Postmodern Movies: Neo-Comic Tragedies, Neo-Noirs, Neo-Westerns

A movie is a Western. Or it a Film Noir. Or it is a Romantic Comedy. Or whatever.

But what if, as Jacque Derrida has asked, there is something more going on?

"What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law of genre itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility that would confound its sense, order, and reason?"

These postmodern questions destabilize not only the idea of individual genres, but the very idea of genre itself. Hence: neo-genres. Neo-genres are genres that understand, as it were, their own contingency. Neo-genres revel in their own self-consciousness. In this ground-breaking new book, film scholar Richard Gilmore reflects on these neo-genre films, and the wisdom - if any - that can be found in them.