Reading Genre and How Not to Write a Review

I realize that blogs are for dashing off quick thoughts and first impressions, but too often this leads to really weak arguments, unexplained assumptions, and random leaps (I'm sure I'm guilty of all three most of the time).

For example, this blog post features a book review of the horror novel The Ruins by Scott Smith, a book that I haven't read but which has a high enough profile to have been reviewed in the Times. So one would assume that this is on the quality end of the genre spectrum. People should love it, right?

No such luck, as the blog review fails to engage in the actual story or themes of the book and instead complains about the missed opportunity to do something really cool with man-eating plants and Mayans. He concludes:

The only acknowlegdement of the strangeness of this fact comes when one of the characters suggests that maybe it isn't a plant at all. But what else could it be? An alien? A weird Mayan god? No one speculates. Furthermore, no one considers bum-rushing the Mayans who are keeping them on this hill, even when it becomes gruesomely obvious that they will quickly die there unless they get off. No one considers suicide until it's way too late. And the end is such a stunning horror movie cliche that I'm surprised Smith found the fortitude to write it at all. Was he truly that unfamiliar with genre tropes (unlikely, I think), or was he so focused on the movie deal with his buddy Ben Stiller that he thought he'd save the screenwriters some time and just tack on Generic Ending A right at the outset?

The book starts out with promise, but devolves into a cartoonish morass of illogic and cliche a little less than halfway through.

There are two problems with this.

One is the fanboy obsession with teh cool, the need to be able to imagine all situations as though they were action figures in a playset, avatars in a video game, in which the goal of any situation is to battle to the end and advance to the next level. Why not bum rush the Mayans? That's what we'd do if this was Halo. The purpose of a story, on the other hand, is to lock people in a situation and see how they fail to behave in the ways we would expect them to, or they would expect themselves to.

The second problem is the fanboy anxiety with regard to cliche; the fear that it has all been done and said before, because it has been done and said before (except for bloggers who are all tremendously original and gifted). The idea of a "genre cliche" is in itself redundant because all genres are cliched. You can't fix it by calling it a trope either. A trope is just a cliche dressed up for prom.

So to say that the ending is a "stunning horror movie cliche" is essentially meaningless. There is no information contained in that statement. We never learn what the cliche is, why it is unoriginal, why its worse than other similar cliches, or how the ending should have been different. The whole attack is designed to highlight the blogger's superiority to everyone reading the post as well as the poor published novelist.

Moreover, if it is the novelist's purpose to write a horror story, then he or she must make use of horror tropes and cliches, it is required that they do so, otherwise (by definition) it is not a horror story. In other words, at a very basic level, the purpose of a horror story is to be a horror story; genre is an end in itself. To say that someone ought to be more familiar with a vaguely defined list of genre tropes and then assiduously avoid them (except for the man-eating plants!) is just confusing.

There seems to be some unspoken assumption that each writer must re-invent the wheel, rework the cliches from the ground up, invert them, reverse them, make them familiar but not too familiar. But how would one do that without disappointing the audience? And who decides which cliches are cool and which aren't. Is there a Gawker for horror writers so we can keep track of what's Hot this week? Is there a Pitchfork for horror snobs?

I'm guessing that if the book is as bad as asserted it has nothing to do with the reasons mentioned in the review. Most stories fail for the same reasons: poorly drawn characters, lack of an empathetic main character, absence of an impact or obstacle character, no relationship story, incomplete plotting, etc.

But here's the Times reviewer:

One of the creepy pleasures of “The Ruins” is the way it combines genre clichés with the verisimilitude that is Smith’s great gift. Transylvanian law apparently requires every horror tale to have a “You vant to go to the castle of COUNT DRACULA?!” scene, complete with terrified driver, howling wolves and rearing horses. Smith’s version is characteristically convincing: the local truck driver who takes the six explorers to the end of the road warns Amy not to go, but grows disgusted when she insists and suddenly says: “Go, then. I tell you no good, but still you go. . . . Go, go, go.” He drives off, leaving her confused; the rest of the party doesn’t even know the conversation took place. Things then fall apart with appalling suddenness, but the characters’ brains keep on ticking like cheap clocks. It’s the contrast between the familiar and the unspeakable that makes this book so harrowing.

In this reading the cliche is not only identified (Dracula) but contextualized and dramatized to show how it enriches the project, reveals character, and advances the psychological aspects of the story. The cliche connects the story to the tradition of the horror story while placing it in an unfamiliar and wholly new situation. It's not just good writing, but good reading. And reading well, making meaning out of the visual and textual fragments that make a story, is the most difficult art to master.

Genre and Book Sales

This is a pretty interesting chart from a study I found here [pdf].




I'm sort of amazed that in spite of the energy and creativity that goes into so much genre fiction (particularly Science Fiction and Horror), that they hold such a small share of the market.

It's no wonder we fall so easily into these religious arguments about what is or is not real sci-fi or real horror. There isn't very much at stake.
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Listening to: The Verve - Come On
via FoxyTunes

Cliches and Conventions

I was thinking about the differences between cliches and conventions in genre fiction. When is something familiar enough to set the right tone, but not so familiar that the reader says, "oh, no, not this again!" Through the magic of the tubes, I found this blog post at Storytellers Unplugged, where they take on the topic this way:

My point is that it's all cliche, to a significant degree. In mysteries and certain kinds of horror, the killer's either going to be a man or a woman, as is the victim. You go to a ghost story for, well, a ghost. Same with vampires, werewolves, etc. If you want to approach plot and character from a point of view of irony, with emotional distance and intellectual curiosity, then I suppose you'll want post-modern with its own unique way of doing and saying things. But like New Wave, splatterpunk, experimental fiction in general, you pretty much know what you're going to get. There's an expectation of predictability in the fiction readers seek out. We want gore. Or atmosphere. Or footnotes.

The whole post is worth reading as are the comments. As one commenter notes, the French word cliche is meant to imply a stereotype, something that has been stamped over and over until it has lost its freshness.

So these question arise: when is a story convention just another cliche? When is an archetype just a stereotype? And when is prescribed way of doing things just too conventional?

Since I tend to think about writing in terms of hardcore structuralist expectations and mythical archetypes, this can cause problems. For instance, using Dramatica as my guide, I tend to approach stories holistically. So if I have this main character in this situation, depending on how I start the story, my ending is almost dictated for me. If that means if a part of it seems predictable or stale, then really the whole thing is predictable and stale and I either need to accept it or start over. Otherwise, if I change gears in midstream just to upset expectations, I end up with two halves of two stories that don't make a coherent whole. It's craziness for its own sake.

Where does one go from here? I think the best way (for me) to approach the problem of cliche and convention is to go back to my little pet theory of culture (emergence, refinement, parody, and revision). Conventions represent that refinement stage where meaning is inscribed and codified. Cliches on the other hand are the later parody stage where overuse and repetition robs the convention of its meaning, making it look foolish or just plain dumb.

The answer then, is to always revise. Attack the cliches head-on and reinvigorate them with our own perspective, our own "take". After all, that perspective (our own), is the only thing new that we can ever bring to our writing anyway.

Hero's Journey Redux

Jane Espenson has a short essay on why Harry Potter appeals to non sci-fi fans. It's a pretty simple observation actually:

It's something about the actual Harry Potter narrative that makes it cross the boundary. It's a very specific type of Hero's Journey, the most potent sub-case. It's told over and over again, and it works, over and over again. Dorothy Gale, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Charlie Bucket, Luke Skywalker, even Peter Parker, they all fit a very specific pattern. They're living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed. And what's more - and this is the important part - in that new world, they are something special. They are The Chosen One.

It's all about having a strongly written main character that readers can identify and empathize with. We can see the world through their eyes, feel what they feel, struggle as they struggle, and experience the world as it can only be experienced through a powerful piece of narrative fiction. That's it.

A Theory of Culture

The cultural landscape is awash in nostalgia, revisionism, and remakes of every kind. If you weren't around in the 70s you can see new versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and soon an all-new Halloween. If you were a kid in the 80s, you had the Transformers movie this summer as well as a new (bad) version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Coming up, Nicole Kidman is starring in yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, called simply Invasion, and Harrison Ford again has taken up his bull-whip and fedora for another Indiana Jones outing. There are highly successful new versions of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who with an all new Kirk and Spock led Star Trek on the way. Along with these (pretty obvious) examples, we have genres built around nostalgia: retro-futurism, steam-punk, neo-victorianism, new weird, all hearken to our love of an invented past, present, or future.

So, just as Vico had his New Science to account for the cyclical nature of civilization's rise and fall, I would like to propose my own (though by no means original) theory of culture in order to account for this phenomenon. As I see it, all popular creations go through four stages: 1. Emergence, 2. Refinement, 3. Parody, and 4. Revision.

The first question of course, is what is meant by a "popular creation". I'm playing pretty fast and loose, so it could mean almost anything: a character, a scenario, a theme, a mood. Anything that can be transmitted and replicated, like a meme, between artist and audience, between individuals, and even between cultures.

Stage 1. Emergence

In the first phase, the creation appears suddenly and seemingly from nowhere and is recognizable as something that's new and unique or at least innovative. More importantly it is something that emerges in response to a need, to something that's missing from the culture. It is raw and immediate. This is the creation as myth, as folklore, as superstition.

Stage 2. Refinement

In the next phase, the creation takes on an iconic role within the culture. It has been refined and put into the larger social context. This is the period where all of its qualities become well defined, rules are fixed in place, relationships are established, and its meaning is easily comprehended. This is the creation as art, as literature, as Romance.

Stage 3. Parody

As time passes, the power of the creation is drained. It is no longer relevant to the culture and there is an effort to de-mythologize it and see it for what it is: one object among many. What was once dark, is now light. What was once deep and meaningful is now superficial and trivial. An object can have no power over us if we can laugh at it. This is the period of camp, of kitsch, and of irony. It is the creation seen through the lense of modernism and postmodernism.

Stage 4. Revision

Finally we come to the era of nostalgia, where the dead creation is restored to a new version of its former self. There is an attempt to get back to origins and the authentic nature of the creation, to reinvest in its original power. This can also be a period where the original meaning of the creation is subverted or inverted in order to give it new relevance to the present day. This is the creation in its endlessly volatile, endlessly repeatable retro mode.

One of the interesting things about this last stage is the creeping anachronism where contemporary interpretations are given to past events and our motivations become the motivations of historical persons. There is often a sincere attempt to restore something to its original and authentic state, but what we get instead is a simulation that reflects our own cultural desires and fears.

We confuse the Victorian era with our Neo-Victorian fantasy, ancient paganism with our neo-pagan inventions, and we assume that our readings are the same of those of the author and his or her original audience. The truth is we are reinventing things in our own image.

Examples

Dracula and Frankenstein

1. Emergence: The original texts from Stoker and Shelley. Raw imagination, folklore and superstition come together in original visions. Dracula expresses Victorian anxieties while Shelley gives us science fiction as skepticism and philosophy, as well autobiographical fears about the horror of childbirth.
   
2. Refinement: The Universal Monster movies fix them permanently in the public imagination with all of their features, characteristics, back-stories, and rules. Lugosi's accent. Karloff's bolts and lumbering walk.
3. Parody: Over time, the Universal Monsters are no longer scary. They turn instead to comedy and merchandising: Abbot & Costello, the Munsters, "The Monster Mash," Count Chocula and Frankenberry cereals.
4. Revision: The characters are reinvented as romantic and tragic figures, as in Coppola and Brannagh's remakes, as well as Goth culture, post-humanism, and Anne Rice. Contemporary anxieties cause us to empathize with their outsider status rather than with their victims. Monsters become anti-heroes.

Batman

1. Emergence: Bob Kane's original and dark Bat-man. He is a two-fisted hardnosed pulp character that reflects the time period.
   
2. Refinement: Now called Batman, he joins the DC pantheon of super-heroes alongside Superman and Wonderwoman in the Justice League. His universe is well defined: millionaire Bruce Wayne, sidekick Robin, Alfred the Butler, the Batmobile, the Batcave, etc.
   
3. Parody: The Batman comic and TV show de-volve into camp and self-parody. Ka-pow!
   
4. Revision: The Dark Knight Returns. Batman is reinvented as a much darker and violent character beginning with Frank Miller. Though no one will acknowledge it, he is a villain. In the Graphic Novel he battles and defeats Superman, a pawn of American Imperialism. We all cheer.
   

The Wizard of Oz

1. Emergence: L. Frank Baum writes the original Oz novels and invests in them his own experiences and political beliefs.
2. Refinement: The Wizard of Oz movie becomes the iconic version of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion. Changes from the original become the canonical version for most people.
   
3. Parody: The Wiz, a failed attempt to update the story, as well as repeated showings on television ultimately drain the story of life.
4. Revision: Wicked retells the story from the wicked witch's point of view, revitalizing it through inversion, and perhaps restoring Baum's original political vision. The upcoming Tin Man mini-series on Sci-Fi channel looks to be a darker sci-fi version of the story.
   

Genre Fiction vs. Genre Tropes

Cory Doctorow discusses the difference between genre stories and genre tropes (the signifiers of a genre) by distinguishing between sci-fi elements that are futuristic and sci-fi stories that are futurismic. He writes:

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices — but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.

Of course, the futurismic NCC-1701 was really based on Rodenberry's desire to do Horatio Hornblower stories in space. Not a hardcore attempt to think about the real social and scientific implications of FTL or transporters or replicators. The question is, can you go hardcore non-futurismic (or non-horrorismic, or non-fantasyismic) and still have anything that resembles a story in the mind of the reader. Or do you just get high-modern experimental meta-fiction which we've had for nearly 100 years now?

Scary Rabbits

Horror, Tragedy, Gimmicks, Catharsis, Torture, Boundaries, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie ... and two rabbits. All in one tidy little video. It really wraps it all up for me.

Catharsis and the Impossibility of Closure in Horror

Interesting chat about horror movies with Adam Lowenstein:

CP: When I talked to Roth recently, he said he holds hope in the fact that soldiers in Iraq have thanked him for Hostel, for giving them "tools" in much the same way that you're talking about. A word like catharsis seems insufficient to describe the effect that you and Roth are talking about.

Lowenstein: I agree with you. I think that catharsis is among the least valuable assets that one could gain from a horror film. Because catharsis is really all about...

CP: Closure, right?

Lowenstein: Closure, yes. And forgetting—"getting over" something. What these horror films remind us, of course, is that the trauma is never really over—that we haven't remembered it enough before we can forget it. I think the real value of the horror film is to remind us that catharsis is too easy, too artificial, and too closed. We know from history that the events we think we've passed through and gotten over and understood come back to haunt us in all kinds of ways. Horror's dark gift is to remind us that the tragic events we think we've gotten over and understood always come back to haunt us.

It's old-fashioned Return of the Repressed kind of stuff. What we find terrifying at any given time is that which we most want to pretend doesn't exist. It's those fractures and nasty unspoken secrets that haunt us and can't ever let us go.

Revisitation Revised

I tweaked my last paragraph:

I now see a lot of parallels between Horror and Drama. In Drama you have both the modern and the classical definitions of tragedy and failure. So what's the difference between Horror fiction and Tragedy? Perhaps Drama can be defined by personal flaws and failings that lead to one's downfall, while Horror represents the impersonal and the alien? Something to think about for the next revisitation.

A new starting point for future thoughts.