XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

Resumo:680-1

Oral (Tema Livre)

680-1	Contradictions of the culture industry: genre hybridization as its own antagonist
Autores:	Charles Ponte (UERN - Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do NorteUNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

Resumo

Promises of novelty permeate the discourse of the culture industry in everyday life; the advertisement for a new pop band, TV show or film brings along a taunting of consumer tardiness, as if the biggest crime to be committed in a capitalist society were the buying deficit. However, more often than not, such promises turn out to be the reworking of old formulas, either by masking repetition through the technological dazzling of the audience, or merely blending elements from older artifacts, which includes the hybridization of genres, and ultimately results in the elimination of genre characteristics. Thus, dialectically, on the one hand, there could, indeed, be a potentiality for the new in such changes, when considering only one artifact, on the other, once all genres start copying this process, the hybridization as a means of procuring new forms of expression tends to backfire. To illustrate that double movement, this paper takes the Scream trilogy (1996; 1998; 2000), acclaimed as a new form of slasher movie, as an example of such hybridization trend in the last decades, and decomposes the films’ structure to identify what genres it blended especially in terms of decoupage and editing, then comparing it to other genres from the same decade, such as the teenager comedy and the thriller. In this case, the apparent innovation becomes a bane for the intended effect, since the old genres, reasonably standardized and differentiable, now overlap, approximating one another and eliminating the few stylistic traits they might have had. Drawing mainly from Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry (1985) as well as Adorno’s further elaborations on the same topic (2001), one can easily perceive that, even if the hybridization springs out from the search for different cultural formats (what cannot be actually asserted from the few modifications implemented), in the long run, this modification ends up in blending all genres into one, therefore rendering the attempt to produce difference its own antagonist.

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