Postmodern Movies: Neo-Comic Tragedies, Neo-Noirs, Neo-Westerns

Genre is the classic, modernist method of identifying a movie. A movie is a Western. Or it a Film Noir. Or it is a Romantic Comedy. Or whatever.But what if, as Jacque Derrida has asked, there is something more going on?“What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law of genre itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility that would confound its sense, order, and reason?” These postmodern questions destabilize not only the idea of individual genres, but the very idea of genre itself. Hence: neo-genres. Neo-genres are genres that understand, as it were, their own contingency. Neo-genres revel in their own self-consciousness. In this ground-breaking new book, film scholar Richard Gilmore reflects on these neo-genre films, and the wisdom – if any – that can be found in them.