{"id":1527,"date":"2011-12-30T15:44:13","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T15:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=1527"},"modified":"2018-10-18T17:00:37","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T17:00:37","slug":"parodies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=1527","title":{"rendered":"Parodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Parody of the Crime Film<\/span><\/h3>\n

Lee Horsley, Lancaster University<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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: Tom Stoppard’s play,\u00a0The Real Inspector Hound<\/em>, for example, parodies the enclosed world of the English country house murder; the narrator of James Thurber’s \u2018The Macbeth Murder Mystery\u2019 muses on an American woman encountered at a Lake District hotel:<\/p>\n

\n

‘I’ve read that people never have figured out\u00a0Hamlet, so it isn’t likely Shakespeare would have made Macbeth as simple as it seems.’
\nI thought this over while I filled my pipe. ‘Who do you suspect?’ I asked, suddenly.
\n‘Macduff,’ she said, promptly.
\n‘Good God!’ I whispered, softly. (Thurber,\u00a0The Thurber Carnival<\/em>\u00a0[1942] 1965: 33)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

The lady \u201cmurder specialist\u201d has made the \u201cstupid mistake\u201d of reading Macbeth<\/em>\u00a0under the misapprehension that it is a detective story. “The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim,” she tells him. Bringing to bear the scholarly apparatus of a devoted student of Shakespeare (\u201cthe Third Murderer has puzzled ‘Macbeth’ scholars for three hundred years\u201d), the narrator questions her closely about the quite different set of critical assumptions that she deploys in her own reading of\u00a0Macbeth<\/em>: “\u2018Is that so?\u2019 I murmured. \u2018Oh, yes,\u2019 said my informant. \u2018They have to keep surprising you.\u2019\u201d Thurber\u2019s parody raises in its brief compass several of the questions that arise in any consideration of the history and the nature of crime fiction: What divides \u2018serious literature\u2019 from genre fiction? How close is the relationship between the two? What are the conventions that define the various subgenres of crime fiction? What expectations do we bring to our reading of popular fiction and what demands does it make on our critical faculties?<\/p>\n

Parody, as Dwight Macdonald suggests, is to be enjoyed as \u201can intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what ‘serious’ critics must write out at length\u201d (Macdonald,\u00a0Parody<\/em> 1960: xiii), and crime fiction has been a rich source of comic and parodic reworkings which have functioned both to assist in the process of generic transformation and to crystallise the conventions of its main subgenres. In novels that work to modify the paradigms, the impulse to parody has often been quietly in play in the details that have shifted our understanding of one well-established narrative form or another \u2013 Christie\u2019s\u00a0The Murder of Roger Ackroyd<\/em>, Hammett\u2019s\u00a0The Tenth Clew<\/em>\u00a0and Hjortsberg\u2019s\u00a0Falling Angel\u00a0<\/em>can all, for example, be seen as transformative texts that deliberately exaggerate an aspect of the established form in order to challenge our habits of reading and change our generic expectations. Alison Light observes that the whodunit has, from the outset, been \u201ca self-conscious form given to self-parody\u201d \u2013 so much so that by the end of a decade Ronald Knox \u201cwas able to draw up a list of its mock rules\u201d (Light,\u00a0Forever England<\/em>\u00a01991: 74). Patricia Merivale, in her contribution to this Companion, notes that parody and its near-relation pastiche have been important ingredients as well in more \u201cserious\u201d postmodern adaptations of crime fiction.<\/p>\n

Working with bolder strokes on a broader canvas, contemporary cinema has fixed in the minds of popular audiences the key elements in a range of subgeneric variants. Classic detection is parodied, for example, in\u00a0The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\u2019 Smarter Brother<\/em>\u00a0(Gene Wilder, 1978); Zero Effect\u00a0<\/em>(Jake Kasdan, 1997), with Daryl Zero as the Holmes figure whose work \u201crelies fundamentally on two basic principles: objectivity and observation, or \u2018the two obs\u2019\u201d;\u00a0Clue<\/em>\u00a0(Jonathan Lynn, 1985), with its accumulating bodies and three different endings; and the long-running series of Clouseau films, from the early Peter Sellers\u00a0Pink Panther\u00a0(Blake Edwards, 1963) to the recent (2006 and 2009) Steve Martin remakes. The gangsters of the great sagas are reduced to children in Theodore Huff\u2019s short film\u00a0Little Geezer<\/em>\u00a0(1932) and, more famously, in Alan Parker\u2019s\u00a0Bugsy Malone<\/em>\u00a0(1976), which opens with \u201cSomeone once said if it was raining brains, Roxy Robinson wouldn’t even get wet.\u201d Hard-boiled private eye films are sent up in\u00a0Dead Men Don\u2019t Wear Plaid<\/em>\u00a0(Carl Reiner, 1982) and\u00a0Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/em> (Robert\u00a0Zemeckis, 1988); police procedurals in the \u2018Naked Gun\u2019 series; Hitchcock films in Mel Brooks\u2019\u00a0High Anxiety\u00a0<\/em>(1977) and Danny DeVito\u2019s\u00a0Throw Mama from the Train<\/em>\u00a0(1987).<\/p>\n

Parody and pastiche of crime film conventions have become increasingly pervasive during the last two decades. Generic knowingness and liberal borrowing (ranging from \u2018homage\u2019 to parody) have characterised the work of many of the best contemporary film-makers, and dozens of films have played with established character types, plots and images. Amongst the period\u2019s distinctive reworkings of the formulas and materials of earlier crime narratives we find, for example, the Coen brothers \u2019The Big Lebowski<\/em>\u00a0(1998) and\u00a0The Man Who Wasn\u2019t There<\/em>\u00a0(2001); Serial Mom<\/em>\u00a0(John Waters, 1994);\u00a0Get Shorty<\/em>\u00a0(Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995);\u00a0One Night at McCool\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0(Harald Zwart, 2001);\u00a0Kiss Kiss Bang Bang<\/em>\u00a0(Shane Black 2005); and David O. Russell\u2019s\u00a0I Heart Huckabees<\/em>\u00a0(2004), in which existential detectives keep everyday life under surveillance and a femme fatale played by Isabelle Huppert tells the protagonist, \u201cIt is a losing game mankind has played for more than a century. Sadness is what you are, do not deny it. The universe is a lonely place, a painful place. This is what we can share between us, period.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Hupert\u2019s eloquent existential gloom suggests, to parody a form isn\u2019t just to make its formal qualities highly visible; it is, generally speaking, to juxtapose conventional elements of style, structure and characterisation with the way in which the text creates meaning. Part of the effect often resides in the implication that there is a gap between serious intent and generic fixity \u2013 and this is, of course, a difficulty with which writers of genre fiction frequently contend, an acute awareness of this possible disjunction often leading them to modify the form.<\/p>\n

Parts of the above discussion are incorporated in the Conclusion to the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0ed. Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). \u00a0\u00a0Click here to visit the Wiley-Blackwell site.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Parody of the Crime Film Lee Horsley, Lancaster University A genre so open to self-parody as the classic detective story<\/p>\n

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