The Genre as Barometer: Screenwriting and American Distrust

Introduction: Mapping Decay Through Genre

Genres change with industries, audiences, and historical circumstances. This essay uses Daniel Rodgers’s “age of fracture” as context for reading three crime films across several decades (Rodgers). Its three “shared fictions”—a just system, a benevolent state, and a coherent self—are AuthZ’s organizing framework. Benedict Anderson’s account of imagined communities offers an analogy for collectively sustained belief, but it is not a theory of film genre (Anderson).

The case studies do not prove a continuous national decline in trust. They show how W. R. Burnett, Robert Towne, and Paul Schrader made different forms of distrust dramatically legible.

The Foundational Anti-Hero: W.R. Burnett and the Gangster as Capitalist Shadow

W. R. Burnett’s 1929 novel supplied the source for Little Caesar (1931); the film’s credited screenwriting was by Francis Edward Faragoh and Robert N. Lee (AFI). The film gave a durable popular form to the gangster’s rise-and-fall arc during the early Depression. Thomas Doherty’s history shows how pre-Code films exposed economic injustice, political corruption, and crime with fewer moral restraints than the later Production Code permitted (Doherty).

This structure can stage social contradictions, presenting the gangster as both a dark mirror of the American dream (as Robert Warshow argued) and a figure whose ultimate containment can restore a sense of order (Warshow 85). Thomas Schatz describes Hollywood genres as cultural forums in which social anxieties can be worked through (Schatz). In Little Caesar, the outlaw’s allure and eventual destruction make that tension dramatically visible.

The pattern extends beyond Burnett, but authorship matters: The Public Enemy was not his screenplay, and later gangster films should not be treated as direct extensions of his work. The narrower claim is that Little Caesar gave durable form to the gangster as both aspirational figure and doomed outlaw.

The System as Villain: Robert Towne and Post-Watergate Paranoia

Rick Perlstein chronicles a period of political disillusionment and conflict in the 1970s; it provides historical context for, rather than a complete explanation of, Chinatown (Perlstein). Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown (1974) is a useful case study. Its labyrinthine plot and limited alignment with detective Jake Gittes restrict what the audience can know.

Towne’s script places viewers alongside Gittes’s disorientation. Its water plot draws loosely on the history of Los Angeles water development: the AFI Catalog notes Towne’s stated interest in the Owens Valley Aqueduct and the partial basis for Hollis Mulwray in William Mulholland (AFI). Reisner’s account of western water development offers further context, but the film remains a fictionalized story rather than a record of a single historical conspiracy (Reisner). The final line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” is read here as a collapse of the shared fiction of a benevolent state.

Films such as Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) offer related, but distinct, images of institutional or local disorder. They are not evidence of a single social trend. In this essay, crime cinema is a diagnostic metaphor: it supplies forms through which distrust can be imagined and debated.

The Atomized Subject: Paul Schrader and the Collapse of Narrative

Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver (1976) shifts the analysis toward fractured subjectivity. Voice-over narration gives viewers sustained access to Travis Bickle’s diary without making his judgments reliable.

Under Martin Scorsese’s direction, the film sustains a tightly subjective encounter with Travis without requiring viewers to accept his judgments (Kolker 234). Travis’s diary entries can be read as an attempt to construct coherence in a hostile world. Schrader’s earlier critical study of Bresson helps contextualize the essay’s comparison, but it does not establish a direct line of influence on every formal choice in Taxi Driver (Schrader).

Le Samouraï (1967) and Infernal Affairs (2002) invite productive comparisons, but a broader international claim would require its own comparative evidence. They are therefore outside this article’s three-film case study.

Conclusion: From Outlaw to System to Sickness

This small case study traces changing dramatic treatments of distrust rather than a measured national trajectory. Little Caesar presents the outlaw as a contained mirror of the system; Chinatown imagines institutional corruption as an organizing principle; Taxi Driver follows an individual struggling to make sense of a hostile social world.

Later television and film can be read alongside these examples, but direct lines of inheritance would need separate production and reception evidence. Crime and noir genres remain useful for examining how narratives stage conflicts between personal desire, social order, and institutional power.