Twenty-First-Century Hybrids

Abstract

It is interesting to speculate on the future of the crime film. Like all durable genres in the cinema, the crime movie is cyclical, with familiar tropes making periodic reappearances (after a suitable interval) for new audiences who — in many cases — will be unfamiliar with the material or its presentation. If a cursory examination of the crime field suggests that it is now tougher and colder than it has ever been, with a rock-hard carapace that allows no gentler moments, this is to some extent an illusion. The earliest crime films (particularly those of American vintage, such as Howard Hawks’ Scarface) are quite as unforgiving and bleak as anything being made in the early twenty-first century. But there are innovations appearing, and some of these are symptomatic of a phenomenon flourishing in other fields of the arts: the hybrid or ‘mash-up’, fusing two disparate genres. In an era in which the Britart enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman add smiley faces to Goya’s Disasters of War and Jane Austen’s genteel, crinolined characters encounter bone-crunching representatives of the living dead in literary mash-ups, it is hardly surprising that the cinema is attempting similar syntheses of disparate elements, shoehorning them together with grotesque results. In some cases, such experiments are a concomitant of creative exhaustion — desperate attempts to cast around for something new to reinvigorate a shopworn format.