I woke up mulling about the John Scalzi column I read yesterday about why Quentin Tarantino’s movie Inglourious Basterds is NOT a science fiction movie as some (e.g. me) claim it is.
As always, Scalzi is judicious in his diatribe, so though he does a comprehensive job of demolishing the ‘Basterds is SF’ argument, he also acknowledges that if fans want to claim it as SF, they should feel free to do so. As he puts it, ‘Hey, if you mess with the timeline, the geeks are going to come out of the woodwork and start chanting, “One of us! One of us!” I wouldn’t suggest that scifi fans shouldn’t feel as if Basterds fits into their genre. Take it! Love it! And, if it wins the Best Picture feel free to claim it as yours.’
I’ve written a rebuttal to Scalzi’s comments in my Comment to his blog; but I’m still left feeling there are big issues here to be thrashed out. It takes us into the murky waters of genre theory. And it involves asking some major questions: What is genre? What is SF? What is the difference between SF and fantasy? Millions of words have been expended on answers to these questions and yet, no one seems to agree.
And at some level, that fact kind of annoys me. Healthy disagreement is, well, healthy; but this level of disagreement reeks of mental chaos. And as someone who loves science, and the rigour and logic of scientific methodology, it irks me; because if scientists were this ‘open-minded’ about every topic under the sun, there would be no science. (To put it another way: if arts graduates had invented the space rocket, it would look exceedingly pretty, but it wouldn’t fly.)
So let me go through Scalzi’s points one by one; and then I’m going to put my head on the chopping block and offer my own attempted answers to all those big questions.
Scalzi argues that Basterds isn’t SF because:
’1) It wasn’t marketed as SF.’
’2) The science fictional aspects of the story are not necessarily essential to it.’
’3) It’s kinda more like fantasy than SF anyway.’
’4) If Inglourious Basterds is science fiction, so are most historical movies.’
For those new to this debate, who haven’t seen the movie, the point to bear in mind is: Tarantino’s film is set in World War II, and tells a fictional but plausible story about a team of US guerrillas (the ‘Basterds’) operating in Hitler’s Germany; but certain events that take place in the movie most emphatically DID NOT happen in real life. In other words, it’s an alternate history drama; and alt-history is a recognised sub-genre of science fiction.
Okay.
Scalzi’s point 1) is a good one. It’s generally acknowledged that ‘genre’ is something that is in part created by marketing. The crime genre wouldn’t be as vividly defined as it is if the publishers didn’t market their tales of criminal activity under the banner of Crime Fiction. There are Crime bookshelves in bookshops; specialist Crime awards, etc etc. And it’s a fact that a Margaret Attwood novel with ‘science fictional’ elements will be treated as a literary novel; but a Philip Palmer or a John Scalzi with SF elements will be sold, marketed, and branded as ‘SF’.
But that’s not good enough. Genre is more than a marketing tool; it’s a vivid, real thing, a slippery but true concept that adds value to the fiction we read, and the movies we see. Genre is like language; you can’t ‘explain’ it, but you can learn to understand it.
To back up that opinion, I will call upon my second favourite Professor (after the ineffable Professor Nicole Peeler – hi Nicole!) namely Professor Rick Altman, of the University of Iowa, whose book Film/Genre is a definitive and brilliant analysis of what genre is, and how it works, and how it changes depending on the way it is perceived.
In Altman’s film theory jargon, ‘Genres are most commonly taken to come into being when a body of texts shares a sufficient number of semantic and syntactic elements. This production-driven definition needs to be matched with a reception-driven definition recognizing that genres do not exist until they become necessary to a lateral communication process, that is until they serve a constellated community.’
Ouch. That was ugly! Sorry to inflict the jargon on you – but bear in mind, this is a specialist academic book and these guys feel the need to talk that way. Elsewhere in the book, however, Altman is more readable; and the reason I think THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT is because he actually does research. He uses a literary version of the scientific method; he studies a great deal of data, he finds the patterns that are hidden there, and thus draws his conclusions from evidence, not out of his own arse.
And much of the data Altman assesses is to do with actual movies produced by actual movie studios. He’s sifted through the files of most of the major studios to find out how THEY define genres. And the conclusions are startling. The genre of ‘musical’ for instance, didn’t actually exist in the early days of movies. Instead, it was used as an adjective, modifying nouns like comedy, romance, or melodrama. Here’s an abbreviated version of a list of movies of the 20s and 30s and the genre descriptions that were attached to them in their publicity material:
Weary River – epic
The Broadway Melody – all talking, all singing, all dancing dramatic sensation.
The Vagabond Lover – romantic musical comedy
Devil May Care – romance punctured with subtle comedy.
The Tender Foot – a Merry Western Comedy full of Laughs and Ginger.
The Love Parade – light opera.
The Rogue’s Song – operetta.
Roadhouse Nights – melodrama and button-busting comedy
College Love – 100% talking, singing, college picture.
There are two points here; The first is that we wouldn’t now necessarily define the genres of those films according to the way they were marketed THEN. So Scalzi’s Point 1) falls off a cliff.
Point 2) is that genre is clearly evolutionary. The very words we use to describe genre can change over time; and as far as movies are concerned, new genres are born all the time. Altman is particularly brilliant about analysing this; he points out that Hollywood studios love to copy their own hits, and the hits of others. So one successful movie about gladiators (a ‘history drama’) will spawn a dozen more movies about gladiators (creating the ‘gladiator movie genre’.) In the same way, the film Rififi is a brilliant movie about a gang of low lives staging a heist; and it’s now a template for the entire ‘heist movie genre’.
In the UK film industry, this ‘genre born out of coypcatting’ tendency is most clearly examplifed by the movie The Full Monty. It was a hugely successful movie; so for years UK producers have tried to produce other movies that are ‘like’ The Full Monty – ie ensemble comedies with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a genre – but it is! My friend Geoff Deane wrote one of the most successful of the Full Monty copycat movies – Kinky Boots, an ensemble comedy with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. (The inspiration for the movie was a documentary about a guy up North who owned a shoe factory and started making fetish footwear.) I’m not decrying the movie by saying it’s a copycat picture, nor I am in any way undervaluing the fabulous job Geoff did on the script. But that was always the deal – Geoff was told from the start that the producers wanted a ‘Full Monty type hit’ and they got one.
Thus are genres born…
That’s a long rebuttal to Scalzi’s point 1). But my underlying intent here is to suggest that you can’t define genre by what it says on the poster. Any serious film scholar has to have a beady eye for what the genre really is, according to the actual material in the movie.
Point 2) is, I’m sorry, a dubious argument. The ending of the film is great, and it depends TOTALLY on this alt-history twist. Take that away, and the story collapses, and becomes a less good movie. So yes, it IS essential to the movie. A similar argument applies to Ken MacLeod’s splendid The Execution Channel, much of which takes place in a world that is very like our contemporary world, but which has a dazzling SF twist in the closing chapters. If Ken had written a different ending, his publishers might have queried whether this was ‘really’ SF; but he didn’t! He knew all along the coup de roman he was going to pull off, and he pulled it off.
Point 3) is a tricky one. Does alt-history have to have a scientific explanation to be SF? Does The Man in the High Castle have such an explanation? Does The Yiddish Policeman’s Union have such an explanation? Okay in Star Trek stories there were often tales that take place in alternate histories that depend on the Enterprise passing through a black hole, or some such. But alternate history stories to my mind work best if they’re just presented ‘as if’.
So does that make them fantasy, or SF? Strictly speaking, the answer should probably be neither: Alternate History could and maybe should be treated as a separate genre. But because it’s a subgenre that evolved out of SF, it kind of fits there. And of course ‘science fiction’ is a term that by no means covers the full range of possibilities of the genre it describes. It drives me mad when people say: ’1984 can’t be an SF novel because it has no science’ (though in fact it does.) For SF is about more than just science! It’s about speculation, and extrapolation – hence the attempt by some writers to rename the entire genre as ‘speculative fiction’.
But this gets to be angels dancing on pins stuff. Alternate History IS Science Fiction, in my view, because that’s the genre that spawned it. It can also be fantasy (as in Naomi Novik’s fantasy series about the dragon Temeraire that fights in seabattles in Napoleonic times.)
Scalzi’s Point 4) is that lots of historical movies get the history wrong; so can’t they be classed as SF too? The answer; no they can’t. That’s just, sorry, dumb-ass sophistry. All drama relies on fictionalising, even the historical stuff! And when in doubt, print the legend; that’s the golden principle of storytelling. John – it’s just not the same thing!
This leaves one final question; does this actually matter? I mean, really? I don’t think it matters hugely to Scalzi, to be honest. He’s just having fun, sounding off, teasing geeks like me. Scalzi is a guy I admire hugely; he’s a fine writer, and a master polemicist, who does one of these columns every week and is a master of arguing the contrary point just to get everyone talking. So why, let’s be blunt about this, am I getting so genuinely hot under the collar?
The answer is: for me it DOES matter. It matters because Inglourious Basterds is a fine film, and a valuable film. Yet though it’s had commercial success and Oscar nominations, it was pissed upon by all the critics I read, who mocked its excessive violence (which is in fact essential to its genre!) and Tarantino’s woeful ignorance of history.
But Tarantino knows his history! And he’s deliberately falsifying it, as part of his artistic strategy of ‘genre-mashing’, and playing games with the audience. So though I’d argue it’s technically correct to class this as an ‘SF movie’, it’s equally correct to call it a war movie, and an action movie, and a B-movie hommage. It’s all those things, all at the same time. That’s the game Tarantino plays; he makes movies for a sophisticated audience who know genre, and love genre, and enjoy the rollercoaster ride experience of totally changing genre a reel before the end.
Genre is a label but it’s not a straitjacket; it’s a creative tool, that offers a direct route to the audience’s imagination via their own insights and knowledge and expectations of ‘this kind’ of film. Ultimately, many of Tarantino’s films (excluding Jackie Brown which plays a different game) constitute a genre of their own – the postmodern, genre-hopping, genre-mashing ‘Tarantino movie’ genre.
And smarter critics, steeped in the traditions and tropes of speculative fiction/science fiction/fantasy fiction, would have spotted all that, and not written such dumb reviews.
Inglourious Basterds is in my view, a fine and startling piece of work. Like Hitchock’s Psycho – which also changes genres in mid-movie – it shocks by doing the truly unexpected just when you least expect anything so unexpected to occur….
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Hi Philip! *waves*
I have to admit, I haven’t seen this, yet . . . But when I do I’ll let you know.
I’d love to know your thoughts on it all!
I’m in your camp–the last few minutes of the movie pushed it from good to great, in my opinion, because it isn’t clear that he’d doing alt history until the end–the whole time the audience, indoctrinated on just about every WWII film since, well, WWII, is waiting for things to fall apart because he can’t, obviously he won’t–holy shit, he did! He actually did! Brilliant. I’m not part of the Tarantino cult but I thought this was one of his best, and to me what elevates so much is that late game rug-tug where we realize the rules have changed and we’re not in Kansas anymore. If alt-history is by definition SF–which, to be honest, I’m not sure of: SF as science fiction or speculative fiction? genre distinctions for the lose–but, back to topic, if alternative history is SF, I don’t see how you can argue it. After all, if Tarantino made another film set in the same universe as IB but even a little bit past the events in the film no one could argue, I don’t think. Hmmm…
The one area of this argument I have a problem with is the idea that Alt-history developed out of science fiction. I’m not entirely sure that’s true–certainly it’s where its most common today, but that itself is a fallacy given your argument concerning film genres in the prior point.
I’m wondering about the origins of alt-history in relationship to historical fiction, most especially. The intentional fictionalization of history is very different from bad history–and I’ll admit I don’t know where we draw the line on that–but does that mean that alt-history is part of the historical fiction sub-genre, but doing a bit of cross-over in relationship to science fiction sometimes?
Hi Jesse
Kill Bill 1 – don’t you love that too? The scene where the women fight in the snow? Amazing visual poetry…mixed with slapstick violence earlier on. Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs are my least favourite QTs – It’s Kill Bill & Inglourious Basterds that do it for me. I’m also fond of Death Proof.
Glad you loved the ending of IG as much as I do – I really thought he’d run out of road! I also loved the bit – but I’ll shut up in case I lapse into spoilers.
Does alt-history develop out of science fiction? Damn that may well be a glaring hole in my argument!
But I can’t think of any other genre that can accomodate alt history. If it’s an historical novel where the facts are wrong – it’s bad history! It’s the lateral leap that makes it ‘speculative fiction’.
But the simple fact is that I associate alt history with Science Fiction because that’s how I found out about it – through reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (both Hitler alt histories.)
You can justify any alt history story on the basis it takes place in an alternative universe; and the existence of such universes is postulated in some versions of quantum and modern physics. But only a fool would SAY THAT in an alt history about Hitler.
But I think my overall feeling is that science fiction is a very broad church – it’s any speculative fiction that doesn’t rely on out and out magic. I have a feeling that I first read the first ‘speculative fiction’ in Brian Aldiss’s history of SF, The Trillion Year Spree. And a bit of quick googling tells me that Robert Heinlein is credited with coining the phrase. SF can mean ‘science fiction’ or ‘speculative fiction’ by his formulation.
Well that never caught on; but that’s my rationale. SF (spec-fic or sci-fi) is the genre of extrapolation and imagination set within a credibly realistic world, whatever that world might be.
By the way – where the hell has my copy of The Iron Dream gone! I loved that book.
Obviously you need to read some new critics *cough*
For me, the strongest point is #2. There’s a lot to love in Inglorious Basterds, but what really knocks your brain out your ear is that cuckoo-crazy ending. Much of its power comes from the gleeful shock of its leap from the rails of real history.
Without you-know-who in that Paris theater, the theater-owner’s actions are robbed of an awful lot of meaning. It’s hard for me to understand how a storyteller like Scalzi doesn’t see that.
“the simple fact is that I associate alt history with Science Fiction because that’s how I found out about it.”
This explains how well alt history fits into science fiction–if you’re a science fiction fan.
But not everyone comes to via that route. When I mentioned to several people that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was science fiction because of the alt history, they all thought it was the silliest thing they’d ever heard (“It doesn’t have anything to do with science! It’s historical fiction.”)
I found myself unable to disagree with them.
Well argued enough that Scalzi himself linked to you!
I’d say it’s fantasy, but not SF, since fantasy is what alternate history falls under. But while “Inglorious Basterds” can certainly be *classified* as fantasy, a win by IB won’t have the same impact that say, an Avatar (possible) or District 9 (very unlikely) Best Picture win would have. Because “Inglorious Basterds” isn’t popularly identified as sci-fi, we can’t point to it as evidence of the genre’s popularity in the same way we can point to Avatar, if that makes sense. I think the most accurate genre description for IB is that it’s a Tarantino WWII movie, with all that entails.
Sorry, didn’t read the part of the post about Alternate History evolving out of sci-fi, not fantasy. For some reason (amazon’s classifications?) I had it in fantasy. I always thought of SF as something that *could* happen with the right technology & amount of time in our world (cloning dinosaurs), and fantasy as something that could *not* happen (dragons, Joel! So many dragons!) Alternate History being in the past makes it fall under fantasy. But that could just be me. Still a fascinating & enjoyable post.
Post didn’t go through earlier, apparently. To self-summarize (with vague spoilers):
A lot of the emotional power behind Inglorious Basterds’ tremendously forceful, wildly insane ending comes from the presence of you-know-who and all his big guns being in that theater. Without them being there–without history being altered–her decision to torch the place is robbed of much of its meaning.
To hear a storyteller like Scalzi say the alternate history involved is inconsequential to the movie, then, confuses me.
(Also, maybe you need to start reading some new critics *cough*)
Hi guys, welcome to the debate.
Ed, you make a really good point about the misleading trailer in your own crit of the movie.
(http://www.tri-cityherald.com/.....lence.html)
Lind, I think you WERE right about Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Tell your friends to back down! The point here is that Chabon’s novel won a Hugo Award, which is THE science fiction award, and HE ACCEPTED IT. And that’s good enough for me…But the point is that movies & films can be multi-genre – TYPU is a literary novel, AND a crime novel, AND an SF novel, all at the same time.
Greg, I do take your point about alt-history being more fantasy than SF. But the boundaries between these two genres are pretty much invisible, in my view. Are Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books SF or fantasy? Telepathy and dragons is magic = fantasy; but the dragons are genetically engineered and the books are set on an alien planet = science fiction.
So I tend to use the acronym SFF, which covers those vast numbers of books that are ‘ampersand’ stories – ie they are science fiction & (ampersand) fantasy, both at the same time.
So – alt-history is SFF! See how I wriggled out of that one!
btw, it was very gentlemanly of John Scalzi to give me a referral from his sight – I do really admire that guy. But in passing, I should just say –
Ha! He’s clearly on the run! He writes: ‘Palmer dares to disagree with me – does he not know I’m ALWAYS RIGHT!’ But what kind of argument is that! It’s like the final blustering of a Bond villain shortly before the laser gun breaks down….
The movie was sold as being scalping, stupid action; and is actually something much more subtle. But the real fans don’t seem to have minded that!
Like Mary Whitehouse in the 80s, I’ve not actually seen the item in question, nevertheless I have an opinion.
I have trouble reconciling alt-history with SF. And yes, there have been some fabulous alt-history SF stories, just as there have been some fabulous alt-history fantasy stories (Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son series, for instance).
And I think it an oversimplification to say that the alternative is that they are historical stories where the history is wrong – they’re historical stories where the history is *different*.
And I also disagree that a genre is *necessarily* tied to its parentage. My parents are very, very different people to me, and even though I’m directly descended from them, I’m very much my own thing.
The few alt-history stories I’ve had come into the various slush piles I have read have always been rejected for being “not genre enough”.
Ultimately, it comes down to a point you made at the start of this post – the genres aren’t so tightly defined that it is possible to categorise all novels neatly, and far from this being a problem, I think it’s a benefit. Pigeon-holing only benefits randy pigeons.
A fabulous, nest-poker of a blog!
It’s hard to know where to start when it comes to the classification of certain works. My own, possibly somewhat backward, take seems to rest somewhere in the muck between the Palmer and Scalzi trenches. You see, I was always taught that any piece of fiction that messes around with historical people or events should be classed as ‘historiographic metafiction’, and thrown hard into the ‘post-modernist literature’ camp.
If this is the case, how then do we define a novel like Alan Roberts’ ‘Yellow Blue Tibia’ – an alt-history tale of aliens and Stalinism? As a ‘post-modern science-fictional piece of historiographic metafiction’? Jeepers, the possible genre categorizations are simply mind-melting!
The problem lies, I think, in trying to categorize anything at all. The thing is, the moment you start to do that there’s no room to manoeuvre, no real space for interpretation or personal definition.
‘Inglourious Basterds’, to me, is just as worthy of waving that science-fiction banner as Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ – both dealing, as they do, with alternate takes on the second World War – speculative ideas formed beneath the banner of SF.
Genre may be slippery, and it may well help to understand what we watch, read and do, but ultimately (again, personal and ill-thought out opinion here. Please, no spitting) it seems too intangible and smoke-like a thing to be used as any kind of definitive tool. There is, surely, no such thing as a definitive genre tag. All we have are stories, living things that change and grow, and become all things to all people.
And it’s that fervent desire, of some, to have everything under the sun neatly compartmentalised that irks me so much. It’s fabulous that Basterds can be both an exploitation-style war movie, and a drooling, bat-shit-crazy alt-history SF mash of a thing. But, when folks try to enforce some kind of rigid absolute the argument tends to fall apart.
So that’s why I wish we could reject the notion that these films/novels/whatevers need to be anything other than just ‘stories’. Wild, wonderful, inspiring stories.
QT and me go way back…but I feel we’ve always had a somewhat vexed relationship. I’m a fan of the old Shaw Bros. kung fu pictures, especially those with Gordon Liu, who Tarantino wasted in Kill Bill 1…but used to genius effect in the second installment. His self-awareness–and self-importance–works more for me sometimes than others, but as is often the case that could have as much to do with my mood/inclination when I screen the films as for the films themselves. Personally, I loved Jackie Brown, for example, but was terribly disappointed with Deathproof…more of a Cannonball Run man myself
Overall, I think IB my be my favorite thing that he’s done.
In terms of genre distinctions, well, I’m with Stuart–though the neo-medievalist in me intrinsically loves taxonomy! The paradoxes we face as complex personalities…
I am fairly sure that alternate history predates sci-fi by a few thousand years.
Unless, of course, we believe that everyone who wrote those stories about Arthur in the middle ages actually believed every word or that the Greek tragedies all were the result of the tragedian producing an alternate version of the troy story (Euripides’ “Helen” would be a good example of this) simply got the story wrong.
They weren’t stupid. The urge to ask the question “what if this had happened instead” is as old as writing about the past. Modern Alternate history and Sci-fi may have a great deal in common and there may indeed be a large amount of merging of the two genres, but the argument that all alternate history is sci-fi is questionable. The inverse argument might work, however, as all sci-fi by default requires the creation of an alternate history (and usually future) of some sort.
I also must disagree that Scalzi’s point 4 was mere sophistry.
Gladiator isn’t just a dramatization of the reign of Commodus, it is an aggressive rewriting of the story from beginning to end to fit the ideals of a modern audience. Either its writers are idiots or it is a conscious alternate history. Given the overall quality of the movie, I expect its the latter. The only reason its ending is not every bit as startling as Inglorious Basterd’s is that while most of the population knows about WWII, the beginnings of the crisis of the third century are not exactly common knowledge.
Of course, I increasingly think that the genre divides we have established within the large category of speculative fiction are barely worth mentioning. In all cases there is a basic “What if…” question at play, and the difference between sci-fi, alternate history, and fantasy is really only the second half of that question. What if we had this cool tech = sci fi. What if this basic part of reality was different = fantasy. What if something different had happened in the past = alternate history. That the genres merge into each other becomes entirely unsurprising when you consider that the piece of speculative fiction that only has one underlying “what if…” is a quite rare species.
These comments are full of fabulous food for thought and powerful arguments…thank you, guys!
Can I come back on a few points?
Joel D, I would argue that the first ever science fiction story was written in 160 AD by Lucian of Samosta, who told the story of a man who flew to the moon and discovered extra-terrestrials:
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LucianSamosata.htm
It also occurs to me that the classic story of Daedalus and Icarus is SF – Daedelus is your archetypal mad scientist, and instead of a de Lorean, Icarus had wings made of wax. (That was NEVER going to work.)
Of course, it’s a stretching a point to call these stories ‘SF’; but if I were writing a history of the genre, that certainly would be my Chapter 1.
Joe, your point about ALL history being alt-history is dazzlingly well argued. I can’t and wouldn’t want to counter it – it’s a great thesis. And if Scalzi had argued his point that persuasively, I wouldn’t have called it sophistry. But he didn’t, so I did.
I would however argue that as it’s generally understood, ‘alt-history’ is a story which RADICALLY diverges from real history because of a single fork in the road. If the Romans had written an epic about a world in which the Greeks conquered Rome – THAT would be alt-history.
Amidst all the other wonderful points, there seems to be a common theme, which I would define thus:
Genre is boring.
Not only is genre boring: genre is a strait-jacket; and any attempt to taxonomise writing according to its genre is stifling to creativity and imagination. Having a ‘Genre’ is like being told by your mum that your bedtime is 10pm!
That, as I say, is for me kinda the general undercurrent of the comments. No one loves genre!
Well, maybe I’m just the geek to outgeek all geeks – maybe I’m the kid who WANTS to go to bed at 10pm! – but I actually love genre. It’s a tool for critics and writers; you can’t ever write a screenplay or a novel without thinking about what genre it’s in. (‘Literary novel’ is a genre in its own right.) And the joy of genre is that it’s liberating, not stifling, collaborative not prescriptive. Genre is what allows the audience to be part of the story-telling; the minute you know ‘what kind of movie’ it is you can start guessing what’ll happen next. And of course the good storyteller tricks you by making something unexpected happen next. (In most popular genres, one of the genre rules is ‘keep the reader/audience guessing.’)
Genre is cool…am I the only person who thinks that?
I’m not so sure I see genre as ‘boring’ – there are some wonderful genre movies out there, some great pieces of genre-led literature that I wouldn’t want to live without – the whole concept is more a bothersome noise at the back of my head I do my best to tune out, before I go mad and start to dribble.
To be honest, the last thing on my mind when it comes to my own work is what genre-box that piece is going to fit snugly into. I search for a meaning, a premise, characters or images that resonate along with my own strange frequencies.
Sure, the rules applicable to rom-com, for example, can be a fabulous aid to those who want to write a staid and predictable re-hash of every other romantic comedy we’ve seen since time began, but that’s kind of the point – adherence to genre, those silly little tags that define EVERYTHING said project is, can only breed predictability.
I understand that genre can allow the audience to be part of the story-telling, but I’d argue against that being a positive thing. I don’t want to know where a film/novel/whatever’s going to go, I don’t want to be aware of the trappings of genre, the fact that the hunky, brusque star will bed (or at least smooch) the frosty, yet attractive starlet by the 50 minute mark. As audience members, we shouldn’t really be aware of anything other than what’s on screen. We shouldn’t be able to look behind the curtain, and see the great Oz pulling his levers.
The best experiences are those that surprise, those that whisk you away without warning. Case in point: I recently had an amazing time watching ‘Martyrs’ – sold as a hardcore horror movie, it takes so many twists and turns that you genuinely have no idea where this film will take you, what crazed thing could happen next. It starts out playing to the trappings of horror, but moves swiftly to become something else entirely, shedding the conventions of the genre to find greater meaning and purpose by the wrought climax.
‘Martyrs’ transcends naming, moves beyond what these little, stifling tags can define it as.
For me genre becomes useful when used as a tool – a way NOT to do things, a way to see what’s come before and avoid it like the impending zombie plague we know is coming, sooner or later.
Another SF movie that wasn’t marketed as such is Vanilla Sky – and the same applies to its Spanish-language original Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes).
That’s a good point Gary…I haven’t actually seen Vanilla Sky. Should I watch it or go straight to the Spanish original?