Form and Meaning

My second blog post is going to be about form and meaning within heist/caper films.  Also I will be focusing on the implicit and symptomatic meaning of the 2010 film The Town.  The Town is a great example of the heist film genre and very well at the Hollywood box office. 

When most viewers see watch a trailer for a film for the very first time they are able to make certain assumptions about the film.  Certainly the heist genre is a relatively old movie genre according to film so movie goers come to expect certain things to be within that particular film.  Although the heist genre is interesting because it is able to fuse itself with other film genres.  For example you can have a very serious film about a great heist or robbery like the film “The Killing” or you can go the completely other way and have a comedy/heist film like the film “Tower Heist”. 

The film “The Town” fits into the more serious thriller/heist film category.  The film starts off with four lifelong friends from Boston Massachusetts.  All four of them grew up and live in a certain neighborhood in Boston called Charlestown.  This neighborhood is known for its breeding and training of bank robbery.  The movie follows the characters as they rob high profile banks and bank trucks in Boston.  The main character Doug takes an interest in a girl during one of his robberies.  He then sparks up a relationship with her without the approval of his other gang members.  As the movie goes on Doug is put under more and more pressure to plan out a larger and larger job, in which it eventually all blows up in their faces when they attempt to rob Fenway Park.  Doug is the only member to make it out alive and escapes with his life.  He leaves a secret message for his love interest and she is able to make a dedication to the city in his mother’s name.

The form and meaning of the film “The Town” can be analyzed in my different ways.  According to Roberts, The interaction and relation between the emotions represented in the film and the emotional response felt by the viewer play a large role in the films form.   For example in “The Town” the audience is almost seeing the main character Doug through a postmodern lens.  Even though he is a self acclaimed bank thief who has a crew, commits felonies, and is associated with a murderous group of other felons, the audience finds themselves rooting for him to get the girl and the cash.  According to Bordwell and Thompson Artistic form is best thought of in relation to a perceiver, the human being who watches the play, reads the novel, listens to the piece of music, or views the film.  So you can see why the audience really can identify with that character in the film.   

To focus more on the meaning of the film you one would have to look at the implicit meaning of the film.  I believe that the implicit meaning of “The Town” is the story of a good American kid who grows up reaching for the stars, but ends up falling on hard times and sinks back down to the expected reality of his life.  I believe that Doug is a good person at heart, who ended up making one too many bad decisions in life and got caught up in a life of crime. 

This pretty much leads into the symptomatic meaning of the film.  Although the audience is able to think of the character Doug as a nice, good person as the movie goes on you start to pick up on his personal values and how he was raised.  Doug’s core values are different from most people’s because of the fact that he grew up in a community where this  profession was idolized, his father is a convicted felon, and his three best friends all shared the same background and beliefs.    

Works Cited

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. "Significance of film form." Film art: an introduction. 5th ed. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997. ch 3. Print.

Roberts, Julian . "The significance of film form." The Significance of film form. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. <www.docstoc.com/docs/4491585/The-Significance-of-Film-Form >.