Radical Genre Hybridity in Contemporary World Cinema
When we go to the movies, our expectations are often motivated by genre; we know we’re gonna see kitschy love scenes if a movie is labeled as a romcom, tense shootouts from an action film, or terrifying jumpscares from a horror film. However, there is somehow still pleasure and comfort in the fulfillment of these expectations. The creators and producers of blockbuster films know exactly what their audiences want to see and how to cater to these demands via an emphasis on the ‘genre film.’ It’s by no means a stretch to say that genres provide a convenient way for films to generate the maximum amount of revenue possible and that these generic expectations are a product of the larger capitalist industry under which they exist. Think about Hollywood, whose ability to produce smash-hit genre films stretches back nearly a century with the slapstick comedies of the 20s and 30s or the westerns and film noir of post-WWII American film.
If genre expectations are indeed derived from capitalist industry, are films which refuse to be defined by singular genres inherently anti-capitalist? This notion of genre hybridity has taken an increasingly more significant presence in contemporary world cinema than in previous decades, from Juzo Itami’s self-proclaimed “ramen noodle Western” Tampopo (1985, Japan) to Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (2016, South Korea), a spellbinding cross between erotic thriller, romance, period piece, and black comedy. But can a refusal to abide by the expectations delineated by genre always be conflated to anti-capitalist commentary? Certain films from the milieu of modern international cinema definitely provide compelling and fascinating parallels between a disavowal of generic singularity and evaluations of capitalism and colonialism.
Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You (2018, United States) is perhaps the most notable entry into the long-standing catalog of American socialist films in recent years. It’s a bright and explosive film with stellar performances from Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, and its zigzagging, genre-defying plotline goes hand-in-hand with its commentaries on the instability of capitalism and the dysfunction of love, labor, and art under capitalist structures. A self-reflexive exploration of the nature of creating art within capitalist confines is embedded within Thompson’s character Detroit, who works in a material industry (selling signs) in a world ever increasingly dominated by screens and wires, as we see in the dystopian office space of RegalView, the telemarketing company whose ranks are ascended by Stanfield’s character Cash throughout the film. Detroit is also an aspiring performance artist whose work centers around activism but is not always understood or received by its audience as intended. On the metacinematic layer, there is an allegory to Riley’s own process of writing and directing his film within the parameters established by the American film industry. His choice to have the film eclipse classification as a black comedy movie, dystopian sci-fi film, or magical realist tale, yet straddle these classifications and occupy some space in between, seems to clearly parallel the diegetic commentary on creating subversive, radical art which attacks the system under which it exists.
The notion of genre hybridity as a radical mechanism is by no means confined by culture, style, or influence—on the opposite end of something like Sorry To Bother You, for instance, would be Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s arresting masterpiece Norte, The End Of History (2013, Philippines), a four hour-long reimagining of Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment set in the modern-day Philippines. The film belongs to a larger artistic oeuvre known as slow cinema, characterized by long takes and an emphasis on the affectation of the passage of time, yet between its long, indescribably beautiful shots of the Philippine countryside, Norte unfolds as part police procedural, part drama, and part prison film, taking Dostoyevsky’s story and reworking it in ways that speak to a nation whose youth faces the great psychological challenge of reckoning with a violent history of colonialism and subjugation. Slow cinema usually takes an interest in labor—the labor of filmmaking as felt through the passage of time on screen and in real time—but in Norte, this labor is made inextricable from the labor of a generation who must grapple with the violence of its predecessors. The protagonist Fabian, played masterfully by Sid Lucero, lives as a generally directionless drunkard until he takes agency over his life and body through the act of murder, like Dostovevsky’s Raskolnikov. The notion of rebirthing the Filipino identity as one with agency, no longer subject to colonization or imperialism, operates within the space of the film as well as outside of it when accounting for considerations of genre, which Diaz seems to defy at every turn.
From American sci-fi comedies to Filipino slow cinema, generic hybridity has assumed a role within contemporary world cinema as a tool through which hegemonic structures are scrutinized and questioned, both within the diegetic space of films to which it pertains as well as on the outside layers of the cinematic apparatus.