Genre Hybridization
In many aspects of life, most people believe that more is better. However, as Americans, we are practically instilled with this ideology. As a country that relies heavily on the media to dictate our lives, the idea that excess should be appreciated is conveyed through our music, films and entertainers. We want more money, our homes to have more square feet, our cars to have more flash, our televisions to have more channels. We want our universities to offer more courses and we want our children to obtain more degrees. We want more reality shows and less of real life. We want more entertainment and less art. America's affinity for the superfluous has even managed to permeate the filmmaking industry, as big budget studio corporations have begun to run filmmaking as an assembly line-style business, making film after film without depth but rather for pure entertainment. Movies are being made as often as a director can yell "Cut" and more often than before filmmakers are looking to a new way to add more to their films. Filmmakers are choosing to add and combine genres, making the post-modern film era one of intense genre hybridization. However, does the melding of genres make it more difficult for intended messages to be recei
The Coen brothers wanted to make a comment on the justice system, saying that people are worthy of punishment, but are usually punished for the wrong reasons, as Crane and his wife both were. It is in this way that the male melodrama genre is a constant factor and never changes. In animated features, story lines are aimed at children, but studios have a habit of "dumbing down" the film's content to make it clearer to the audience. One thing leads to another and a murder occurs, leaving Crane to clear things up around himself in a sometimes humorous manner. But their intentions were sometimes buried by the piling on of genres and the moodiness of the noir style. Joel and Ethan Coen, directors of the 2001 film, "The Man Who Wasn't There", were appreciators of the noir style, and modeled their film after it down 4to the use of lighting in the shots. The male melodrama acts as the foundation upon which the black comedy, social satire and mystery lay and without it the exploration of the beleaguered salesman's life may not be as believable. Comedy also plays an important part in the movie. However, there is one movie that combined the male melodrama with an array of other genres: "Glengarry Glen Ross". Furthermore, if touches of black comedy were omitted, the movie would be simply a dark tale about the middle class that people may not relate to. Most, if not all of Mamet's works are hybrids, but "Glengarry Glen Ross" is where Mamet's mastery of dialogue and appreciation for reality shine the most. In "Glengarry Glen Ross", the issue of masculinity and what it means to be a real man are examined. Movies made in this way aim to make us question humanity while looking at the underbelly of America. It is in this case that more is not always better unless one knows how to accurately meld more than one genre together to produce a good film and the film companies need to give us more "Iron Giants" rather than a story with a message that just isn't there. Due to the studio's assumptions that children aren't interested in films that deal with serious social and moral issues, companies continue to make movies about fantasy characters who only sing songs all day while battling bad guys.
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Acceptance Essays
