Morrow, Hobson worked to fashion the lawyer-detective in a way not originally evident in Gardner’s submitted draft of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. With the more recent incarnations from 1957 to the present, the television actor Raymond Burr becomes a primary creator, or “author,” as the title character in the television series Perry Mason. Each effective creator works within the frameworks of ideological and historical influences and makes choices accordingly. Howard Becker’s view of cultural products is similar to both Peterson’s and Wolff’s. Becker’s critique identifies conventions of production as only part of the whole production of culture process. Here his argument becomes much more complex than Peterson’s. In Becker’s view, the proper object of a production of culture analysis is the combination of cultural product, the process of its creation, and the reproduction of that process as it is experienced by members of that culture.19 For some culture critics (Carey 1975; Jensen 1984, 1990), the production of culture perspective falls short of achieving a true understanding of how the production process relates to culture itself. For Joli Jensen, the production of culture perspective leaves the production process a simple transmission of messages from one level of production to another. Instead, Jensen calls for the consideration of the “nature of the cultural material and its role in collective life.”20 As illustrated by Jensen and her critique, several distinct production of culture perspectives have emerged. The entire production of culture field has come to encompass those critics of the American sociological traditions that perceive production of culture analysis to be a step toward describing the relationship of a society to its culture (Becker 1974, 1982; Peterson 1976, 1982) as well as those critics who hold to a Marxist position by identifying culture production as an ideological function within a socioeconomic system (Bennett and Woollacott 1987; Gallagher 1982). Critics using production of culture analysis identify production conventions as interlaced with the product conventions, though some emphasize one over the other. For some the product conventions are the primary focus. Becker, reacting to the argument that organizations are cold, uninspired, and inartistic in their production practices, believes that it is the very activity of the organized collective of artists that provides an atmosphere of artistic inspiration and creates the need for shared conventions. That is, there needs to be more critical examination of production conventions before turning to product conventions. These shared conventions provide a social framework for continued production and reproduction of art. For Becker, to study an artifact is to study the social arrangement that brought it into being.21 Becker says that production conventions enable a particular process to develop, although those production conventions are but one component to the whole world of artistic practice. Others who take this approach (Cawelti 1978; Cheatwood 1982; Turow 1984) identify the significance of individual elements of production conventions as a way of deducing the production constraints. For these critics the social arrangements associated with production constraints affect the final look of a particular cultural product. For example, Derral Cheatwood identifies the elemental conventions of the various Tarzan films. He then identifies the production conventions that affected each of those films.22 In going further to add a distinctly social dimension to his study of genres, John Cawelti identifies four types of production conventions, which he calls “artistic matrices,” that link the society to a cultural product:
In one of the most recent production of culture studies, Joseph Turow sets out a systematic framework for analyzing the organizations that create mass-mediated products. Like Becker, who considers the collaborative process to be influenced by the availability of artistic resources, Turow develops a model of resource dependence that posits that a media organization’s product is determined by both individual talent and those who make funding and supplies available.25 By using the resource-dependence model, Turow identifies the relationship of audience to media industries as a dynamic one. This is a very useful concept for the analysis of how society and culture interplay with cultural products. Turow considers product conventions simply functions of that dynamic. He does not, however, see that these conventions have any effective significance in and of themselves to the underlying popularity of such a formulaic system of conventions as the detective genre. I disagree with Turow in that I indeed do find these conventions of product to be significant to a study of cultural production. These conventions enable the audience to become very interested in one product—such as Perry Mason—and not respond favorably enough to another product such as The New Perry Mason to justify more than a fifteen-episode run. Like Wolff’s view of art as a social practice, Turow’s approach has an ideological orientation, focusing on control of resources limited to those with similar ideas and therefore determined by those culture producers. Whereas some argue that production conventions should be emphasized more, other analysts (Pekurny 1982; DiMaggio and Hirsch 1976; Sanders 1982; Peterson 1976, 1982) argue that the product conventions should be the primary focus of critical attention. From the viewpoint of these analysts, production conventions are created because of the need to achieve artistic and economic goals. Robert Pekurny, in his study of network programming in 1974, argues that the production process calls for the replication of product conventions of successful programs in order to assure audience approval. Assuring predictability becomes a key coping mechanism for Pekurny, involving the regular utilization of successful formulas and production personnel.26 Here, the primary goal is an orderly process. Yet, the result of this process is that the conventions of production and the conventions of product both are self-perpetuating. Much like Wolff’s view of artistic production, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s book The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985) concerns production practices—particularly those views that arose out of the Hollywood studio system. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson argue that a studio repeats and standardizes certain production practices in order to increase profits. These production goals, along with product conventions, influence production conventions.27 The continuing process of production conventions begetting product conventions begetting further production conventions is influenced by the culture producers’ goal of remaining in business. In the case of Perry Mason, the conventions of product and process are influenced by various generic attributes. GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP IN PERRY MASON Perry Mason, whether in book, broadcast, or film version, is a part of the detective genre. Although he is a lawyer by profession, Perry Mason clearly functions as a detective by his narrative characteristics. Even though Paul Drake is the private investigator who does the traditional detective work for Mason, it is Mason who is the true detective of the narratives. Mason does not function as part of the lawyer genre in the same way as his counterparts (The Defenders, L.A. Law and Civil Wars on television and The Verdict, The Accused and Presumed Innocent in film).28 Legal aspects within the Mason stories primarily serve as atmosphere (background) that facilitates the basic plot of murder and its resolution. Whether as a part of the lawyer genre or detective genre, repeated patterns of significance—elements of genre—serve as important tools in understanding the Mason character. Jane Feuer’s tripartite schema divides genre criticism into levels based on what each tradition emphasizes: aesthetic, ritual, and ideological.29 Various genre critics (Newcomb 1974; Cawelti 1978; Schatz 1981; Kaminsky and Mahan 1985) focus somewhat on an aesthetic level of genre analysis. This level identifies specific generic conventions for comparison within or between particular genres. Several of these and other genre critics (Schatz 1981; Newcomb and Hirsch 1987; Allen 1985) develop genre criticism at a ritual level, which perceives that an ongoing exchange between industry and audience provides a means by which a culture speaks to its collective self, continually refining and reexamining its basic values and beliefs. A third style of genre criticism examines works at an ideological level. These critics (White 1985, 1987; Feuer 1987) consider that each text within a genre is an example of social expression. For the ideological critic of genre, each historical period provides a context for specific social groups to present their worldview. A detective film becomes more than a narrative that uses the conventions of the detective genre to tell its story (as a purely aesthetic critic could argue) or a dynamic process of production and reception influencing each other (as the ritual critic might say). Instead, the ideological critic would focus on the historical context in which a detective series is created. Such an example is seen in the mid-1960’s radicalism and its influence on highly conservative Jack Webb’s production of his second Dragnet series (1968–1970). Here, the ideological genre critic focuses on whatever argument the creators of that text wished to make about the social order of their time. Although my approach tends toward the aesthetic view of genre, each of these methods will come into play as I discuss Perry Mason as a system of narrative conventions that remains popular with many different audiences within their varying cultural and historical contexts. The differences between the versions of Perry Mason are just as important to this study as the similarities making the ideological significances of those similarities and differences worth study. Though both genre and production of culture analysis deemphasize the existence of a single creator, the study of Perry Mason’s cultural production must consider as a key component to that production process Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970). Gardner is the one who first produced that arrangement of product conventions that I identify as the Perry Mason formula. Variousbooks have been written on Gardner and his writing style (Johnston 1947; Hughes 1978; Fugate and Fugate 1980; Van Dover 1984). Most focus on the biography of the author while avoiding deep critical analysis of his material. In the earliest one of these, Alva Johnston points out that Gardner’s writing was so very popular because of “the average American’s fondness for legal problems [which are] fascinating at every turn.”30 Of the other biographical books, Francis and Roberta Fugate’s The Secrets of a Best Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner (1980) presents a painstaking examination of Gardner’s work and is thorough in detailing his writing habits. Of the books on Gardner that critically analyze his work, several (Green 1975; Penzler 1977; Tuska 1988) deal with him as an influential writer within the detective genre—one who helped formulate a style of writing that emphasized plotting over characterization. Still others (Everson 1972; Pitts 1979; Parish and Pitts 1990) integrate a discussion of Gardner into the overall analysis of detective motion pictures. Invariably, each of these writers does not focus on Gardner’s numerous other characters and stories, but instead on his lawyer-detective Perry Mason.31 The only other characters to benefit from critical analysis are Gardner’s detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.32 Works that are less biographical (Kelleher and Merrill 1987; Martindale 1991; Davidson 1993) are primarily written for the fan of the “Perry Mason” television series and contain helpful plot and cast lists for the various episodes. Of all the books and essays on Perry Mason and Gardner, most do not take a strong theoretical stance in their approach. However, one essay on the Mason character does take a strong, scholarly approach with a critical theory base and focused on Mason’s status as a cultural hero. Patricia Kane identifies Mason as a part of that group of intellectual, rather than physical, heroes of popular culture. He is a popular hero—a term she defines as “one created by a known author and disseminated through the popular media.”33 Most of the more critical analyses of the television series (Newcomb 1974; Meyers 1981; McNeil 1984; Kaminsky and Mahan 1985) tend to discuss Perry Mason as a part of the television detective genre. Here, both the rigidity of the Perry Mason formula and its popularity with its audience are examined and compared with other television detective series such as Columbo, McMillan and Wife, Harry-O, and The Rockford Files. This study develops a more distinctive picture of the production process, the constraints and freedoms that the rigidity of the detective genre provides, and the aesthetics of the resulting works. This is done by focusing on the series of representations of Perry Mason over time and in different media. In as much as this book deals with genre and the role of the individuals—both Gardner and those who produced Perry Mason with and after Gardner—this analysis of Perry Mason necessarily considers authorship issues. Current interest in television and mass media authorship has its roots in film studies. Some studies of film authorship (Sarris 1968, 1985; Truffaut 1967; Wood 1986; Wollen 1976) consider some directors auteurs, as if despite the constraints of the production process and product conventions they are able to establish a particular style.34 Genre analysis is essentially a reaction against “the romantic bias of auteur criticism.”35 Part of any consideration of authorship issues should consider product conventions as they are developed within a particular genre by individuals such as Gardner. In examining basic authorship issues involved in the production of mass–mediated products, various writers (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985; Schatz 1988) consider the influence of Hollywood filmmaking practice during the “classical” era (roughly 1917–1960). Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson identify a mode of production and product practices that produce a specific style of narrative and narration. Because of the desire for rapid and efficient production, economic goals promoted a moderately formulaic quality to filmmaking. This, however, occurs in conjunction with product goals as well as storytelling. Hollywood’s narrative form throughout its historical period could be described as having a consistent formal structure:
previous and concurrent products while balancing that differentiation with a certain level of standardization.37 This economic goal of stimulating continued consumption of products through variation is known as product differentiation. Product differentiation was also a primary drive in the production practices of the Hollywood studio system and provides an economic explanation for “authorship” actually being encouraged—rather than constrained as auteurists so often contend—in the production process. For Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson the original author of a work served four functions of production conventions:
The studio system, with its various processes of production, has clearly influenced production practices in different media. As do Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Thomas Schatz identifies the individual producers who contributed to the final product and focuses on the interrelation of individual behavior as it works “with the studio’s production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and marketing strategy.”39 These recent analyses of film and broadcast production have shifted attention from directors toward producers (in some cases writer/producers) and the overall production process (Marc 1981, 1984; Newcomb and Alley 1983; Schatz 1988; R. Thompson 1990; Marc and Thompson 1992). Again, as in the study of the Hollywood studio system, the production process takes center stage. In approaching the world of Perry Mason, this book examines and compares the various conventions of production, the narrative conventions of the detective genre, the aspects of authorship concerning Gardner and others, and the connection between the products and the culture in which they are created. To do this, I primarily make use of production of culture analysis, with related (or ancillary) considerations for genre, authorship, and textual studies. In examining the individual works of Perry Mason, I employ a version of narrative criticism that has sprung out of Russian formalist literary criticism and is called neoformalism. The combination of neoformalism’s textual analysis with production of culture and its concern with production constraints develops into a methodology that I call transmedia poetics. NARRATIVE AND FORM In a letter to Gail Jackson, the producer of his television series, Gardner complained—as he often did—about the quality of the writing. “We can’t make a good series unless we get good stories,” he writes. “Good dialog comes easy—it is consistent motivation and plots that are hard to come by.”40 With this comment Gardner hammered on the topics he was so concerned with for his entire writing career: plot and motivation. From a close reading of his notes on the various adaptations of his work, clearly his analysis was unrelenting when it came to these two aspects of narrative style. For Gardner, plot—or the sequential arranging of narrative events—grew in importance as one set of characters progressed from one book to another. The characters remained consistent in their behavior and speech. Yet, it was the arrangement of the events of each story that must vary enough from story to story to make reading less a run around a track and more a jog through familiar, but not identical, neighborhoods. Too much change from one novel to the next and the formula might be jeopardized—something that bothered Gardner as he sought to repeat a formula from story to story while varying the details. his aspect of form and story in narrative series applies to all works in the Perry Mason system. A general understanding of form—the ordering of presentation or production of a work—by both the producers and audience is crucial to the understanding of a work. Questions such as “What are the elements of the production?”, “How is the director’s style made present in a film?”, or “Is this a film, a play, or a television episode?” are readily answered after first determining if an event should be viewed in context of plays, films, or television episodes. When a stage play is examined, it is usually examined in relation to other plays—as one might consider, say, a Neil Simon in comparison to a Bertolt Brecht. Such a comparison would allow for use of similar words in describing each: proscenium, narrative space, upstage action, act structure, dialogue pacing, etc. However, to begin talking about lens aperture settings and deep focus, frame composition, or even camera blocking would bring confusion to the discussion. Considering any work as a part of a group, or genre in the classical literature sense, is valuable to the analysis of that work. And Gardner was always looking for a way to understand how his novels, stories, films, or broadcast dramas compared with what was done professionally in each medium. This concern with medium was a constant burden on his distinctive narrative style. Gardner’s narrative style is of primary concern in this study of his lawyer-detective creation. For even though a production of culture analysis can deal with the dynamics of the production process, such a view of the whole can obscure the individual works themselves. Although television and cultural critic Raymond Williams cautioned that the analysis of production process could treat all processes as artifacts, I want to avoid going to the opposite extreme that treats all artifacts as processes.41 What drew me to the subject was not aspects of production practices or the relation of Perry Mason as a subtext of some supernarrative called “detective fiction” or “commercial television”—it was the individual episodes, texts, and films themselves. This study requires an approach to these various instances of Perry Mason on the level of plot, story, and narrative style. The approach that I use is neoformalism. It is tempting to proceed directly into a description and analysis of the world of Perry Mason, but because terms used in my methodology have been used with different intent and meaning in various other theoretical approaches, I devote the rest of this chapter to a brief history of neoformalism and Russian formalism to better lay the groundwork for my analysis of the lawyer-detective. FROM FORMALISM TO NEOFORMALISM Russian Formalism The methods of a neoformalist are based on a close analysis of the structure, or form, of actual art works. In film analysis the work of neoformalist film critics David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson is exemplary. Their approach to film is based on a type of literary analysis called Russian formalism. This type of formalism arose in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of literary critics who believed that the critical climate of their time labored erroneously by trying to import meaning into and out of the work of poetry or literature, in effect considering the work as only a vehicle for a message. For these early formalists, literature and poetry were to be distinguished from ordinary language because of the form each takes and the aesthetic intent of their writers. And further, as argued by Lee Lemon and Marion Reis, if the thing that separates literary and poetic language from ordinary language is the form of each, then it is important in any serious analysis of a work to identify the way literary language is formed.42 The Russian formalists—originally called Opoyaz, a name made from the first letters of the Russian spelling of the title “The Society of the Study of Poetic Language”—approached the work as a shaped thing. These formalists were a group of literary critics in Russia in the early 1900s who argued for a “separation of literature and politics.”43 These critics turned away from the work of those who held the reins of literary criticism at the turn of the century. Representative of this controlling group, and the ones whose arguments were most contradictory to those of the Russian formalists, were the Symbolists. These critics argued that the aesthetic language of literature is a reflection of some universal truths, a relationship that is somewhat mystical.44 Neoformalism faces a similar criticism in contemporary media criticism, and it will be useful to examine it later in this chapter. As a way of studying literature, Russian formalism is a turn away from seeking inherent meanings in a work and a turn toward an understanding of a work’s construction and the functions of its component elements. Further, the particular form of a text becomes a key to examining how the particular text “works” and how it is a part of a genre.45 Here I use “genre” in two senses: as a type of presentation (novel, poem, film, play, television episode, etc.) and as a group of shared conventions (detective, adventure, spy, romance, etc.) as discussed earlier. For the formalists, two things were necessary for their effort: a large enough body of historical data upon which to base their discussion of motifs and patterns, and some sort of agreement over how writers use the very basic elements of the genre in which they are writing. Their argument is an aesthetic one, based on historical data surrounding the creation of artistic works, and it requires a way of differentiating between the poetic and the ordinary in language, artistic and nonartistic expression, and literature and nonliterature. That concept is defamiliarization, or “making strange.”46. The Russian formalist critics who most effectively deal with these issues are Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum.47 Shklovsky identifies the basic methods that make art “artistic” as “defamiliarization” and the manipulation of form (such as occurs in the differences between plot and story). For Shklovsky, art takes ordinary speech and makes it seem out of the ordinary. The purpose of art is not to “think in images” or to represent reality as one would apprehend it through experience but to bring attention to routine and automated thinking or experiences. To properly analyze a work is to know the difference between seeing and looking, hearing and listening. Defamiliarization in poetic language makes people notice the work.48 The word “work” means both the activity of production and the subject matter itself, for each meaning is too often left to automatized perception by the audience. Shklovsky takes these techniques and uses them to form the basis for his ultimate distinction for poetic, artistic language. Because artistic language is intentional language—purposefully tortuous and set apart from practical language—the ordering of events in a work, even a work that is as familiar as a folktale, becomes for the formalists a key distinguishing factor. The events, real or fictional, are known as “story” and form only the basic material for the creator of a work. The events are formed into an order called the “plot.”49 This distinction, between plot and story, is developed by another of the Russian formalists: Boris Tomashevsky. The raw elements of the story—story events—must be arranged into an order—plot. For Tomashevsky this was not a haphazard arrangement but an order based on some narrational purpose. This order is guided by a “theme,” which needs to be based on “general human interests”—or what is generally perceived as interesting. Those themes could be the grand ones of Love, Death, Birth, and Eternity.50 Here is what Tomashevsky contributes most to the formalist vision, because for him a grand theme is not enough. It is the way the plot is constructed that allows the theme to flow from presentation through all the delays to these final recognitions. He argues that two things make up a plot: motifs and motivation. Motifs are those individual, elemental units of imagery that the work provides. The motifs could be either “bound motifs” or “free motifs,” depending on how they are used in the plot. If an element in the plot has to be there for the story to work, it is a bound motif. If the element can “be omitted without disturbing the whole causal-chronological course of events” and is not necessary for the story to be understood, it is considered a free motif.51 This distinction is crucial to comprehending the use of motifs in a work. Tomashevsky distinguishes between the common definition of motif in the comparative study of literature and the way he uses it. In what he terms “historical poetics” or the comparative study of works through time, the motif is that elemental image that travels unchanged within a genre through its history.52 Such a motif would be the glint of the blade in the horror film genre. It is important to note that Tomashevsky added a twist to this conception. For the formalists the motif is that image or progression of images that is key to the operational unity of the work itself. Here the concept of bound and free motifs becomes significant. Bound motifs move the plot forward. In doing this, they contribute to the active move from one situation in the story to the next and tend to be dynamic. Free motifs tend to delay the progression of the plot and thus are considered to be static. Tomashevsky backs off from saying that all bound motifs are dynamic and all free motifs are static. Their dynamic or static nature is a result of whether they change a given situation, or state of affairs, in the plot.53 Some free motifs can cause a change of affairs, yet this may be only a delay in the outcome. Such a situation would clearly arise in the case of the mystery story involving the “red-herring”—as the detective searches a boat at a dock and finds a worn cloak. This discovery clearly changes the situation (the search for clues to the discovery of a cloak). Yet in retrospect, if the clue turns out to be nothing more than a delay—the cloak ultimately did not belong to the killer but to an innocent suspect—the motif is termed a dynamic change, yet still a free motif. This operational use of motifs, whether bound or free, becomes motivation. As each motif is introduced, it must be justified for a purpose—it must be motivated. Tomashevsky divided motivation into three types: compositional, realistic, and artistic. With compositional motivation, a motif is introduced because it is useful to the plot. Tomashevsky uses the example of introducing a gun in a mystery play. If a gun is shown in the first act, its owner’s “prowess” with it is ridiculed in the second act, and the owner shoots someone by the end of the third act, then the motivation was for a compositional purpose. Because the gun was necessary for the climax of the play to work, it must be still on stage in the third act.54 The usefulness will be interpreted by the audience/reader of a work along the lines of the conventions of the particular genre. If, instead of a mystery, this play were a romantic comedy, the gun’s appearance would not necessitate its use by the third act.55 If the motivation for a motif is to give a sense of reality—of verisimilitude—to a plot, then it is realistic motivation. The introduction of historical figures in the Tolstoy novel War and Peace serves to anchor the plot to reality.56 In the television episodes of Perry Mason realistic motivation is served in the use of long, establishing shots of actual Los Angeles exteriors that add a sense of real “place” to what were generally studio-bound scenes. The third type of motivation is artistic. It is with artistic motivation that realistic motifs can be made literary. And therein lies the key to motivation in Russian formalism that sets it apart from realist or symbolic criticism. In order to make a real motif fit into a constructed plot, the sequence must be made unfamiliar to the audience. Shklovsky’s device of defamiliarization introduces motifs in that artistic way and is for Tomashevsky a special form of artistic motivation.57 A final concept that Tomashevsky introduces is useful especially to the examination of devices. He argues that devices could be conventional or free.58 The conventional devices are those that are tied most closely to generic trends and themes. Styles of dialogue, use of delay and revelation, and types of secondary characters are prescribed by the particular genre. If these survive to be repeated through time within a genre, they become conventions. The free devices are not linked to a genre and may appear in multiple genres without the fear that such an appearance will connect one work with another in a different genre. The cowboy hat is a convention to the western genre, and its appearance in a detective film will make a connection to the image of the American West, whether intentional or not. Herein lies a crucial test of a device’s conventionality. The first appearance of a device will not constitute a convention until it is repeated over time. Again, history makes a difference as a work is formed. To consider the dynamics of story, plot, and style, formalist analysis treats defamiliarization—the ‘making strange’ of the story—as a result, an ‘effect’ of the work. Why a particular device is used at a certain time in a film to defamiliarize a viewer is guided by something identified as the “dominant.” The dominant is termed “the main formal principal a work or group of works uses to organize devices into a whole.”59 The dominant is found in foregrounded or emphasized devices. For example, the high contrast of the lighting or the use of voice-over narration within the film noir style may be seen as foregrounding of devices. Both the devices and the use of each are guided by a principle of the dominant. There can be no tallying of devices to identify the film itself without the overall effects and interplay among a work’s story, plot, and style factored into it. Tomashevsky’s distinction of the formulation of plot, quite apart from a consideration of sociological or even symbolic inferences, created a fire storm of controversy. The work of the Russian formalists was feeling the shifting climate of literary criticism brought in by the Russian revolution. In the 1920s Russian formalism was beginning to deal with the problems naturally arising from the developing of a new approach in the midst of an economic and artistic revolution. Leo Trotsky, a framer of the Russian revolution and an architect of the Soviet Republic, found in the work of the formalists an approach to literature that he considered representative of bourgeois decadence and an anathema to what he and Lenin were doing with art as an apparatus of the state. Actually, what Trotsky objected to was what could be termed the “incomplete” aspects of the approach. Formalism did not take into account the interpretation and sociological aspects of art. It was, in effect, problematic because it was doing what it claimed to do: considering literature as literature (or to belabor the cliché, ‘art for art’s sake’).60 Eikhenbaum found himself in the position of defending the approach. He developed his “theory of the formal method” to do this. In this work we find a somewhat simplified arrangement of the history of the Russian formalists. In his view, formalism, because of its separation of literary study from sociology, philosophy, and other ideologically-based methodologies, can complement these studies. Specifically because Eikhenbaum was well aware of his geographical and historical location—within the newly formed Soviet Union—Marxism was the one theory that Eikhenbaum argued would most benefit from a formalist approach. The two areas he most emphasized after his historical analysis of the Russian formalist movement were the use of the content-context model and the device-delay-dominant relationship. The key to what Eikhenbaum calls “the formal method” is the desire for an independent science of literature. It is not a method at all, for Eikhenbaum rejects the idea that what he and the other formalists were proposing was a freestanding theory or methodology; they posited instead a systematic approach to what he terms “the theoretical and historical facts of literary art” for use by critics of most theoretical persuasions.61 Eikhenbaum argues for a “radically unconventional poetics,” with influence more from its understanding of the internal workings of art rather than an aesthetics imposed from the outside.62 The use of many theories bothers Eikhenbaum most. Surely an aesthetics, a poetics of art, could be more useful if it worked with the formulation of art first and then left it up to the philosophers to discern a meaning from that. Instead, the formalists faced a critical world that set the theory above all and left the work itself as but a reference point. The Critiques of Formalism Russian formalism flourished in two fertile periods. The first was in the 1920s and 1930s when Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Eikhenbaum, and their contemporaries developed their encompassing theories. The second period began in the 1960s and continues today. It is in this current period that we see the scholarship of Victor Erlich, Herbert Eagle, Peter Steiner, and others. In the earlier period, Russian formalism had its primary critics in the Bakhtin circle (who followed and circulated the writings of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin) and the Prague structuralists. The Bakhtinians argued that the Russian formalists viewed literature as “an autonomous reality” separate from the culture of its production. Instead, the Bakhtinians opted more for using linguistics in the study of literature.63 The Prague structuralists followed a similar path of disagreement in seeking to analyze the literary text using the terms of semiotics. For these structuralists, a key point was the redefining of defamiliarization to include the notion of a much more fixed hierarchy of meanings associated with literary devices to specific social and historical referents.64 At the time Mikhail Bakhtin was writing his literary criticism, a new wave of Soviet critics using the theories of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were proposing competing theories of literary criticism against formalism. For many, including Trotsky, Russian formalism was seen as a poison, a bourgeois holdover. Though his followers generally opposed the views of the formalists, Bakhtin himself can be generally viewed as sympathetic towards the intertextualist views of his predecessors. He saw formalism playing a “fruitful role” in literary criticism.65 For Bakhtin, the formalists’ work prepares the ground for his own work on the dialogic interconnectivity within literature. He argues that although Russian formalism works “against all abstract ideologism in the interpretation of art,” it identifies a work as a closed structural unity while it is endowed with “the deep semantic saturation of every element of artistic structure.”66 But after the 1930s the movement went dormant until its revival decades later. In the middle- to late-1970s, Russian formalism began its resurgence. Tony Bennett was one of the first to revive an interest in Russian formalism when coupled with Marxist criticism as an effective complementary arrangement, much as Eikhenbaum argued decades earlier. Responding to criticism that the Russian formalists “fetishize the literary device,” Bennett points out that their focus is on the use made of the device rather than the device itself.67 For Bennett this became the key to the appeal of the Russian formalists. Bennett compares Russian formalism to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the separation of types of language analysis. The use of the concept of defamiliarization as the dominant strategy in literature can be incorporated into Saussure’s distinction of synchronic and diachronic systems. A synchronic system is a static group of guiding principles working at a single instance in time and is similar to Eikhenbaum’s form of textual analysis. The diachronic is a consideration of the history and continued progress of that system over time and recalls Eikhenbaum’s infusion of historical studies into textual analysis.68 This consideration of the contextuality of literature, the notion of content and context as form, draws praise from Bennett. Yet this praise is mixed with a degree of caution. With this desire to create a science of literature, much like Saussure’s science of language, the Russian formalists ran up against the notion of the literariness of literature. What is literariness to the Russian formalists is not to be found in the work but in the relationships between works.69 Moreover, Bennett finds fault in that in all their discussion of the value and function of the works, the Russian formalists could not reconcile that understanding with the variation and changeability of form and functions over time.70 They had managed to separate the synchronic from the diachronic. And once that is done, according to critic Fredric Jameson, they cannot be reunited.71 Marxist critic Janet Wolff, who is discussed earlier in this chapter, finds Russian formalism to be a useful tool in approaching works as cultural products in that it “enables us to comprehend works as complex and relatively autonomous signifying systems and codes.”72 She points out that in Marxism there has been too little consideration of “the nature of particular genres and artistic forms.” Thus a return to the work of the Russian formalists would be a useful asset to an overall understanding of art.73 Although Eikhenbaum wanted the Russian formalists to create a science of literature, whether they would have succeeded in their quest is largely unknown. Their work was effectively silenced in the 1930s. In America, analysis similar to the formalists was being done by the “new critics” such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren. Yet it was their emphasis on the close textual reading to the near exclusion of history or the life of the author that made new criticism a much more narrow and rigid approach. America also saw the work of the formalists widen its scope to include cinema. It was the work of narrative theorists of cinema David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson that moved the arguments of the Russian formalists into that new arena. Neoformalism As Dudley Andrew points out, the Russian formalist movement coincided with the rise of the formative film theory of Sergi Eisenstein and Rudolph Arnheim.74 Both flourished in the period between 1918 and 1930, and the themes of the formalist film theorists and the formalist literary critics are similar and somewhat connected. In fact, Shklovsky was an early biographer of Eisenstein, and they knew each other well.75 Both groups of theorists turned their attention to either the work or the process of art creation.76 The formalist theorists fix their emphasis on the processes and techniques of film. Both Eisenstein and Arnheim, with their own separate emphases, make use of the Russian formalist concepts of ‘plot’ and ‘story.’ As Andrew points out, Eisenstein was very much influenced by their work, and Arnheim was most likely familiar with it. In more-recent work, the Russian formalists find a new life in the work of Thompson and Bordwell. The scope of their work is focused on history and narration in films. Bordwell examines classical Hollywood narration and issues of authorship in both The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), with coauthors Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, and Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). In their book Film Art: An Introduction (1986), Bordwell and Thompson have created a standard introduction to film studies that breaks down the text into cogent groups: production techniques, cinema styles, and theoretical analyses. In Making Meaning (1989) Bordwell’s subject of analysis is nothing less than the whole notion of “film criticism.” Throughout all three books, Bordwell develops his approach to film narration through neoformalism. To illustrate what the neoformalist approach involves, Thompson has used Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible as an object for analysis, taking from Russian formalism its concern with the artwork as a key of understanding the way art “works,” rather than importing meaning of a film into the film “from above” (to use Eikhenbaum’s image). In Thompson’s view, the search for the “literariness” of literature—words made strange by their use—becomes something different when considering another artistic medium, namely cinema. In cinema, the “materialness,” or “cinematicness,” of film is enough to bring conflict into the film.78 Like the Russian formalists, for both Bordwell and Thompson the guiding principle of their approach is defamiliarization. Moreover, for Bordwell and Thompson defamiliarization is important in engaging viewer interest. The audience will stay for the film’s end if it is conventionally engaging and yet sufficiently dissimilar from other works. It is necessary to maintain audience interest along the lines of “What will happen next”—with plot or even style. This process—the balancing of dissimilarities with similarities—is carried on in the development of the experience of the text through story and plot.79 The Russian formalists identify the story as the mental creation of causal relations that the audience necessarily forms from the information provided by the plot, which is the actual presentation of the story.80 Thompson identifies this presentation as having both proairetic features (a narrative chain of causality) and hermeneutic features (a series of enigmas posed by information that is strategically withheld and revealed during the course of the film). Most films, particularly of the mystery and detective genres, progress with a dynamic tension between these two types of presentation.81 The causal chain constructed by the plot is either answered or unanswered in the course of the hermeneutic presentation. Unanswered causes are considered ‘open’; answered causes are ‘closed.’ In the detective genre this aspect of presentation is most often closed by a ‘buckle structure,’ in which the plot is centered on a group of interrelated events. Determining the original causes of the story comes about by returning to those causes at the end of the unfolding plot—like a belt circling to reenter the buckle and thus end, or close, the plot.82 The shape of the presentation, the form of the film, is developed by two main devices in fictional storytelling: characters and narration. Characters are what Thompson, following Roland Barthes, calls “a collection of semés” or character traits. She stresses that although characters may be identified with real people, such as Tolstoy’s use of Napoleon in his War and Peace or even Warner Bros.’ use of events and personalities of the real-life outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in the film Bonnie and Clyde, characters are dedicated to the narrative. They are not real but instead are representations created by the authors and audience. And as such, characters are dealt with as devices by analyzing them in terms of how they function within a film. What is of primary importance is how they aid in plot development.83 A second device of film construction is its narrational style. Narration, for the neoformalist, is the process by which the plot presents and delays information of the story. This process in turn affects the motivations and functions of many devices. The way a narrative is constructed guides the audience to construct a story from the unfolding plot. To better discuss the connection between plot construction and story construction, Thompson draws from Bordwell’s constructivist theory of spectatorship. Bordwell argues that the spectator approaches a film-work in an active way rather than as a passive viewer. This viewpoint is attributed to the German physiologist/physicist H. L. F. von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and later to British philosopher Sir Karl R. Popper (1902–1994) and is commonly referred to as the Constructivist theory of perception. Bordwell notes that since the 1960s this theory has generally maintained a strong position among others in perceptual and cognitive psychology. For Bordwell, “perceiving and thinking are active, goal-oriented processes.”84 From this comes the idea of inference making: The mind “constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.”85 From this theory Bordwell argues that the mind evaluates what it perceives by creating a series of questions and answers, each laid out as visual and aural stimuli arrive. These hypotheses are used as a way of guiding the inference of meaning. The screen is dark. But, why is it dark? The knife blade glints light from somewhere off the set, and a gloved hand grips it tight. From this point on, there is a back and forth, questioning and answering, that attaches significance to the experience. This is based on hypotheses about what will come next. The basis upon which certain questions are asked and others not asked, and of the gradual inferring of meaning, is a top-down process drawing on schemata. Bordwell identifies schemata as “perceptual or cognitive, organized clusters of knowledge.”86 One type of schemata is the developed ideas about what textual features, such as conventions, mean. To examine conventions is, in effect, to construct a schemata. Thus, in Bordwell’s argument, the constructivist theory identifies film viewing as a highly dynamic activity. The viewing of a film incorporates at various levels our capacities of basic perception, any prior knowledge and experiences with similar films, and the order and form of the film being viewed.87 The viewer therefore enters into the process of constructing a somewhat meaningful story through the course of the film-viewing experience. The viewer and the creators of the film, or any other media-work, enter into a process known as narration. The neoformalist views narration as a process that includes cueing our hypothesis-forming about story events. Following Meir Sternberg and Bordwell, Thompson describes this narration as having three aspects: knowledgeability, self-consciousness, and communicativeness. Each of these allows for critical analysis.88 Knowledgeabilty is the range of the revelation of what is known about the overall story that is available to various characters at any point in the plot. The narration’s knowledgeability is also revealed in the depth of the revelation. This goes back to the discussion of characters and their traits and what is revealed about them. If there is not much depth, then little is known about the minds of the characters, and the inverse is also possible.89 The self-conscious aspect of narration is revealed at the level where it “admits” to be telling a story to an audience.90 This could come out in overt narration, with a visible narrator on the screen setting up the story of a film. Or it could be seen in any self-referential motivations of its devices: for example, breaking the fourth wall by Alvy Singer in Annie Hall as actor/director Woody Allen leans toward the camera to give the audience any of this film’s numerous asides. Finally, the level of communicativeness, as distinct from the knowledge revealed through narration, is the degree to which knowledge is made available to the audience.91 It is in this aspect (what Marxist literary critic Pierre Macherey believes is deceitful in the detective story) that the real strength of narrational structure comes into play. The ebb and flow of information about the story to an audience is influenced by the different devices used and at what level they are motivated. As mentioned earlier, the neoformalists, like the Russian formalists, view their work as an approach rather than as a method. This important distinction bears discussing here as it has an impact on the use of neoformalism in conjunction with production of culture theory. The tools of Russian formalism—including devices, motivations, and functions—are the tools of the neoformalist critic. It is the consideration of a priori assumptions about how the world works that must guide the use of these tools. Bordwell and Thompson have advanced neoformalism as a notable successor to the Russian formalism hailed by Bakhtin as highly serious in nature and fruitful.92 The neoformalist makes use of plot/story distinction, coupling it with consideration of defamiliarization as a guiding influence on plot construction and style of production. Style is simply defined as the repetition of devices and techniques that are characteristic with a particular narrative pattern or genre. Style includes considerations of space, time, and the formal logic of the narrative or nonnarrative. For film, space is the visual dimensions represented or suggested in a frame. Time would include both the chronology of the story and the structured order of the plot. The narrative or nonnarrative aspects would deal with causality or other logical structures such as what Thompson calls the “abstract play” among “spatial, temporal, and visual aspects of film—the graphic, sonic, and rhythmic qualities of the image and sound tracks.”93 Whether applied to literature or other media, the concept of style takes on great importance. The Critiques of Neoformalism Just as its predecessor, Russian formalism, neoformalism has had its share of critics. The criticisms usually claim that neoformalism doesn’t search out any meaning in the construction of works that goes beyond structure and history. Two of the more interesting analyses of contemporary neoformalism come from Robert B. Ray and Janet Staiger. Ray takes aim at the early neoformalism formation that occurred under the label of ‘historical poetics’ in Bordwell’s article “Lowering the Stakes: Prospects toward a Historical Poetics of Cinema.” The publication of Ray’s article coincided with the appearance of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s film study Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC). Ray uses CHC to argue that neoformalism (which Ray disparages as “narrow formalism”) does not work on classical Hollywood films as well as on the “modernist cinema” of Dreyer, Ozu, and Eisenstein.94 For Ray the idea of identifying an “explicit, detailed, and comprehensive analysis of norms” is impossible because norms cannot be identified without taking into account ideological concerns. Issues of representations are largely unexamined in both CHC and in Bordwell and Thompson’s narrow formalism. Ray interprets the ideological stakes of “effects and epistemic causes” to be of primary importance to the analysis of film.95 It appears that Ray has missed the point of neoformalism. Although separating out the so-called larger ideological stakes from issues of style and narration, Bordwell and Thompson offer a neoformalism that may serve as a complement to ideological study. By not taking a firm position on effects of film within a society, neoformalism allows the researcher of such divergent strands as Marxist or Weberian sociology to make use of the same analytical methods and data. Janet Staiger makes use of neoformalist principles in CHC with her coauthors Bordwell and Thompson. Yet, she has some differences with Bordwell’s constructivist cognition theory in explaining the viewer’s interpretive strategies. In her book Interpreting Films, Staiger argues that Bordwell emphasizes only one type of spectator without considering the variations of historical or cultural differences. She does point out that Bordwell explicitly chooses to eliminate this problem of real spectators from his discussion. Thus, Staiger is not attempting to poke critical holes in Bordwell’s description and use of neoformalism. Instead, she points to the possibilities that could be taken up by other researchers. She writes: “Bordwell permits the possibilities of patterned historical variation among spectators” by his recognition that the various schemata used to interpret films are produced socially. Like Ray, she believes that ideological issues are also worthy of study.96 This is where, ultimately, neoformalism finds its best use: as a two-step process. The first step is to conduct such analysis of a film artifact that will identify the dominant for that narrative structure. The second step, so important and so often overlooked in criticism of neoformalism as ‘empty formalism,’ is the application of an appropriate theoretical worldview to that knowledge to draw out an understanding of larger issues: industrial practices, social interactions, or cultural influences. Although this potential of neoformalism is not explored by Bordwell and Thompson, neoformalism itself is not inherently incapable of being used by scholars interested in culture, society, and representation. With consideration of these arguments cautioning against viewing neoformalism as a neutral tool—without inherent implications about ideology—this study of Perry Mason as a culturally produced mediated work makes use of constructivist cognition theory alongside production of culture theory. When combined with neoformalist analysis, this provides an overarching approach that can be called transmedia poetics. TRANSMEDIA POETICS AND PERRY MASON The heart of transmedia poetics is the examination of formulas across media. This structuring of the formula within and across different media is a key to my analysis of Perry Mason. I identify the formula as culturally produced and seated in the very conventions of the genre in use by a mediated work. Although it has been primarily used in the analysis of cinema, I apply neoformalism to several other mediated works including novels and television. The formula as a construction transcends production of a single work. Just as with adaptation studies, this analysis does more than cross from one film to another, one book to another, but within the genre itself from one medium to another. Added to neoformalism, a production of culture approach allows this study to deal with different media at the same time. Moreover, a production of culture approach further provides a system of questions and assumptions about conventions and their functions. Although it is true that Bordwell stops short of interpreting (assigning cultural meaning to) the films he studies with neoformalism, he does argue convincingly the merits of stopping. It can be argued that Bordwell’s Making Meaning is a description of why he stops short of interpretation: to avoid the importing of meaning into a film under study. This allows for concentration on form. Yet, as I use transmedia poetics, the analysis of the culture-creating aspects of both form and content within a work allows me to draw inferences about the meaning of Perry Mason. THE “UNIQUENESS” OF PERRY MASON Crucial to this study is Raymond Burr’s use of the term ‘trust,’ not simply in a strictly legal sense but as a series of relationships, professionally and culturally constructed, wherein both sides, producers and consumers of cultural product alike, share in a common cultural context. The context of Perry Mason’s world is shaped by numerous contributing factors, each of which influences the resulting film, broadcast, and literary texts in different ways. What I expect to find as a result of the study of Perry Mason falls (with a considerable amount of overlap) into three areas: historical/industrial, generic, and textual. Each of these areas makes up the culture of Perry Mason. This book asks (by way of close examination of selected works) how generic conventions are manipulated by narrative through formula and variation. Does a Perry Mason novel handle the detective genre differently than the Warner Bros. film of that novel? Is the same true when considering the product conventions of the television series? Can looking at how character is revealed, how the story is told, and how certain choices in phrasing, dialogue, and even the visual effects of words on paper, present a clear image of how disparate media with their own conventions should come out with a successful fictional narrative based on the same story? And finally, is the television series featuring Burr as Mason the consummate Perry Mason? As listed in the beginning of this chapter, many individual works make up the world of Perry Mason. Because of this, there may be a temptation to focus on the works alone for clues as to the significance of Perry Mason. Although this could provide a clear view of the result of each Perry Mason enterprise, as I argue, this is only a partial view. By taking the individual works as a part of a whole, an element such as the work itself would not be examined in isolation, as if it existed in a vacuum. Instead, by using the production of culture method and considering the text as only a part of the world of Perry Mason, I may be able to project a clearer understanding of how these stories continue to be produced. This is what makes the world of Perry Mason so engaging. Each constituent element—the films, the novels, the broadcast series—has made use of the conventions of its medium to achieve a certain level of success. But by looking at the entire system of Perry Mason production practices as well as the resultant products, we can possibly understand the complex interplay involved in producing such a large, transmedia, historical, industrial system. 21. Becker, “Art as Collective Action,” in American Sociological Review 39, no. 6 (1974): 775. 22. Derral Cheatwood, “The Tarzan Films: An Analysis of Determinants of Maintenance and Change in Conventions,” in Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 2 (1982) 127–142. 23. John G. Cawelti, “The Concept of Artistic Matrices,” in Communication Research 5, no. 3 (1978): 295–301. 24. Becker, Art Worlds, 194. 25. Joseph Turow, Media Industries: The Production of News and Entertainment (New York: Longman, 1984), 5. 26. Robert Pekurny, “Coping with Television Production,” in Individuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint, eds. J. S. Ettema and D. C. Whitney (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), 143. 27. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 108. 28. I use the term ‘genre’ as a way of grouping similar kinds of products under historical and industrial designations—such as gangster, western, or detective—rather than in its classical sense as a type of writing designated by its form—such as poetry, prosody, lyric, or biography. 29. Jane Feuer, “Genre Study and Television,” in Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Discourse, edited by Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 119. 30. Alva Johnston, The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner (New York: William Morrow, 1947), 15. 31. Gardner had developed a number of series characters, some of which were quite popular, that were printed in the pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s and early 1930s. Perry Mason was his first novel-length character, the one he wrote the most about, and the one who has most often appeared in television, motion pictures, radio, and other popular media. 32. See Frank E. Robbins, “The Firm of Cool and Lam,” Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review 59 (spring 1953): 222–228. 33. Patricia Kane, “Perry Mason: Modern Culture Hero.” In Heroes of Popular Culture, edited by Ray B. Browne, Marshall Fishwick, and Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1972), 125. 34. Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory,” in Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 531. Originally published in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 35. Feuer, 117. 36. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 174–193. 37. Ibid., 108–109. 38. Ibid., 77–78. 39. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 6. 40. Letter, Erle Stanley Gardner to Gail Jackson, October 30, 1958, Erle Stanley Gardner Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 41. Quoted in Paul DiMaggio and Paul M. Hirsch, “Production Organizations in the Arts,” in American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 19, no. 6 (July/August 1976): 735. 42. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, “Introduction,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), xii. 43. Lemon and Reis, ix. 44. Ibid., xiii. 45. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2d ed., (New York: Longman Books, 1989), 19. 46. Lemon and Reis, 4. 47. For a more thorough discussion of Russian Formalism, several works and collections are useful to the reader. Victor Erlich developed a highly influential standard text on the Russian Formalists, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 3d ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965). He also edited a collection of translated works of the Russian Formalists, Twentieth Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). This work is a survey of concurrent and recurrent themes. On the more theoretical side, the collection Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) develops a strong theoretical analysis of the movement. 48. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Lemon and Reis, 13. 49. Ibid., 57. 50. Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Lemon and Reis, 64. 51. Ibid., 68. 52. Ibid., 67–68. 53. Ibid., 70. 54. Ibid., 79. 55. This consideration of convention by an audience is used in the development of a theory of the spectator as introduced by David Bordwell later in this chapter. 56. Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Lemon and Reis, 84. 57. Ibid., 85–87. 58. Ibid., 92–94. 59. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 43. 60. Lemon and Reis, 99–100. 61. Boris Eikhenbaum, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’ ” in Lemon and Reis, 103. 62. Ibid., 103-104. 63. Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 261–262. 64. Ibid., 263–264. 65. P.N. Medvedev [Mikhail Bakhtin], The Formal Method in Literary Studies, trans. A.J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 232; quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, Theory and History of Literature Series, vol. 13 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 36. 66. Ibid., 38. 67. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (New York: Methuen & Co., 1979), 50–51. 68. Ibid., 51. 69. Ibid., 59. 70. Ibid., 61. 71. Ibid., 64. Bennett is quoting Fredric Jameson. 72. Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, Controversies in Sociology Series, edited by T. B. Bottomore and M. J. Mulkay, no. 14 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 89. 73. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 61. 74. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 79. 75. Ibid., 80. 76. Among the formalists film theorists, Arnheim argued against the idea that film must somehow “represent” the world. It is only when film is expressive that filmmakers are progressing in their craft. Eisenstein’s work follows Tomashevsky’s notion of the unifying theme of a work as a process of artistic intention. For Eisenstein, theme is found in a film’s form, out of the intentional ordering in the arrangement of cinematic elements. 77. Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 79. 78. Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 132. 79. The terms used are the Russian versions of the words ‘syuzhet’ for plot and ‘fabula’ for story. Their reasoning is that the English words have been so often used that, in effect, readers have become automatized to the interchangeability of the terms. I will continue with the English words to make it easier for the flow of this study. 80. Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 38–39. 81. Ibid., 39. 82. Ibid., 40. 83. Ibid., 40. 84. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 30–31. 85. Ibid., 31. 86. Ibid., 31. 87. Ibid., 32–33. 88. Bordwell, as quoted in Thompson, 41. 89. Ibid., 41–42. 90. Ibid., 42. 91. Ibid., 42. 92. Bakhtin, as quoted in Todorov, 36. 93. Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 43. 94. Robert B. Ray, “The Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of Knowledge,” Strategies (Fall 1988): 174. 95. Ibid., 174–175. 96. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 68. |
