Figuring the Contemporary in US Popular Cinema, 1967-2022: Genre, History, Event explores how popular film offers us frameworks through which to historicize the present and to imagine alternative futures in the opacity of the contemporary moment. This book offers an original way to interpret the contemporary as form, presenting the idea of contemporaneity as historical concept and not simply as "period" in the temporal sense. It explores how we might historize our current critical preoccupation with the seeming immediacy of the present. This study offers a nuanced set of theoretical interventions and critical analyses tracking how a dominant cultural logic has unfolded over the last six decades by way of the historical evolution of popular cinematic form. In a "postmodern," "posthistorical" present, the representation of history must assume the forms of inherited plots and familiar genres—periodized formalizations from another time that must ultimately fail to address our own but through which failures and disjunctures the Real of history nonetheless appears in negative relief. This book is therefore about how we might (and must) figure the elusive history of the contemporary by way of such reified, secondhand cultural forms in their spaces of overlap or hybridization or in their failed generic closure.
