Generic Involution and Artistic Concession in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema: Overheard Trilogy and Beyond

genres and the cultural myths they embodied “exhaust[ed] themselves” (578). Cawelti’s theory was developed (e.g., Collins) and widely contested. Major criticisms, exemplified by the work of Janet Staiger, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, questioned the concept of genre blending by rejecting the hypothesis of genre purity underpinning Cawelti’s claim; the authors contributed to the growing consensus that films are more or less instances of genre blending, which is a standard practice in a system like Hollywood. Such criticisms have not denied altogether the phenomenon of genre blending in practical terms—genre is a practical concept after all—and the fact that genre blending has become a particularly salient feature in certain films at specific historical moments provides a potentially fruitful site for understanding film history and the sociocultural milieu in which it occurs. The criticisms have mounted ontological and epistemological challenges, such as the theoretical futility of seeking purity in genres and the implausibility of neatly demarcating (hybrid) genres. Most criticisms, however, have invariably underemphasized an axiological aspect of Cawelti’s theory. At the very end of his seminal essay, Cawelti made a value judgment—namely, that transformations within a traditional genre tend to produce “the highest artistic accomplishment” (579), without expounding why genre blending necessarily leads to achievement or progress in artistic terms. The conclusion was likely drawn more from the revolutionary films he chose as case studies than from a deduction of the generic john cawelti’s influential essay “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” published in 1979, ignited considerable scholarly attention and debate on the issue of genre blending in cinema. Significantly, there emerged an enduring dichotomy between genre blending as exhaustion and genre blending as evolution in understanding the practice, which I will explicate in the first pages. In my research on a series of posthandover Hong Kong films, however, I find neither the creative exhaustion nor the artistic evolution model adequate to depict and explain the phenomenon of genre blending. A focused analysis of a group of hybrid films from Hong Kong, especially of the characterization of protagonists, illustrates that they exhibit a tendency that can rather be described and comprehended using the anthropological concept of “involution.” A sociohistorical and psychocultural account of involution, in particular, provides a penetrating insight for understanding the occurrence of what I call “generic involution” in the context of Hong Kong cinema over the past two decades. Through an analysis of Chinatown (1974) and a few other titles, Cawelti in his essay suggested a pronounced tendency toward genre transformation in 1970s Hollywood films, which was marked by the blending of traditional genres with external elements. For him, genre blending resulted because the traditional