The Unorthodox Jukebox of the Picaresque Young Girl Phenomenon: An amelioration of subsumable genres

Abstract

We live in a dodecahedron-structured cybernetic enmeshment of technology running through an extension of media convergence. In this context, the psychic fragmentation of a postmodern aesthetic is radically splintered and spreadeagled. The reflexivity praxis, embedded in a multisensory milieu navigating strange peregrinations (from modernity to postmodernity to post-post modernity), is tearing apart the current fabric, particularly through cinematic endeavors. Therefore, cinema hyphenates the piquant postmodernist aesthetics by orchestrating fragmentation, hyperkinetic synergy, anachronistic mode, pastiche, meta narratives, beats of simulacrum, and the dementia praecox of mutagenicity, to name a few. Films like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022), directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, encapsulate the current vertiginous reality through a metaverse of careening camera movement, frenetic editing, and the pulverization of the fractured self. A new neologism called “transgene” gets illustrated in the film, wherein multiple genre textures (science fiction, comic book aesthetic, melodrama, comedy, action, and an LGBTQ troupe) are indicated through singular sequences or even images in the film. This film clearly obfuscates the clarity of genre iconicity and exhibits a continuum of energy (flowing), but an interesting embodiment of the young girl concept through the character of Jobu Tupaki provides us with a structure in which postmodernism, transgene, and the young girl get encapsulated. The nihilistic and sassy daughter of Evelyn Wang has been fractured across realities of the metaverse, which renders her a powerful universal being bent on causing chaos and destruction. I shall attempt to outline the major configurations and reconceptualizations of several cinematic genres while foregrounding the plane of reality in which postmodernist cinema transforms into a trans-genre or rather undergoes a metamorphosis into a trans-genre. Additionally, it explores the phenomenon of a young girl functioning as a sublime and spectral obsequiousness amalgamated into the infrastructure of postmodernism, resulting in the atomization of trans-genres showcasing everything, everywhere, all at once. Furthermore, the confluence of these genre aesthetics prepares a bouillabaisse that embodies several configurations of young girls or the becoming of young girls (by all genders and ages) through an apocalyptic dread, permeable brain leaks, and a genre mix.