of internal and international crisis, crisis and restrictions in Hollywood itself; such is the fairly gloomy context of the Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) undertaking (Editors of Cahiers du cinéma 1979: 785).
In this case, 20th Century Fox supported the Republican Party and through Zanuck put into production a film that linked Lincoln and the Republican Party with being the epitome of Law and Truth. The mechanisms by which this was done are layered throughout the film, such as the electoral speech, where, in a few short words, the film simultaneously creates Lincoln as an eternal champion of Republican values and as being above “normal” politics, indeed an American hero. Another example is later in the film during the trial scene where Lincoln, through “common sense” (using an almanac) wins the case and thereby guarantees Truth and Justice – by extension the Republican Party also guarantees Truth and Justice (Editors of Cahiers du cinéma 1979: 820–2). In the year before a presidential election, the motivation and ideological purposes of Young Mr. Lincoln were clear, to help defeat the enemy of Big Business and the Republican Party. In the end, in their analysis the editors of Cahiers du cinema do not really manage to avoid the causal relationship they refer to (Lapsley and Westlake 1988: 116). As is the case with many of the theories mentioned here, which came into film theory from other fields, the way Marxism is used in film theory is both similar to and yet different from the way it is employed in other disciplines, such as the social sciences. Part of that is due to the symbolic level of abstraction that is involved in studying film (as we saw in the case study above), rather than kinship or market forces on job creation. What Marxist film theory is forced to do is study the ideological forces through the medium rather than first hand and, because of that, the effects and the targets of the ideological forces are more hypothetically derived than empirically determined. What this means is that often the context of cinema is assumed rather than researched. As we will see later in the book, this approach to how film works has some problems. Marxism was not the only theory attempting to establish how film works though.
Structuralism Building on the linguistic work of Saussure, structuralists (and, as we shall see later in this chapter, semioticians) set about establishing the fundamental units of filmic meaning (Lapsley and Westlake 1988: 10–12). Structuralism is simultaneously com plex and simple. The basic preposition of structuralism is that humans engage with, make sense of, and function in the world through sets of binary oppositions – good/ bad, left/right, earth/sky, land/water, etc. For instance, in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is “good” and Darth Vader is “bad.” I could have chosen any of a thousand films for film theory
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