Why is it that--in movies and in comics--genre fiction* completely and comprehensively kicks not-genre-fiction's ass?
Books can and do handle not-genre very well. Infinite Jest, The Information, and Pale Fire all get along fine without anyone having to assume they'll end in a gunfight or a showdown (though Pale Fire kinda does, if I remember).
But in movies? Even the snobbiest visual-blind Time Out London film snob is going to admit that Blade Runner and Chinatown and The Godfather and Star Wars and Ran and Alphaville are up there. And that precious few not-genre films are up there. Whadda ya got? Citizen Kane? Really? Everybody knows the Big Sleep is better than Citizen Kane. Faces is pretty good.
Great non-genre films exist. Visually great non-genre films exist. But genre films do surprisingly well in movies, even with the snob class.
Great non-genre films exist. Visually great non-genre films exist. But genre films do surprisingly well in movies, even with the snob class.
And there are no good not-genre comics. I mean, if we pretend art doesn't matter in comics then maybe a few black and white indie comics about crying are earnest and weird enough to get remotely close to like Elektra Lives Again-level-good but it does and so they're not. On the big scale of real new mind-boggling creativity, in the ring where Moebiuses and Kirbies contend, the comic book wholly devoid of murder in any form has, thus far, been a dismal failure--despite all the effort the AV Club has poured into making it seem hip. I mean, there's some funny ones like Land of Nod, but even that has a worm in a cape, and there's Signal To Noise--but it sneaks in a medieval village and the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse so how not-genre is it, really?
Yeah yeah I see you raising your hand with an answer: genre films deal with exotic people, exotic situations, exotic technology and that's all inherently very visual.
But I think it goes deeper than that, because novelists and poets and people who write songs and painters and photographers and everybody else who is not working both with visuals and in four dimensions manages to gorgeously defamiliarize familiar everyday life all the time. Or at least they can impress you as often without guns and death and fantastic inventions as with. In fact, the entire snob echelon of these media completely avoid genre with surprising success. Daido Moriyama can photograph a dog and be awesome and one visit to a museum bookstore will tell you he's not alone.
For me personally particularly: I can draw a person I know sitting there in a typical early 21st century room and it isn't going to be boring. However if I imagine stringing a series of these pictures together into a comic and adding a plot, I suddenly desperately feel the need to add mutilation or cyborg monkeys. And I don't think this is just because of our preconceptions about what goes in comics. I think it's something to do with how what we see now interacts in unfolding stories with what we expect to see later.
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Here's what I think it is: when the medium is not just visual, but about visual storytelling in time, genre films and comics can make some promises that fully grown-up movies and comics can't.
Ok:
Star Wars starts and you've never seen it before. You think a lot of things, sure, especially after reading all that scrolly yellow text up front, but here's one of the things you think:
That spaceship is beautiful.
I'm going to get to see more of those.
And, holy fuck, there's robots--I bet I'm going to get to see more of those, too, and I bet I'll get to see one blow up.
Now, another beautiful movie opens, this is Woody Allen's Manhattan:
And along with whatever baggage you're carrying around from Woody's narration, you're also thinking:
That shot is beautiful.
Even though I've seen New York a million times on screens, it's never looked like that.
I wonder if he'll be able to keep it up for 2 hours...
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The beauty of Star Wars is based on nouns--robots, space ships, and lasers that are only ever present when they can be made beautiful whereas the beauty of Manhattan is based on adjectives--dark, contrasty, mysterious, bold--applied to something (real life) we know is capable, at any moment, of boring us.
The genre film, by it's very structure, can promise more nouns and verbs where the opening nouns and verbs came from. They have a Chekhovish visual logic:
If you see a space ship you will see a spaceship crash, if you see a gun, you will see a gunfight, if you see a robot and an alien, you will see a robot fight an alien, if you see Spider-Man and you see Dr Octopus, you will get to see Spider-Man fight Dr Octopus, bats imply vampires and the chainsaw always implies the coming massacre. And this is not just about the climax--once you meet Chewbacca, he is here to stay the whole time. It never has to rise to the level of conscious thought: your bones know these things. Every single scene that introduces a new noun puts that noun in play as something you might see again later in an even more elaborate visual relationship to all the other nouns announced in all the other scenes. Your unconscious starts brainstorming the potential fan fiction before the next scene even starts. It's that effervescent intimation of potential that's part of the excitement in all beginnings in all fictions.
Whereas what do fantastic visuals in Manhattan promise for later, in terms of tension and expectation? Nothing. You just hope Woody can keep doing things like that in different interiors and exteriors for 96 minutes. He does, incidentally, but nothing in a beautifully shot scene of a bunch of normal life people and stuff 30 minutes in can promise you'll see more of it 65 minutes in. (See Kalatazov's I Am Cuba for a graphic example of the later visuals totally not living up to the promise of the early sequences.)
(Other than a sorta meta-story trust that the author is good at their job, which seems like pretty decent thing to rely on, but anybody who tells stories for a living will tell you that's not enough. Stories which rely on only that alone are never anybody's favorite--those are the ones you watch out of a sense of responsibility and indulgence and then maybe, if you're lucky, realize there are good parts in halfway through. Without an internal tension all its own, a story is just an anthology of moments that are good or aren't, like the Bible.)
It's like some backroom deal with the Visual Union--even though Woody has visuals on his side, they do not work as efficiently for him as they do for Lucas. He, like some miserable playwright or writer, has to rely solely on dramatic foreshadowing: we have some people, they have some problems, you want to see them resolved, right? He can ensure that it will look really good when Woody breaks up with whatsherface and decides he'd rather be with whatsherface, but he can't promise it in any way we'll viscerally believe.
Which is all to say: genre stuff in movies and comics not only give us great visuals, but the visuals do more in the story than they do in stories about everyday life.
And I think that's why things are the way they are.
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*
I mean the violent genres here--not comedy and romance--because I'm talking mostly about "genre" the way they do in bookstores, where "comedy" is barely its own genre and "romance", though it exists, hardly ever results in books that get to the screen except in costume- (and therefore visual-) heavy form or which (check your Netflix) often get hybridized with action genres when translated. And you'll notice how much critical and popular hay HBO has made by hybridizing the plots of the lowly TV soap opera with settings and subjects that make more visual promises than Knot's Landing.
As for mysteries, this is probably one more reason the violent, snappy post-Chandler crime story took over for the post-Conan Doyle Sherlock-type mystery: more guns, more broads, more cars, more to see.
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