What Do Knives Out And WandaVision Have In Common?

gamerant.com:

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but viewers would hardly think so based on critics’ use of ‘pastiche’. The word is practically an epithet in movie reviews—the last insult spewed at a film when its failure was too feeble to be worth examining, too kitsch to provide guidance for the next attempt. Yet that usage does not reflect the historic role of pastiche in art; it does not reflect what pastiche is. Now pastiche has begun to emerge as a mainstream style—regarded less as imitation and more as bankable formulation.

The success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Disney’s WandaVision signals a new avenue by which studios might capitalize on a culture-wide thirst for nostalgia…while continuing to churn out original content—with room to innovate. It even has the potential to revive genres that have fallen out of favor, refreshing old formulas with minimal risk. In fact, pastiche may be just what Hollywood needs to break away from its rut of reboots and remakes, without staking its future on unpredictable trends.

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So what is pastiche? Basically defined, it is, “a work, esp. of literature, created in the style of someone or something else.” Pastiche thus relies on a clear understanding of authorship, but how that concept translates to an inherently collaborative medium like film—what constitutes film ‘authorship’—has been a subject of much scholarly debate. It is not necessary to dig into the finer points of so-called auteur theory, however, to appreciate that authorship in movies generally refers to the look and feel of a film overall.

There are many directors working in present-day Hollywood whose authorship is clearly defined and easily