Genre

Here are actor Liam Neeson’s opening lines from the first Taken movie:

“I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Those lines tell you exactly what kind of movie it is going to be, don’t they? This is the very definition of genre movies, writes Eugene Wei:

“Genre movies are ones in which we know going on what will happen, broadly, and so you grant audience pleasure by fulfilling expectations, not by subverting them.”

No wonder then that those very lines were also part of the Taken trailer.

Wei goes on to say:

“These are not movies that will waste much time with character development or other high art duties that will slow the narrative pace.”

But is that a must-have characteristic? Or does it just happen to be like that most of the time? After all, haven’t we all read books and watched movies where putting them in a genre felt wrong? Have we not felt what Neil Gaiman wrote in his provocatively titled talk, “The Pornography of Genre”?

“There were spy novels and… novels with spies in them, cowboy books and books that took place among cowboys in the American West.”

But is that a just a touchy-feely differentiation? A subjective call? Sure, but as Gaiman said, there’s also a somewhat objective criterion for the differentiation:

“If the plot is a machine that allows you to get from set piece to set piece, and the set pieces are things without which the reader or the viewer would feel cheated, then, whatever it is, it’s genre.”

On the other hand, says Gaiman:

“When every event is part of the plot, if the whole thing is important, if there aren’t any scenes that exist to allow you to take your audience to the next moment that the reader or the viewer feels is the thing that he or she has paid for, then it’s a story, and the genre is irrelevant.”

And so, says Gaiman:

“Subject matter does not make genre.”

Perfectly put.

All of which then leads Gaiman to ask the Zen like question:

“Do we transcend genre by doing amazing genre work or do we transcend it by stepping outside of it?”