3 - Returned Genres: The Dream Has Ended

Summary

With these art world practices in mind, how can we describe the possible similarities and differences in commercial film practice? As we have noted, the impulse to reuse past images and genres is also evident in the mainstream narrative film of the period. Jameson had seen this use of pastiche as a response to the rise of multinational capitalism. If we look more closely at the films themselves, however, especially those of the 1970s, they seem to be reacting to a more localized, if not altogether distinct, cause. In many of these films, the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1960s are often cited as the crucial preceding events, resulting in either the denial of those historical disruptions or an active confrontation with them. (The cultural and political battles of the 1960s resonated, as they continue to do today, as a sore spot in the American psyche.) In a practice similar to that of the art world, then, past images and genres in the mainstream film are also set in opposition to new material. Here images “return” as pictures of other pictures, often affecting the very epidermal surface of the film, calcifying it through extratextual references. Similarly, old genres return and also have a tendency to be rendered opaque because of their layered reuse. In a number of mainstream films this pull to the past and to surface is resisted or commented on.