Genre hybridity
It can be tempting to think of genres as relatively stable, even despite the ways in which they obviously change over time, responding to context and shifts in audience desires. However, one of the things that can link genre films together, despite their production dates, is the continued presence of style, conventions, iconography, and other overt markers of generic status. So, what happens when filmmakers try to fuse two different genres together? In these examples of what is often called generic hybridity, two seemingly contradictory genres make strange bedfellows, with filmmakers combining the genres to place them in conversation with one another.
A history of hybridity
Generic hybridity is generally associated with contemporary filmmaking because it is often seen as a postmodern phenomenon. Postmodernism is hard to define, but in essence, it responds to the modernist period that preceded it by commenting reflexively on earlier eras of storytelling. Neo-noir, for instance, is a perfect illustration of a postmodern approach. While filmmakers working in the classic Hollywood period did not refer to their works as film noir, that label became useful after the fact to describe them. Neo-noir films of the 1970s and especially the 1980s were self-consciously designed to recall the noir films of the classic period, with the label self-applied as opposed to adopted by a critical community. Look at these shots from neo-noir films, which are deliberately designed to echo the visual style of the noir period.
However, neo-noir films are also self-conscious in their deliberate revisionism of the noir period. While noir protagonists were limited by the dictates of the Production Code, which essentially mandated that they be killed or go to jail at the end of each film so as to enforce—nominally, at least—its vision of morality, neo-noir often makes a deliberate show of allowing its characters to get away with their crimes or at least avoid the fates of previous noir films. For instance, the self-aware neo-noir Body Heat (1981, Dir. Lawrence Kasdan), an unofficial remake of classic noir Double Indemnity (1944, Dir. Billy Wilder), allows its scheming femme fatale Matty Ross (Kathleen Turner) to escape to a sunny beach at the end of the movie, the money earned through the murder of her husband well in hand. Sam Raimi’s neo-noir A Simple Plan (1999), in which a mild-mannered Minnesota man named Hank (Bill Paxton) comes across and decides to keep a bag full of ransom money he finds in the ruins of a downed plane, does not kill the protagonist or send him to jail, but strands him in a kind of purgatory, doomed to live with the terrible things he has done, including committing murder.
These examples, however, offer fairly garden variety examples of postmodern genre practice, including self-awareness and referentiality, as well as outright revisionism. None really reflect hybridity. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is also a canonical neo-noir film: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a hybrid of science fiction and noir that uses the combination of the two genres to depict a dystopian Los Angeles of rain and near endless night. The film’s protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a kind of private detective in the classic noir tradition, hired by the police to hunt down and kill a group of escaped replicants (human-looking androids). The film also includes a kind of femme fatale, android Rachel (Sean Young), who tempts the anti-hero Deckard with her almost, but not quite, human feeling. The setting, which combines the trappings of science fiction with the urban shadows of noir, is highly influential for its hybridity, with many subsequent films borrowing its general look and feel, reconfiguring the future as a dystopian nightmare infused by the dread and despair of noir.
Watch the commentary at right on the fusion of noir and science fiction in one particular scene in Blade Runner, in which Deckard is summoned to the Tyrell Corporation to learn more about the escaped replicants he is charged with tracking down and “retiring.” Pay close attention to the ways in which director Ridley Scott brings the science fiction and noir elements into conversation with one another through style and narrative conventions.
|
|
Critic Barry Langford argues that contemporary Hollywood is defined by “rampant generic hybridity,” as most mainstream films rely to some degree or another on the combination of two genres. Many blockbuster films, for instance, are action films or at least make narrative use of action as a device, often combining that action with comedy. These hybrids complicate genre considerably because they fuse often contradictory elements. An action film, for instance, that relies on comedy can trivialize the use of violence by making it funny, allowing audiences to detach from the real consequences of the drama. Hybridity is certainly here to stay, however—it allows filmmakers to explore the boundaries of genre by deliberately transgressing them. The creation of generic hybrids can produce some remarkably interesting films, mostly so when genres that are seemingly opposite from one another are brought together.
Hybridity - the western and the heist film in the badlanders
Any debate over whether heist films are a genre or a cycle is made more complicated when considering the role of genre hybridity. Heist films share generic identity with gangster films, film noir, crime thrillers, action movies, and comedic capers. In this sense, they are almost all hybrids because they draw upon the style, conventions, and iconography of other genres, but those elements are repurposed by individual filmmakers to serve particular ideas, especially in the 1950s and 1970s when they are responding to specific trends in culture.
If heist films are inherently hybrids, then an examination of heist films that combine with other genres with strong identities may yield some interesting insights. Few genres are stronger in style, iconography, and conventions than Westerns; that makes Delmer Daves’ The Badlanders (1958), a remake of The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston), as it is also based on W.R. Burnett’s novel, an important example of the combination of the Western with the heist film. In many ways, these two genres lie beside each other quite easily, as exemplified by Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is not only credited as the first screen Western but also the first heist movie. Subsequent Western films feature heist sequences and follow the basic three-act structure, but The Badlanders, because it is a direct adaptation of the prototypical heist story (novel and film) shows how the presence of the Western affects the conventions of the heist film.
If the typical stylistic approach and iconography of heist movies is drawn from film noir, thanks to their usual urban nighttime settings, then the shock of Western elements drags the heist out into the daylight in the bright sunshine of Arizona. As is typical of heist film protagonists, The Dutchman (Alan Ladd) and McBain (Ernest Borgnine) are released from jail in the film’s opening moments, and almost immediately get down to plotting their revenge. By contrast, however, both The Dutchman and McBain were seemingly wrongly imprisoned—The Dutchman was framed for a robbery he didn’t commit, and McBain killed a man who had cheated him.
This particular adaptation combines a few roles, eliminating the heist mastermind Doc Riedenschneider character from The Asphalt Jungle, and instead making him into The Dutchman, a man of action; he isn’t just the brains of the operation, but can handle himself with a gun. McBain seems to stand in for The Asphalt Jungle's roughneck Dix Handley, while the corrupt Lounsberry (Kent Smith) is a substitute for the film's crooked lawyer Emmerich. The basic plot feels largely the same as it does in The Asphalt Jungle, but the iconography of the Western creates an opportunity for a shift in the MacGuffin from jewels in a locked safe to gold in a mine. As a result, the robbery sequence itself feels quite a bit different in The Badlanders.
While the production code was still in place in 1958, it had weakened somewhat, undergoing several rounds of revisions that aimed to soften some of its rigid, moralizing strictures. However, one typical feature of 1950s heist films is that the thieves are never allowed to get away with the stolen loot; in The Badlanders, the crooks do get away with it, with The Dutchman planning to meet McBain with the gold in the town of Durango. Partially, this is because The Dutchman and McBain aren’t bad men—not really. But, the production code gave Westerns a longer leash on violence and morality issues, largely because they were period films that announced their settings firmly in the past. Because noir films were set in the present, in cities that many audience members lived in, censors were much more concerned about the messages they might send. In Westerns, violence was often (as in, almost always) used to solve narrative problems and frequently made to feel justified, as long as the right guy was doing the shooting. Because The Badlanders doesn’t want to judge The Dutchman and McBain too harshly, they are spared the grim fates of their counterparts in The Asphalt Jungle, and allowed to get away clean.
The Badlanders demonstrates that genre hybridity was not exclusively a postmodern phenomenon; we tend to associate this kind of hybridity with later genre films, as filmmakers inevitably are forced to combine, revise, and remix genres as an effort to keep them fresh. However, it would also be wrong to say that The Badlanders is typical of the 1950s; as an act of genre hybridization, it’s pretty rare.
clip quiz - intertextuality and genre hybridity
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985, O'Bannon)
The zombie film Return of the Living Dead combines two genres into one movie: the horror film and the comedy. Where do you see elements of horror and comedy in this clip? |
|
WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988, Zemeckis)
Elements of film noir and animation come together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as exemplified by this clip. Why combine two radically different genre conventions? What is generated from putting them together? |
|
COWBOYS & ALIENS (2011, Favreau)
The film Cowboys & Aliens combines the Western with science fiction. In this scene from the film, which of the two genres do you think is more dominant, and why? |
|
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1985, Carpenter)
What two genres do you see at work in this clip from Big Trouble in Little China? How do you know? |
|
intertextuality and genre hybridity - red heat
Action director Walter Hill and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger joined forces for the Cold War-era police thriller Red Heat in 1988. Schwarzenegger’s Russian cop Ivan Danko loses his partner to a notorious drug dealer in the film’s Moscow-set first act, which leads him to Chicago, where he teams up with the wisecracking American Art Ridzik (James Belushi), who also loses his own partner to the drug dealer. Red Heat uses the buddy-film formula that Hill had previously relied on in 48 Hours, but instead of a mixed-race pair, Danko the communist and Ridzik the capitalist navigate their political and cultural divides while trying to apprehend the drug dealer, Viktor Rosta (Ed O’Ross).
As a director, Hill’s work in Red Heat exemplifies a key dynamic of the action cinema, which tends to fuse the conventions of two different kinds of films: the Western and the film noir, bringing them together in a contemporary context. Like Western heroes, action film protagonists are men of violence who use their guns to bring villains to justice; like the world of film noir, many action films take place in dark, ruined cities overrun by crime. The final face-off between Danko and Rosta in the trainyard demonstrates the fusion of these two traditions. They each have a gun and stand apart, ready for a quick draw, as in the climax of many Westerns. However, the nighttime setting, heavy use of shadows, and general urban environment infuses the moment with the spirit of noir.
As a star, Schwarzenegger does not do much joking around in Red Heat; his character Danko is pretty self-serious, with Belushi’s Ridzik taking care of a lot of the comic relief. Notably, the script doesn’t really give Danko any of the ridiculous one-liners that populate many of Schwarzenegger’s other films—there is no “he’s dead tired,” as in Commando (1985), or “Stick around” after impaling a guy with a machete, as in Predator (1987). Hill and Schwarzenegger seem to both acknowledge the actor’s physique in the film’s early moments; its opening sequence inside a Russian bathhouse features Schwarzenegger, clad only in a loincloth, fighting another giant man, first inside the bathhouse and then outside in the snow. The camera privileges Schwarzenegger’s muscular body in the way that many action films of the decade do.
Though action films are often decried as mindless, violent entertainment and dismissed as little more, Red Heat demonstrates that sometimes, the genre is capable of interest in genuine political ideas. Historically, it comes at an important moment, when the Soviet Union is nearing the brink of total collapse—the Berlin wall would fall in 1989, and the full dissolution would finally come in 1991. Red Heat illustrates the change; because Schwarzenegger was such a popular star around the world, including in the largely hermetically sealed Soviet Union, he and director Hill secured permission to shoot in Moscow in Red Square, a privilege not granted to many non-Russian film productions for the duration of the Cold War. The footage from inside the Soviet Union’s capitol marks an important shift that is just on the precipice of taking place.
However, the political implications of Red Heat go further than just a few images from Moscow. It consistently asks us to consider the ramifications of these characters’ sets of beliefs. Danko seems to know that the ideology of the Soviet Union has limitations, and Ridzik is likewise skeptical of his own role as an American police officer, routinely breaking the rules in order to obtain information from suspects or informants. Unlike the anti-communist films of the 1950s, Red Heat addresses political ideas in a non-propagandistic way. The ideas are there, but they rest within the conventions of the action film without overwhelming them.
Some genres work very well as vehicles for hybridity because their conventions are permeable. The action film was born as a hybrid, with its reliance on Western and film noir conventions that combine in a variety of different ways. Because action began not as a genre of its own and more of a tactic that filmmakers used to move the story along, it is a natural fit for hybridity; think of the number of action films you know that blend with comedies, war films, heist movies, and more.
Hybridity in genre is ultimately a postmodern phenomenon that comes about when filmmakers want to combine two existing genres. In the best instances of those exercises in hybridity, the combination can reveal something interesting about each genre. When they are repurposed for new eras, genre hybrids potentially break new ground for both genres that make up the hybrid, creating new possibilities for exploration.