14. Hybrid or Inbred:
The Purity Hypothesis and
Hollywood Genre History
janet staiger
Two theses in recent film scholarship seem closely linked. One thesis is
that films produced in Hollywood in the past forty years or so are persistently
instances of genre mixing. For example, in discussing two films,
Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis, 1990) and Dances with
Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), Jim Collins writes,
. . . they represent two divergent types of genre film that co-exist in current
popular culture. One is founded on dissonance, on eclectic juxtapositions
of elements that very obviously don't belong together, while the other is
obsessed with recovering some sort of missing harmony, where everything
works in unison. Where the former involves an ironic hybridization of pure
classical genres . . . , the latter epitomizes a "new sincerity" that rejects any
form of irony in its sanctimonious pursuit of lost purity.1
Collins notes that John Cawelti noticed this generic transformation happening
as long ago as the early 1970s. What Collins hopes to contribute
is a description of the 1990s films as "ironic hybridization" and "new sincerity,"
as well as an explanation for the trend.
The second thesis in recent scholarship is that genre studies has been
handicapped by its failure to sort out just exactly what critics are doing
when they think about "genre." Examples of this thesis are excellent essays
by Rick Altman, Tom Gunning, and Adam Knee in a 1995 issue of
Iris. Interestingly, it is also in the early 1970s that Andrew Tudor provides
a detailed discussion of the problems of doing genre studies, just when
Cawelti notices a rash of genre transformations occurring.2
This conjunction of theses about genre films and how to do genre studies
in the 1970s and again in the 1990s might be explained in two different
ways. One is that something different happens in Hollywood movies
which provokes critical attention to how we categorize and define groups
of films. Another--and the one I want to argue for--is that Hollywood
films have never been "pure"--that is, easily arranged into categories. All
that has been pure has been sincere attempts to find order among variety.
186 JANET STAIGER
Good reasons exist to find such order. For one thing, patterns of plot
structure and conventions of representation do persist throughout decades
(and some plot structures and conventions predate the emergence
of cinema). To suggest, as I shall, that Hollywood films have never been
pure instances of genres is not to say that Hollywood films do not evince
patterns. Patterns do exist. Moreover, patterns are valuable material for
deviation, dialogue, and critique. Variations from patterns may occur for
making a text fresh or for commentary about the issues raised within the
standard pattern, and both aesthetic and ideological functions of variations
make no sense without a notion of some pattern or order. Hence, although
the tactics of grouping films by genre have been eclectic, grouping
films can still be an important scholarly act because it may elucidate
what producers and consumers of films do. That is, they see films against
a hypothesized pattern based on viewing other films. The process of comparison--which
requires pattern--is crucial to communication and may
contribute to the enjoyment of a text.3
Where finding order may go awry, however, is when a subjective order
visible in the present is mapped onto the past and then assumed to be
the order visible in the past. This historicist fallacy is then compounded
if the past pattern is assumed to be pure against a visible present that is
not, that the visible present is some transformation, deterioration, or hybridization
of a pure essence and origin.
To claim that films produced in "New Hollywood" (hereafter "postFordian
Hollywood") are typified by a recombinant force is to misunderstand
seriously "Old Hollywood" (hereafter "Fordian Hollywood").4
And the cause of the historical error is our own critical apparatus that has
led us to believe erroneously that Hollywood films and genres were once
pure. To make this argument more than an assertion, I want in this essay
to review why the "genre" purity thesis is fallacious, both theoretically
and historically, and why the "hybrid" claim for post-Fordian Hollywood
is a particularly pernicious characterization.
A THEORETICAL REJECTION OF THE PURITY THESIS
FOR FORDIAN HOLLYWOOD
Two ways exist to argue theoretically against a purity thesis for films created
during the Fordian era of Hollywood. One argument is to note that
the eclectic practices and failures of prior critics of genre suggest that any
attempt to find a suitable method for describing genres is doomed: if critics
could have done it, they would have already. The other theoretical argument
is to take a poststructuralist position that any observed pattern
will invariably criticize itself. Both arguments have recently been used to
discuss the activity of genre study.
HYBRID OR INBRED 187
The observation of eclectic practices and failures to describe genres by
previous critics is the argumentation method preferred by film scholars
when tackling the difficulties of hypothesizing patterns across films. Indeed,
this is the strategy employed by Tudor in his 1973 analysis of the
pitfalls of doing genre work. Tudor notes four methods by which critics
might try to group films, and he underlines the problems for each one.
These methods, and my labels for them, are as follows: (1) find a film and
judge other films against the pattern and conventions in that film (the idealist
method); (2) determine from empirical observation the necessary and
sufficient characteristics to include a film in the category (the empiricist
method); (3) make an a priori declaration of the characteristics of the
group (the a priori method); and (4) use cultural expectations to categorize
the text (the social convention method).
Problems with the idealist method include finding ways to judge among
various declarations of which film is the ideal from which the pattern
should be derived. For the empiricist method, a circularity exists. The
critic cannot observe objectively, since the critic has already predetermined
which films to include in the group in order to find the necessary and sufficient
characteristics. The a priori method like the idealist method presents
problems of settling debates among critics as well as operating in a
predetermined fashion. Finally, the social convention method raises questions
about how the critic finds evidence of expectations and determines
cultural consensus. Moreover, for all four methods, characteristics can
shift from grouping to grouping. Tudor notes that while the western is
defined by "certain themes, certain typical actions, certain characteristic
mannerisms," the horror film is defined by the above and also the "intention
to horrify."5
Tudor's reaction is to take the practical approach I
have mentioned already: simply to live with the inconsistencies in method
and "deficiencies" in the objects of analysis for the sake of what might
be learned from textual comparison. Indeed, most film scholars know
these theoretical shortcomings of genre study, and then just forge ahead
anyway.
The inability of previous scholarship to find an appropriate method of
genre categorizing has also been the focus of the recent essays by Gunning,
Knee, and Altman. They, too, note the eclectic practices and failures
associated with genre criticism. Gunning particularly stresses that the
groupings created by critics assume some kind of "preexistent phenomena"
that critics "articulate."6
These phenomena may be quite at odds
with the use of genre terms by individuals charged with distributing and
exhibiting films, who may have much to gain by expanding the categories
into which a film might fit and thus widening the appeals to various audiences.
Thus, Gunning urges that scholars distinguish carefully between
academic and industrial acts of genre classification.
188 JANET STAIGER
In reviewing the sources of science fiction films of the 1950s, Knee details
a variety of categories of films from which these movies drew their
features. Among them are the war film of the 1940s and the postwar documentary.
In fact, Knee eventually concludes that 1950s "science fiction
in a sense functions both as a genre and as a mode of generic discourse, a
rendering fantastic of other generic forms."7
Such a view of the "adjectival"
possibilities of genre categories has existed for some time among
scholars of melodrama who argue that melodrama is less a narrative formula
and more a mode of vision, inflected upon many different narrative
patterns.
Altman, too, outlines contradictions in categorizing films by genre. Expanding
somewhat on Gunning's list, he details four different approaches
to "genres": (1) a model, which becomes a formula of production; (2) a
structure, which exists as a textual system in a film; (3) an etiquette, which
is the category used by distributors and exhibitors; and (4) a contract,
which is an agreement with spectators on how to read a film.8
These four
approaches then produce five disparities in the critical application of genres
to individual texts or groups of texts: (1) words used for genres are
sometimes nouns and sometimes adjectives; (2) producers try to reproduce
the norm but also deviate from it; (3) genres defined by critics are
different from genres perceived by audiences; (4) genre categories are
sometimes historical and sometimes trans-historical; and (5) genres defined
by producers are different from genres analyzed by critics.
In all of these cases of attention to the eclectic practices and failures of
critics to delineate clear, coherent, and consistent categories for films, the
underlying premise is not that this could not be done. Rather, it is that until
critics sort this out and everyone--from the authors to the distributors
and exhibitors to the audiences and the critics--agrees on how to categorize
films, no hope exists for genre study to function so that critics
might find exemplars of the formulas, patterns, and conventions. Thus,
this theoretical argument against a "purity" thesis operates from an assumption
that human behavior and labeling can never be controlled in
such a way that critics would know a "pure" genre or genre film.
This practical approach to arguing against critical knowledge of "pure"
genre films is quite different from a poststructuralist thesis. A poststructuralist
thesis would argue that every text inherently displays what it is
not. A good example of this has been the argumentation against a purity
thesis invoked by Thomas O. Beebee in his study of literary texts, and this
method could fruitfully be applied to film studies. Like Tudor and Altman,
Beebee finds four different approaches to genre: (1) as rules, which
display the "authorial intention" in production of the text (adherence to
or deviation from the conventions and patterns might occur); (2) as species,
which is the historical and cultural lineage of a genre text; (3) as pat-
HYBRID OR INBRED 189
terns of textual features, which exist "in the text itself"; and (4) as reader
conventions, which exist "in the reader."9
Appealing to poststructuralism,
Beebee suggests that every act of labeling is "always already unsta-
ble":10
"I argue that, since a `single' genre is only recognizable as difference,
as a foregrounding against the background of its neighboring genres,
every work involves more than one genre, even if only implicitly."11
Thus,
genre labeling by any of the above four approaches is "inescapable" (individuals
cannot understand a text except in context with surrounding
texts). Moreover, the text is inevitably impure because it cannot but be
known by the context in which it exists. Beebee goes on to argue that
genre texts often are in dialogue with their own definition by (fallacious)
exclusion, creating moments of metatextuality and places for assessing
ideological struggle.12
Beebee's approach to the problems of genre and notions of the "purity"
of a text is most obviously familiar in poststructuralist criticism that elucidates
structuring absences ("what a text cannot say but says in spite of
itself"), evidences of overdetermination, and intertextual dialogues. Since
poststructuralism hypothesizes this breaching of boundaries and impurity
to be features of every text, then any text located as an instance of genre
would also, ipso facto, breach generic boundaries and display its excluded
otherness. In other words, no genre film is pure.
Both the practical argument about eclectic practices and failures and
the poststructuralist argument provide theoretical reasons why critics
should reject the notion that Fordian Hollywood ever produced pure
examples of genre films. Why is it, then, that the sense of a "transformation"
in genres or an "ironic hybridization" and a "new sincerity" exists
strongly enough in the era of post-Fordian Hollywood to encourage
special attention to generic instability as some new feature of the postFordian
era?13
Cawelti believes the trend is due to an exhaustion and
inability of the underlying myths of popular genres to deal with the postVietnam
War era. Collins explains "ironic hybridization" and "new sincerity"
as attempts to master "the media-saturated landscape of contemporary
culture."14
In cases of "ironic hybridization," the films explore the
plurality of genre experiences through referential dialogues with their
sources. In cases of "new sincerity," the films revert nostalgically to seek
a lost "authenticity."15
Both textual strategies are methods to control a
sensory experience of the "hyperconscious."16
Another explanation exists as to why Cawelti and Collins find generic
transformations and hybridizations in post-Fordian Hollywood, and that
is that they never interrogate the generic descriptions of Fordian Hollywood.
As Gunning notes, the beginning of genre classification by film critics
occurs in the 1940s, particularly in the writings of Robert Warshow
and James Agee. Film genre study accelerates with the arrival in the uni-
190 JANET STAIGER
versities of academic film studies and the critical methods of new criticism,
structuralism, and semiotics. The descriptions of Fordian Hollywood
genres upon which Cawelti and Collins rely are ones constituted by
film critics observing a limited set of films produced mostly between 1930
and 1960.17
Additionally, those founding generic descriptions display the
definitional fallacies described above.
Even more significantly, the generic descriptions are produced by critical
methods that by their very methodology offer one genre category with
which to label and analyze the text. New criticism analyzes how great
works overcome apparent contradictions to create a master coherence: all
the parts are made to fit together by the critic or the text is demeaned as
a lesser artistic work. Structuralism finds one underlying binary opposition
influencing the surface. Semiotics looks for narrative patterns and
transformations that also reveal primary, if perhaps contradictory, structuring
paradigms.
What Cawelti and Collins do not tackle is how arbitrary and inadequate
those original generic descriptions are to the original texts. Fordian
Hollywood genre texts appear to be suddenly transforming in the 1970s
or hybridizing in the 1990s because the generic definitions were "fixed"
by critics in the 1960s using critical methods that sought coherence and
purity. This "fixing" of genre definition (and of text in genre category) ignored
(or sought to overcome through critical argumentation of coherence)
the industrial practice by Fordian Hollywood of providing at least
two plots for every movie. And it is here that I turn to historical reasons
to reject the purity thesis of Fordian Hollywood genres.
A HISTORICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR THE REJECTION
OF THE PURITY THESIS FOR FORDIAN HOLLYWOOD
Several fundamental economic and ideological forces influenced the normative
construction of the conventions of the classical film produced by
Fordian Hollywood. Among these were the needs to (1) both standardize
and differentiate products, and (2) market movies to many individuals.
From the 1910s, Hollywood business people assumed several types of audiences:
adult and child, male and female, urban and rural. In analyzing
what appealed to these various audiences, these people assumed that certain
genres had greater appeals to the various subgroups. Throughout the
history of Fordian Hollywood, discourse is plentiful about the varying
tastes. Moreover, a movie appealing to a variety of audiences was praised
as having good potential box office. Reviewers often tried to describe
what the various audiences would or would not find in a film.
The Fordian Hollywood film is typified by usually having two plots--
one often being a heterosexual romance. What makes this dual plot line
HYBRID OR INBRED 191
"classical" is that the two plot lines hinge on and affect each other. The
advantage of the dual plot line, I would argue, is that such a narrative
structure permits appeals to multiple subgroups of taste. Moreover, the
edge for one plot line being a heterosexual romance is the presumptive appeal
to women consumers (whom the industry also assumed from the
1910s were major decision-makers in family entertainment choices). Finally,
add to this the need to differentiate product. Combinations and rearrangements
of formulas are quite simple if two conventional plot lines
from different genres are merged together.
To test the thesis that Fordian Hollywood films are a mixture of multiple
genres and not pure examples, I need to analyze them. However,
since the theorists of genre point out how many different ways genres
might be defined, I want briefly to show that no matter how I create the
criteria by which genres are constructed, Fordian Hollywood movies will
not stand up to the purity hypothesis. For the most part, I will make only
gestures toward this proof, but I hope the evidence and argumentation
will seem to have sufficient validity that common sense will take my argument
to its conclusion.
For my purposes here, I will use Altman's set of the four methods for
defining genres that I described previously: a model, a structure, an etiquette,
and a contract. To determine etiquette and contract, I will use film
reviews as a sort of explicit statement of mediation among the distributors,
exhibitors, and spectators. My presumption is that film reviewers
are functioning as surrogate consumers, following up on the promotion
and publicity generated by the studios and affirming or denying the proposed
reading strategies to counsel viewers about what they will see.
Thus, the reviews are one among several sites of evidence for both etiquette
and contract.
How did Fordian Hollywood construct genres as models of production?
They certainly did not construct them rigorously or neatly. One way
to determine how studios perceived formulas would be to examine the
work areas of associate producers for studios. In 1932, Irving Thalberg's
associate producers were organized as follows: Al Lewin was in charge
of sophisticated stories; Bernie Hyman, animal stories; Bernie Fineman,
genre pics and curios; Eddie Mannix, action films; Larry Weingarten,
Marie Dressler films; Paul Bern, sex fables; and Harry Rapf, sad stories.18
Beyond the use of dual-plot structures and the incoherence evident in
MGM's allocation of work assignments (which is typical of all the studios)
is the production source of stories. Since Fordian Hollywood found
purchasing novels, plays, and magazine stories economical (the story came
ready-made and possibly with some indication of consumer satisfaction
and advance publicity), Fordian Hollywood dealt a good deal of the time
with pre-made stories that might not fit any studio-produced formula.19
192 JANET STAIGER
The pre-made stories were usually reconfigured to adhere to Fordian
Hollywood norms of storytelling, but their original sources outside the
studio system contaminated them. Moreover, the value of innovation
produced work in cycles, widely acknowledged by commentators on the
Fordian Hollywood system.20
No, the purity hypothesis most certainly
would not hold up if I were to use the model method of defining Fordian
Hollywood genres.
What about the structure method? Here is the method most likely to result
in satisfactory findings, since the point of the structure method is to
uncover underlying, nonconscious patterns that only the sensitive critic
can reveal. Is Fordian Hollywood replete with examples of films that display
pure examples of genres with no interference by other patterns or
formulas, no hybridizing? Here is how three critics deal with apparently
prototypical genres or examples of genre films:
(1) Paul Kerr, in discussing film noir, writes: "Furthermore, the `hybrid'
quality of the film noir was perhaps, at least in part, attributable to increasing
studio insecurities about marketing their B product (covering all
their generic options, as it were, in each and every film)."21
(2) Dana Polan, in discussing In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950),
allocates the film to film noir, screwball comedy, and gothic romance
categories.22
(3) Peter Wollen, discussing Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and
Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964), declares: "[The films are] hybrids of the fairy
tale with a detective story."23
I do not mean by these examples to suggest that no critic could ever find
examples of "pure" structures of a genre. However, I would also argue
that if another critic came along, that second, argumentative critic could
likely make a case for contamination, influence, or degradation of the
pure-case example. How to do this is neatly argued by David Bordwell in
his book Making Meaning.24
Recalcitrant data exist in all Fordian Hollywood
films to permit critical debate and perception of other patterns and
formulas: see the second plot line just to begin. Moreover, the argumentative
critic could easily dispute the pure-example critic's original definition
of the pattern and conventions of the genre category, as shown by the
theoretical work of Altman, Gunning, and Beebee.
How easy this argumentation would be to do is evident when I turn to
the etiquette and contract methods of genre definition. The routine effect
of combination within Fordian Hollywood is obvious not only for apparent
cases such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein but even for
films that critics have labeled as classics in a particular genre. Take, for instance,
the classic "screwball comedy," It Happened One Night (Frank
Capra, 1934), described by contemporaneous reviewers as "a smooth
blending of the various ingredients" with "a deadly enough familiarity all
HYBRID OR INBRED 193
31. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: The routine effect of genre combination
within Fordian Hollywood.
through"; intertextual references include the film being called "another
long distance bus story" and a "Molire comedy," while the male protagonist
is "one of those crack newspaper men frequently discovered
in Hollywood's spacious studios."25
Those remarks notwithstanding,
the reviewers thought the film charming but not the start of a new movie
pattern.
Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930) is a crime movie but the "modern
criminal . . . thirsts primarily for power." Thus, it is also a "Greek epic
tragedy," a gangster film, and a detective movie. The Public Enemy
(William Wellman, 1931) is a gang film, documentary drama, and comedy,
but "in detail The Public Enemy is nothing like that most successful
of gangster films [Little Caesar]."
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) is resolutely not described in Variety as
a western (this would be a derogatory term in 1939), but instead is a
"`Grand Hotel' on wheels," an "absorbing drama without the general
theatrics usual to picturizations of the early west." Likewise, the New
York Times uses "frontier melodrama" and concludes with a pun on the
194 JANET STAIGER
32. Stagecoach (1939): A "Grand Hotel on wheels."
film director's name: "They've all done nobly by a noble horse opera, but
none so nobly as its director. This is one stagecoach that's powered by a
Ford."26
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) will succeed because of the "variety
of moods, action, suspense, comedy and drama." While it "goes heavy on
the love theme," Casablanca also has "adventure" and "anti-Axis propaganda."
"[Warner Bros.] is telling it in the high tradition of their hardboiled
romantic-adventure style" with "a top-notch thriller cast," and
"they have so combined sentiment, humor and pathos with taut melodrama
and bristling intrigue that the result is a highly entertaining and
even inspiring film." It is another "Grand Hotel picture, a human crossroads."
Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945) is a "drama," "melodrama,""frank
sex play," "mother-love" story, and, of course, a "murder-mystery."
As several of the theoreticians of Hollywood suggest, the ways to create
genre categories are multiple. By all of them, except the critical method
that a scholar can find a pattern within the text, I have argued that, historically,
no justification exists to assume producers, distributors, exhibitors,
or audiences saw films as being "purely" one type of film. In the case
HYBRID OR INBRED 195
of the structural method, both the problems with traditional critical
methods of genre study and the evidence that critics have argued that genres
are mixed in Fordian Hollywood cinema suggest that even the structural
method of defining genre fails to locate "pure" examples of genres
within Fordian Hollywood cinema. This is not to suggest that the pattern
or genre is not "pure" but that Fordian Hollywood films do not provide
clean examples of the critically defined genre.
THE PERNICIOUS HYBRID THESIS OF POST-FORDIAN HOLLYWOOD
In the preceding two sections, I have argued that representing Fordian
Hollywood films as simple examples of films that would fit into neat, coherent
genre categories is an inadequate thesis both theoretically and historically.
Rather, films produced during that period were perceived by the
producers and audiences to belong potentially to several categories. No
one worried about this. Instead the lack of purity broadened the film's appeal
in terms both of the likely audiences who might enjoy the movie and
of the film's originality.
The reason, however, to expend this much effort on the problem of the
purity thesis for Fordian Hollywood cinema is that the purity hypothesis
is then used as the foundation upon which is built a critical difference for
the post-Fordian Hollywood era. It is one thing to claim, as Cawelti does,
that genres are transforming in the early 1970s. It is another to propose
that post-Fordian cinema is typified by its hybridity.
The reasons for my complaint are twofold. One is that this proposed
difference just is not the case.27
The second reason is that the use of the
term hybrid for post-Fordian cinema distorts and reduces the potential
value that the theory of hybridity has for cultural scholars.
The notion of "hybridity" comes from botany and zoology and describes
the crossbreeding of separate species.28
An influential application
of this organic concept to literature comes from Mikhail Bakhtin. What
Bakhtin writes stresses the meeting of two different "styles" or "languages"
derived from different cultures. He summarizes: "The novelistic
hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages
in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination
of one language by means of another, the carving out of a living image of
another language."29
Bakhtin particularly emphasizes that the event of
hybridization permits dialogue between the two languages. In botany and
zoology, the function of hybridization is to produce invigorated offspring
by crossbreeding, but the offspring may be sterile. So too, the hybridized
literary text (often a parody) may create a strong effect, but the hybrid itself
does not generate a new family.
In accord with Bakhtin's original proposition, the recognition of tex-
196 JANET STAIGER
tual hybridity has been fruitfully appropriated by postcolonial scholars to
describe the outcome of cross-cultural encounters. The editors of The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader write that an event of textual hybridity does
not deny "the traditions from which [a hybrid text] springs," nor does a
hybrid event signal the disappearance of the culture from which the hybrid
derives.30
More significantly, however, a textual hybrid has effects on colonizers.
Homi K. Bhabha points out that the recognition by colonizers of hybridity
produced by the colonized must call into question the transparency of
colonizing authority. In "Signs Taken for Wonders," Bhabha cautions,
The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance,
do not simply or singly refer to a "person," or to a dialectical power struggle
between self and Other, or to a discrimination between mother culture and
alien cultures. Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of
discrimination is always to the process of splitting as the condition of subjection:
a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self
and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but
repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid. . . .
. . . Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting
forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of
domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory
identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority).31
Bhabha's point here is clear: to recognize a hybrid forces the dominant
culture to look back at itself and see its presumption of universality. Hybridity
always opens up the discriminatory presumptions of purity, authenticity,
and originality from which this textual hybrid is declared to be
a deviation, a bastard, a corruption. Bhabha goes on to explain that "the
hybrid object . . . revalues its presence by resiting it as the signifier of
Entstellung--after the intervention of difference. It is the power of this
strange metonymy of presence to so disturb the systematic (and systemic)
construction of discriminatory knowledges that the cultural, once recognized
as the medium of authority, becomes virtually unrecognizable."32
To use the notion of hybridity for the mixing of genres in post-Fordian
Hollywood cinema is, thus, to pervert doubly its potential value for cultural
studies. In the social and communicative sense in which Bakhtin
uses the term hybridity, the notion ought to be reserved for truly crosscultural
encounters. I have to ask, are the breedings of genres occurring
in Fordian and post-Fordian Hollywood truly cross-cultural? Truly one
language speaking to another? I seriously doubt that the strands of patterns
that intermix in Hollywood filmmaking are from different species.
Rather, they are in the same language family of Western culture. The
breeding occurring is not cross-cultural, but perhaps, and with a full sense
of the derogatory implications involved, even a case of inbreeding.
HYBRID OR INBRED 197
Moreover, Bhabha's very particular political sense of hybridity suggests
that when critics encounter a cross-cultural hybrid, the questions of
power, of presumptive authority, purity, and origination of the dominant
genre, ought to be the focus of the analysis. Unlike Bakhtin, Bhabha
stresses the historical fact of an inequality of cross-cultural contacts and
communications.
I cannot, of course, do more than request that critics respect the possibility
that narrowing the application of theories such as textual hybridity
to a specific situation has value--both descriptive and explanatory--to
scholars. However, I do make the plea. Despite all the theoretical and historical
problems associated with categorizing films, perhaps the most
valuable critical contribution that can be made is to analyze the social,
cultural, and political implications of pattern mixing. In the above theoretical
discussion, none of the writers ultimately declared the project of
genre criticism impossible or unworthy--only fraught with scholarly difficulties.
My rejection of the hybridity thesis for post-Fordian Hollywood
cinema is not a rejection of (1) the view that pattern mixing is occurring;
or (2) the fact that post-Fordian Hollywood cinema is producing hybrids
both internally within the United States and externally throughout the
world economy of signs. Internal hybrids33
would be examples of films
created by minority or subordinated groups that use genre mixing or
genre parody to dialogue with or criticize the dominant. Films by U.S.
feminists, African Americans, Hispanics, independents, the avant-garde,
and so forth might be good cases of internal hybrids.
Both inbreeding and hybridizing need to be studied, and genre criticism
has a contribution to make toward that work. Considering the implications
of how critics apply theories can help in that cultural and critical
work, but distinguishing between inbreeding and hybridity throughout
the history of Hollywood has scholarly potential.
Notes
1. Jim Collins, "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,"
in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hillary Radner, and
Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 242­243.
2. Rick Altman, "Emballage réutilisable: Les produits génériques et le processus
de recyclage," Iris 20 (Fall 1995): 13­30; Tom Gunning, "`Those Drawn
with a Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush': The Origins of Film Genres," Iris 20 (Fall
1995): 49­61; Adam Knee, "Generic Change in the Cinema," Iris 20 (Fall 1995):
31­39; Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1973), reprinted
as "Genre and Critical Methodology" in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill
Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 118­126; John G.
Cawelti, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,"
this volume.
198 JANET STAIGER
3. Tudor, "Genre and Critical Methodology," pp. 119­121.
4. I reject the representation of Hollywood as "new" after World War II;
rather, I see Hollywood's industrial structure, modes of production, signifying
practices, and modes of reception as an intensification of monopoly capitalism.
Following contemporary theorists of global capitalism, I am relabeling the period
of Hollywood of 1917 to around 1960 as "Fordian Hollywood"; the Hollywood
of post-1960 or so I will call "post-Fordian Hollywood" to emphasize the strong
linkages to the past as well as the industry's accommodations to late monopoly
capitalism. Moreover, this labeling permits the possibility of a new descriptive
term for Hollywood if it moves beyond "post-Fordian" practices--which is less
the case for a label such as "new." See Kevin Robins, "Reimagined Communities?
European Image Spaces, Beyond Fordism," Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1989):
145­165; Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 1­24; and Annabelle SrebernyMohammadi,
"The Global and the Local in International Communications," in
Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Edward
Arnold, 1991), pp. 118­138.
5. Tudor, "Genre and Critical Methodology," p. 120 (emphasis in original).
6. Gunning, "`Those Drawn with a Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush,'" p. 50.
7. Knee, "Generic Change in the Cinema," p. 36.
8. Altman, "Emballage réutilisable," p. 14. This list is quite similar to
Thomas O. Beebee's list, summarized below, in The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative
Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1994). Altman does not refer to Beebee, and I have no reason to assume
influence: just the happy coincidence of intelligences.
9. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre, p. 3.
10. Ibid., p. 27.
11. Ibid., p. 28.
12. Ibid., pp. 12­19.
13. Cawelti, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation"; James Monaco,
American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Money, the Movies (New York:
New American Library, 1979); Robin Wood, "Smart-ass and Cutie-pie: Notes
towards an Evaluation of Altman," Movie, no. 21 (Autumn 1975): 1­17. Monaco
writes: "Easy Rider, by all accounts one of the most significant movies of the decade,
was a Chase-Caper-Road-Youth-Drag-Buddy film," and in the 1970s, "the
lines of definition that separate one genre from another have continued to disintegrate"
(p. 56). Wood even uses the "hybrid" term: "[Robert Altman's] best films
are hybrids, products of a fusion of `European' aspirations with American genres"
(p. 7). As I shall discuss below in the third section, at least Wood's use of the term
hybrid may have justification, since he suggests an encounter between two "languages"
(although whether European cinema is another "language" than Hollywood
could be debated).
14. Collins, "Genericity in the Nineties," p. 243.
15. Ibid., p. 257.
16. Ibid., p. 248.
17. The lack of access to films prior to 1930 is an important cause for the problem
of the limited descriptions by these critics of Hollywood genres.
HYBRID OR INBRED 199
18. "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer," Fortune (6 December 1932), reprinted in The
American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1976), p. 260.
19. Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Film Facts 1942:
1922--20 Years of Self Government--1942 (New York: MPPDA, n.d.), p. 52.
20. William J. Fadiman, "Books into Movies," Publishers' Weekly, 8 September
1934, pp. 753­755.
21. Paul Kerr, "`My Name Is Joseph H Lewis,'" Screen 24, nos. 4­5 (JulyOctober
1983): 52.
22. Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: British Film Institute, 1993).
23. Peter Wollen, "Hybrid Plots in Psycho," in Wollen, Readings and Writings:
Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), p. 37.
24. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation
of Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
25. These and the following unattributed quotations are from contemporary
reviews in Hollywood Reporter, Motion Picture Herald, New Republic, New
York Times, Saturday Review, Time, and Variety.
26. Variety and Motion Picture Herald would not use "western" because of
that genre's association with a rural taste, but the New Yorker does not hesitate.
27. Or both Fordian and post-Fordian cinemas are hybridity cinemas, which is
not the way I want to go. See below.
28. It can also apply to genera and family, so technically the term could be used
for what we are discussing. However, see my remarks below.
29. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 361
(emphasis in original).
30. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 184.
31. Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence
and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1
(Autumn 1985): 153­154.
32. Ibid., p. 157.
33. The term internal implies accepting the notion of a "nation," which is a
problem for theories of post-Fordian capitalism. This is an issue impossible to
take to its appropriate conclusions here.