Animations and wallpaper in this section by Samuel
Horsley,
Parody of the Crime Film
‘From the beginning the whodunit was a self-conscious form
given to self-parody. By the end of the decade, it had already become
so well-worked that Monsignor Ronald Knox was able to draw up a
list of its mock rules in 1928, a decalogue to be jealously observed
by the Detection Club founded two years later’ (Alison Light,
Forever England).
A
genre so open to self-parody as the classic detective story has also
over the years, not surprisingly, attracted a wide range of other
parodic responses, as have the formulaic elements in hard-boiled fiction.
Literary parodies abound: James Thurber, for example, in ‘The
Macbeth Murder Mystery’, tells of an American woman encountered
at a Lake District hotel who has picked up Macbeth under
the misapprehension that it’s a mystery story (‘In the
first place,’ she confides, ‘I don’t think for a
moment that Macbeth did it’); Tom Stoppard's play, The Real
Inspector Hound, parodies the enclosed world of the English country
house murder. The figure of Sherlock Holmes, in particular, has been
a magnet for parodists, as has the Bogart iconic private eye (most
memorably parodied in Martin Rowson’s graphic version of Eliot’s
Waste Land). Parody and its near-relation pastiche have been
important ingredients as well in more’serious’ postmodern
adaptations of crime fiction: the reassuringly 'low' genre of the
detective story has been re-imagined as the anti-detective novel,
an inverted form which, by avoiding resolution and frustrating the
expectations of the reader, transforms a popular genre into an expression
of sophisticated, avante-garde sensibility (in the work, e.g., of
Auster, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov and Pynchon).
It
is film parody and pastiche, however, that have had the greatest popular
impact. One thinks first, perhaps, of parodies of specific types of
crime film: Sherlock Holmes is parodied, for example, in The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (Gene Wilder, 1978)
and Zero Effect (Jake Kasdan, 1997); hard-boiled private
eye films in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner,
1982) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988);
police procedurals in the ‘Naked Gun’ series; Hitchcock
films in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety (1977) and Danny
DeVito’s Throw Mama from the Train (1987).
Animated films as well have mined the possibilitties
of crime film parody, for the purposes both of pure comedy and of
satiric comment - whether in an 'adult' animated series like the early
90s cartoons about a disorderly private dick called 'Duckman', in
a 'big budget' production like Nick Park's A Close Shave
(1995), or in a short, minimalist animation like the following, that
uses an interactive Hitchcock parody to satirise a xenophobic foreign
policy (NB - to navigate through the animation click on the buttons):
Parody, Pastiche and the Postmodern
Parody
and pastiche of crime film conventions are also, of course, much more
pervasive than this. Richard Martin, in Mean Streets and Raging
Bulls, argues that, from the 80s on, the mainstream market has
seen a growing tendency towards generic formularization and an attendant
self-awareness – a phenomenon symptomatic of a cultural shift
towards a postmodern preoccupation with style, surface, self-referentiality
and playfulness. Generic knowingness and liberal borrowing (ranging
from ‘homage’ to parody) have characterised the work of
many of the best contemporary film-makers: the Coen brothers (in Blood
Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man
Who Wasn’t There) have played in dazzling ways with the
character types, plots and images originally associated with Hammett,
Chandler and James M. Cain; Tarantino’s films (Reservoir
Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) have been
highly distinctive reworkings of the formulas and materials of earlier
crime films; amongst David Mamet’s films, we have his take on
psychological suspense films in The House of Games, the Hitchcockian
Spanish Prisoner, and his journey through the double- and
triple-crossing streets of film noir in Heist.
The
last decade alone has produced dozens of other films that play with
the conventions established in the first half-century of crime films
– for example, The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994),
Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994), Get Shorty (Barry
Sonnenfeld, 1995), Bound (the Wachowski brothers, 1996),
The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996), Palmetto
(Volker Schlondorff, 1998), Wild Things (John McNaughton,
1998), Goodbye Lover (Roland Joffe, 1999), Drowning Mona
(Nick Gomez, 2000), Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000), One
Night at McCool’s (Harald Zwart, 2001).
A genre so open to self-parody as the classic detective story has also over the years, not surprisingly, attracted a wide range of other parodic responses, as have the formulaic elements in hard-boiled fiction. Literary parodies abound: James Thurber, for example, in ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, tells of an American woman encountered at a Lake District hotel who has picked up Macbeth under the misapprehension that it’s a mystery story (‘In the first place,’ she confides, ‘I don’t think for a moment that Macbeth did it’); Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Inspector Hound, parodies the enclosed world of the English country house murder. The figure of Sherlock Holmes, in particular, has been a magnet for parodists, as has the Bogart iconic private eye (most memorably parodied in Martin Rowson’s graphic version of Eliot’s Waste Land). Parody and its near-relation pastiche have been important ingredients as well in more’serious’ postmodern adaptations of crime fiction: the reassuringly 'low' genre of the detective story has been re-imagined as the anti-detective novel, an inverted form which, by avoiding resolution and frustrating the expectations of the reader, transforms a popular genre into an expression of sophisticated, avante-garde sensibility (in the work, e.g., of Auster, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov and Pynchon).
It is film parody and pastiche, however, that have had the greatest popular impact. One thinks first, perhaps, of parodies of specific types of crime film: Sherlock Holmes is parodied, for example, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (Gene Wilder, 1978) and Zero Effect (Jake Kasdan, 1997); hard-boiled private eye films in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner, 1982) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988); police procedurals in the ‘Naked Gun’ series; Hitchcock films in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety (1977) and Danny DeVito’s Throw Mama from the Train (1987).
Parody and pastiche of crime film conventions are also, of course, much more pervasive than this. Richard Martin, in Mean Streets and Raging Bulls, argues that, from the 80s on, the mainstream market has seen a growing tendency towards generic formularization and an attendant self-awareness – a phenomenon symptomatic of a cultural shift towards a postmodern preoccupation with style, surface, self-referentiality and playfulness. Generic knowingness and liberal borrowing (ranging from ‘homage’ to parody) have characterised the work of many of the best contemporary film-makers: the Coen brothers (in Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There) have played in dazzling ways with the character types, plots and images originally associated with Hammett, Chandler and James M. Cain; Tarantino’s films (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) have been highly distinctive reworkings of the formulas and materials of earlier crime films; amongst David Mamet’s films, we have his take on psychological suspense films in The House of Games, the Hitchcockian Spanish Prisoner, and his journey through the double- and triple-crossing streets of film noir in Heist.
The last decade alone has produced dozens of other films that play with the conventions established in the first half-century of crime films – for example, The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994), Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995), Bound (the Wachowski brothers, 1996), The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996), Palmetto (Volker Schlondorff, 1998), Wild Things (John McNaughton, 1998), Goodbye Lover (Roland Joffe, 1999), Drowning Mona (Nick Gomez, 2000), Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000), One Night at McCool’s (Harald Zwart, 2001).
