MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of parody as a mode particularly suited for the “testing” of discourses have clearly inspired much contemporary theory and analysis that seeks to find the postmodern and/or meta-cinematic in Hollywood cinema. Bakhtin found parody’s multi-voiced strategy to be a fundamental category within his concept of the dialogic. Simultaneously figuring selected models as both objects of degraded scorn and privileged affection, parody is fundamentally paradoxical, engaged in a strategy of establishing critique and difference with its object, while concurrently implying some forms of unity and resemblance with same. Bakhtin valorizes Don Quixote as an ideal example of a testing parody, because it contains “a profound but cunningly balanced dialogism of parodying discourse.” In the 90’s, there was an intriguing cycle of more than two dozen Hollywood-on-Hollywood films that provocatively examined classical Hollywood cinema of the past, present, and future. These movies – such as Barton Fink (1991), Mistress (1992), The Player (1992), and Ed Wood (1994) (to name a few of the many) – employed competing and paradoxical tones of affection and scorn to construct meta-parodic, often near-nihilistic discourses which self-reflexively put classical Hollywood cinema’s prior generic assumptions and rules of formation to the test. This paper examines some defining features of such postmodern, meta-cinematic “authorized transgressions,” and what they might tell us about the ambiguities of American film culture two decades ago.