Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films Michael Green Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films Ira Jaffe. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008, 160 pp. In Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, Ira Jaffe takes on the subject of genre mixing in films, or what he calls "hybrid cinema," and attempts to draw a comparison between classical Hollywood and contemporary Hollywood, saying that the former has "not yielded hybrid generic forms … as radical as those in other [artistic] traditions that have responded to modern life's distinct complexity and indeterminacy" (24). Some contemporary Hollywood films, on the other hand, according to Jaffe, "faithfully reflect as well as influence contemporary life" (6). Overall, he writes, "Diverse stylistic and generic currents intersect in more glaring and anarchic ways than in the past" (26). If this seems vague, it is at least consistent with the rest of the book, which examines this "phenomenon" (26), as the author calls it, in a rather disorganized manner. The book is arranged into an introduction and five chapters titled "Fact and Fiction," "Gangster and Warrior," "Melodrama and Teen Romance," "Tragicomic Accidents," and "Global Parallels." The chapter titles give some idea of Jaffe's wide scope, a scope that accounts for much of the vagueness of the book. Jaffe starts out with a comparison that one might reasonably tackle in 160 pages—classical Hollywood genre mixing versus contemporary Hollywood genre mixing—and then immediately departs from it by looking at documentaries in chapter 1. Despite the many thoughtful points, overall, there are too many eras represented here, too many kinds of films: not only classical Hollywood and documentary, but also international, independent, and avant-garde films, among others. By taking a tour across film history, Jaffe actually makes the opposite point: that the way in which contemporary films handle genre is not so different from films of the past. And this is without even stating the obvious, which is that some of the most famous films from the classical era, from Citizen Kane to It's a Wonderful Life, are unclassifiable hybrids that mix a number of genres. Better-defined categories would have helped. Many of the films that Jaffe lumps under "Hollywood" are made by directors such as David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Todd Haynes, directors whom most film scholars and even casual fans would link to independent filmmaking. Though most of them have worked in Hollywood (and Jaffe is careful to name films distributed if not produced by major studios as Hollywood), they nonetheless made their names in the independent golden age of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when these films were clearly trying to set themselves apart from Hollywood's aesthetic. Genre mixing in the independents was not only common but even a selling point. To really make his case that contemporary Hollywood films mix genres differently than their predecessors and are more "sensitive to modern circumstances," Jaffe needs to have used more mainstream examples. Alas, beyond Fargo and Three Kings (again, by directors who have their roots in independent filmmaking), there are not many such examples here. Jaffe is better at summarizing histories and analyzing styles than he is at making arguments. Individual strands of sharp description and analysis jump out all over the place. His breakdown of the films of Stan Brakhage, for example, is an excellent summary of both the form and purpose of the filmmaker's work; his writing on Pulp Fiction in terms of genre, identification, and pop cultural allusion is among [End Page 58] the best in the book; and he brings a generous knowledge in comparing Todd Hayne's Far from Heaven with Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Too often, though, these isolated strands of analysis, however incisive, fail to connect to a larger point or flow from an explicit purpose. Jaffe is obviously a film lover, and he has clearly watched these films carefully, but he often provides too much blow-by-blow description of the films without the careful, consistent analysis that would contextualize them and bring the author back around to an argument. Sections and chapters end without summing up or even...