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Joss Whedon: God?

I’m given ‘that look’ a lot. It’s the look that fellow genre fans give you when you confess that when it comes to Joss Whedon, you’re not a fan. But why? Why aren’t you a fan of Joss Whedon? How can you run a blog about genre and claim to be this huge genre fan if you don’t like – nay, love – Joss Whedon??

Let me start with a confession: no, I have not watched every single episode of Buffy and Angel and Firefly and Dollhouse. In fact, I’ve avoided these shows quite well. I’ve seen the odd episode of Buffy here and there, and bits and pieces of the others. But before the classic “well, you can’t judge it unless you’ve seen it” argument raises its head, let me nip it in the bud here. The power of these shows and the following that they inspire mean that I have absorbed plenty – certainly enough to have developed a relatively well informed opinion on them. Whedon’s body of work has penetrated popular culture to such a point that it’s almost impossible to move in these circles and not be exposed to it at some point. So I have seen his work on multiple occasions, had many conversations with fans (including some quite hardcore ones), read many articles and blogs about him, seen interviews, etc, etc, etc.

Buffy and Angel: Proving beyond doubt that teenagers suck.

Now, I’m also not trying to be trendy by saying I don’t like something that is clearly popular. I’m not treating Joss Whedon the way that hipsters treat Coldplay. I have tried to connect with the Whedon universe in the past and I have always found the experience wanting. Since I’m a huge sci-fi fan, I decided to sit down and watch Serenity. I remember it being an uneven film; there were some great ideas packed in and some good performances. But it just didn’t come together as a whole. The film left me kind of cold, I had no desire to delve deeper into these characters by watching Firefly, because I felt that in those two hours I had seen enough to know them, who they were, how they interacted and it simply didn’t interest me. I have been told by several fans not to judge Firefly on Serenity, and of all the Whedon shows it’s the one I am most open to watching.

So what was the problem? It was the same thing that I found with another dissatisfying sci-fi film that Whedon was involved with, Alien Resurrection. Some good ideas, but let down by a screenplay that spoiled the mystique of the Aliens and reduced Ripley to a wise-cracking charicature of the person she once was. I know that it’s not fair to hold Whedon responsible for that film, and he has gone on record to say how upset he was by the whole experience. But I did find that its tone was remarkably similar to the other Whedon projects that I’ve seen. Wise-cracking cowboys in Firefly. wise-cracking space pirates in Alien Resurrection, wise-cracking teenagers in Buffy, wise-cracking demons and vampires in Angel, and on it goes.

Sure, that’s Whedon’s style, and that’s fine. I’m not saying that Whedon is bad, I’m not saying that you suck for liking him. I’m saying that his work simply doesn’t appeal to me. I know the arguments as to why his work is good, and I can see the way that he plays with genre. But perhaps that’s the problem – I haven’t liked his characters and I can see what he’s doing on the surface.

The best part of this film was the poster.

]]> http://whengenresattack.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/im-not-a-fan-of-joss-whedon-please-stop-looking-at-me-like-that/feed/ 0 captnsassypants Whedon BuffyAngel1 serenity http://whengenresattack.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/guest-blog-spilt-ink-by-j-s-breukelaar/ http://whengenresattack.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/guest-blog-spilt-ink-by-j-s-breukelaar/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:26:06 +0000 captnsassypants http://whengenresattack.wordpress.com/?p=152 ]]> The agent totally gets it. As a prolific writer of poetry that involves everything from crop circles to telekinesis, he totally gets writing that fuels a desire for ‘another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.’  Borrowing from Melville. That Melville.

The agent describes my work as ‘literary genre.’  Aware of the market difficulties for short stories, he arranged with a friend who runs a small press in Denmark, Les Editions du Zaparogue, to put out my collection of stories and poems called Ink.  Kris Saknussemm (Zanesville, Enigmatic Pilot) in the forward describes me as a ‘Poet of the Raw Peculiar.’

‘I have no doubt that there exist photographs of the writer as a young, smiling, apparently normal little girl’ he writes. There does. ‘ But somewhere along the way, something happened.’ Okay. ‘A mutation of mind.’ I’ll take that too. And I’ll be in good company.
The poet Beddoes said of Mary Shelley, that ‘she has no business to be a woman by her book.’

Like many genre writers—male and female—my work has met with the usual comments, often from family members that, well, it’s not really their kind of thing. Mmmmm. After dutifully buying a copy of the book at the launch, a relative called me up, confused. He couldn’t quite make the connection between who (he thought) I was, and what he’d read. As another colleague of Shelley’s said to her:

‘You are cool, quiet and feminine to the last degree… explain this to me.’

It’s complicated.

Another guest at my launch, a Bosnian woman who has known her share of horror but who I only knew until then as the mother of one of my kid’s friends, also bought a book. I felt so exposed. Lord, we’d sat at school assemblies together, and now. NOW she’d see me as I really am. Kind of. I mean there is that story about the talking dog called Clint Eastwood.  And the one about the armless piano player. The monster who saved the life of a concussed child by sticking a tongue up her nose. The boy who bit the devil’s scrotum. The lonely zombie who hungers for some of Mrs Baldacci’s nettle risotto, but must now make do with Mrs Baldacci herself.

My new Bosnian friend wrote to me a few days later.

‘…  I see you as someone that is able to “feel”, sense the world on much deeper level than majority of the people……your understanding of tiny things that define us is incredible…..I hope people give you back for what you offer them.’

Our understanding of the tiny things that define us. Literature right? The good stuff. So how does the bogey man fit into that? I’m teaching Hamlet and Aeschylus’s Oresteia for a lit class at UWS. Everyone knows there’s a ghost in Hamlet, and witches in Macbeth. Faeries, monsters and magicians in The Tempest. Does that make them ghost stories, horror and fantasy respectively? Yes and more.  In the third play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides, not only does the ghost of a murdered queen pretty much chew up all the scenery, but also the central characters are the Furies, ancient goddesses of the underworld generated from the castrated penis of Uranus. Bizarro? Horror? The Old Weird?

I think the point is that if we’re lucky, genre can attack anywhere, anytime. And we wouldn’t have literature without it.

Written by J.S. Breukelaar

You can visit J.S. Breukelaar at  The Living Suitcase

I know a writer who turns her books face out on the shop shelves wherever and whenever she can, and this week I admit I’ve done my personal equivalent of that: sneaking a copy of my freshly published second novel out of Science Fiction and into the Crime Fiction section of various local bookshops. If I had my druthers, I’d stash another copy under Australian Authors and one in Literary Fiction too, though usually, there aren’t that many copies to spread around—and it would make me too obvious in my nefarious activity.

So why bother? Because The Courier’s New Bicycle is a hybrid creature—a genre amalgam; but who would know from the bookshop shelf arrangement by genre, as if being in one category denies the possibility of the others?

My book rep tells me my real problem is that my surname begins with ‘W’. Chastened, I scuff my boot against her bag hung on the café chair. If only I’d had the perspicacity of Jim Grant, who, with a clear and canny eye to his future as an author, carefully gathered together the correct letters and syllables to make his nom de plume, and turned himself into Lee Child.

About labelling, I remember the first short story competition I sent a story to. Its requirements were that the writing be ‘speculative’. I thought, well, my stuff’s that. At the time, I didn’t realise how the term was part of a highly structured system of categorisation: one that a writer and their writing could become permanently ententacled in, despite the term itself being a superfluity, all fiction surely speculative. Anyway, this first story won that competition, then one called an Aurealis, and my trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction was set.

My first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published in 2008 by HarperVoyager, and so it came out with a science fiction label. I preferred to call it poetic apocalyptic, a descriptor I’d come up with in an effort to flag to readers something of the style and substance of its interior, which was a conglomerate of SF, mythology and the supernatural, all with a literary bent, its bedrock being the land—a post-apocalyptic Terra Australis—and its preoccupations being with humanity’s capacity for destruction and equal instinct to survive.

Fiction that crosses genre lines runs the risk of not being judged on its own terms, but according to the label it comes with, preconceptions firmly attached. The Daughters of Moab, viewed through the lens of science fiction, was critiqued accordingly—and more often than not it vexed expectations, the prose deemed too obfuscatory for the genre. And while I maintained that a broader readership might get something out of a dose of the poetic mixed with the apocalyptic, apparently the story’s SF label made it too lowbrow for literary inspection.

I remember how my first-time novelist’s ego plunged like a bungy jumper into a bucket when (I shan’t say a close family member) saw the book cover’s shout line, Assassin. Protector. Blood Sister… and said, ‘If you write something like that, you have to expect a lot of people won’t want to read it’. Sadly, my close family member wasn’t wrong—labelling and shelf allocation all but killing a broader interest; and alas, the novel fell through the genre cracks.

By now you’re thinking I’m dark on labels. In fact I like labels, and sorting things. Some (family members) would say it’s my anally retentive Virgo nature coming to the fore, but I think labelling was invented to help everybody, not just me, organise a confusing world.

One of my favourite activities as a kid was to put all the animals from my big bag of plastic creatures into groups. Sometimes it was according to kind—farm animal, wild animal, mythological animal, etc; other times it was by biggest to littlest or best to worst; and other times it was according to the new alliances and friendships each had made with the others while I was off eating my breakfast. Eventually abandoning my bag of animals, I went on to list making and room tidying, my clothes drawers organised by colour and my files alphabetically. This, I said to myself, was so I could find things. Little did I know that this entirely sensible rationale would return later in life to bite me in the bum.

Back to the genre amalgam that is The Courier’s New Bicycle. I’m happy to report Australian Bookseller+Publisher has described it as ‘a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale’. This quote-worthy phrase opens up the field of interest: the ‘noir’ a nod to crime fiction, the ‘cyberpunk’ to SF, and the ‘credible’ to current societal aptness. Hopefully, it will spur a variety of readers into wanting to know more about a bike courier and accidental sleuth who has a mystery to solve in the alleyways of a dystopian Melbourne just around the socio-political corner from now, despite the book’s despatch solely to the SF shelves steering it too towards the genre cracks. Which brings me to Venn diagrams.

Unlike fractions (those sharp-edged and unyielding divisions that caused me no end of pain), the circles that I learnt about in primary school geometry class, their intersections alluringly shaded, hinted at a world with grey areas, ambiguities. These days I wonder if my fascination for Venn diagrams was because I knew from quite young that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, desire floating in an as yet unnamed place, and those grey areas speaking to me of the possibilities that might live inside me and at the interstices of things. This might explain, in part, the gravitational pull cross-genre writing has always had on me, and maybe now’s the time to mention that Salisbury Forth, the primary protagonist in The Courier’s New Bicycle, is happily gender androgynous.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in the binary labelling system currently used to decide sex and divide gender, and began to see both as continuums with any number of identity positions along them; but a non-intersecting binary now seems as blunt and flawed an instrument of categorising as the labelling system used, say, to keep literary and genre content apart.

An either/or world is a brittle, lifeless creature. The pleasure that sorting animals gave me as a kid was also the pleasure of re-sorting; that is, the freedom to change perspective and make endless rearrangements in the order of things. In my fiction I go to the grey areas and in-between places because they hold the most promise. And for those willing to read a novel that slips between the genre cracks, there’s always the possibility of finding wonderland.

Written by Kim Westwood.

You can visit Kim Westwood online at her website.

This blog was first published on shearersbooks.blogspot.com

I was at a backyard barbecue recently – the sort of occasion one gets dragged along to by a partner where you don’t know anyone and spend half the afternoon introducing yourself – and got stuck talking to a stockbroker named Randall. His name might not have actually been Randall but if it wasn’t it should have been. Randall seems like the sort of name a stockbroker would have: strong, confident, and a little obnoxious.

It became clear quickly that we had little in common. Randall liked talking about money. I don’t have any money, so I couldn’t contribute much to the discussion. When he realised I wasn’t a prospective client, any semblance of polite interest began to fade from Randall’s eyes. It only flared up again when I told him what I did for a living.

‘An author, huh? Published too? What sort of stuff do you write?’ Randall asked, puffing cigar smoke in my face (he wasn’t smoking a cigar, but it feels like he should have been).
Clearing my throat, I answered without a shred of embarrassment, ‘I write supernatural fiction.’
Randall’s eyebrows twitched, and his top lip curled into a smirk. ‘Oh…really?’ he said, in the kind of patronising tone only the truly ignorant can muster. ‘Why? Why would you choose to write that junk? You’re a grown man. It’s all a bit silly isn’t it?’

I smiled and shrugged, biting back my reply that it was probably a bit silly to wear a three-piece Armani suit to a casual backyard barbecue, thanked him for his opinion and moved on. I think he was grateful to see me go. Men like Randall, creatures of facts and figures, have a hard time relating to people like me. I make them uncomfortable. Storytellers don’t fit easily into their carefully ordered, rigid view of the universe (which probably looks something like the Matrix – everybody and everything reduced to a flashing green number.)

Now, if Randall had nodded politely and told me that he personally didn’t enjoy reading about things that go bump in the night, I wouldn’t have minded (though I would have been surprised as such a response required a level of tact presumably beyond his reach). Books are like ice-cream, and not everybody likes strawberry mixed with their chocolate. I don’t like reading westerns – not because I have anything against cowboys on the high plains, it’s just not a flavour I particularly appreciate. What bothered me about Randall’s reaction was the way he dismissed an entire genre without a second thought, as though it was an irrefutable fact that supernatural fiction was terrible and those who wrote it, fools.

When we’re young we happily gobble up the fairy tales our parents read us, delighting at the monsters and the magical turns such stories feature. As we grow older, some of us begin to look down on these stories, locking them away with our old toys, leaving them to gather dust. We forget the power they have and our imaginations start to atrophy. Soon the only narratives we can tolerate are those that take place in a recognisable reality, and anything that challenges or pushes at the constrictive boundaries of this reality is regarded with suspicion, or worse, contempt.

I used to feel sorry for people like Randall and their shrunken, malnourished imaginations until I realised something startling – these people felt sorry for me. They looked at my ability to suspend disbelief, to indulge the impossible, as some kind of developmental shortcoming. A few steps removed from mental retardation or insanity.

Why choose to write about such things? – they ask me, and my response is always the same…
Why assume there is a choice?

What moves us, moves us. It’s a simple as that. A psychologist might be able to pick apart my predilection for the paranormal. Might be able to point to incidents in my childhood that helped shape my creative direction, but what it boils down to is, I dig this stuff. Not only that, but I genuinely believe supernatural fiction has literary merit. Of course there’s plenty of pap out there, but there’s enough genuinely good work that I’m always surprised the genre is given such short shrift.

You only have to look at the writings of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Block, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and that poor whipping boy of the critical community Stephen King, for evidence of great stories of the supernatural that hold up to literary scrutiny. All of these authors can weave tales that astonish and terrify, but most do so in the service of a greater message. They use genre conventions and metaphor to reveal basic human truths much more artfully than straightforward, realistic fiction. In other words, the spectral happenings are just the garnish on the meal, not the meal itself.

When I started writing my first novel, Winter’s Shadow, I knew I wanted to write about love and death. I wanted to write about that difficult transitional period between adolescence and adulthood. I also knew I wanted to write about monsters. So I crafted the tale of young woman named Winter Adams, who discovers there’s a whole other world beyond the one she can see with her eyes. A world full of magic and terrible things that wish her harm. One of those terrible things just might be the man she’s fallen in love with.

I wasn’t attempting anything profound, but I didn’t approach the story carelessly. While it’s true the surface mystery contains many supernatural twists and turns, it was the deeper mysteries of the book, those grounded squarely in the real world, that interested me: love and death. Winter learns a lot about both over the course of the novel, and her journey is all the more satisfying for it. If I’d left out the supernatural aspect I might have garnered fewer sneering responses from the Randall’s of the world, but I wouldn’t have had as much fun writing. And, I suspect, the readers who’ve picked up the book wouldn’t have had as much fun reading.

M. J.
 www.mjhearle.com

The evening began with an articulate and varied discussion of expectations placed on female characters in fiction: none of the authors struggled to give examples of how their female protagonists’ actions and choices were questioned by readers (and editors..). Implicitly, female characters are often expected to be emotional, nurturing and selfless. They’re also given less leeway to make “bad” decisions, or choices that serve their own purposes. (These are not strictures frequently applied to male protagonists, it would seem.)

On the other hand, the panelists expressed some hesitation about female protagonists who were too accomplished to be realistic, or did not have any qualities that identified them as female. The ensuing discussion involved examining the two extremes that are commonly present in fiction: either a woman is all malleability and/or wisdom, or she is “superhumanly strong” and/or completely devoid of typical emotional responses.

The panel advocated very convincingly for a more textured, layered approach to the portrayal of women in fiction – without indulging in either of these extremes.

Georgia Blain suggested that as readers, we often seek to find characters in books both likeable and believable. (Tough asks, indeed!). Mardi McConnochie pointed out that writers “suspend judgement” of their characters, whilst readers judge freely. As readers, we judge characters harshly; we judge them as people we might know.

Of course, the controversial topic of one gender writing about the other (i.e. men writing about women, women writing about men) had to be addressed. There were remarks that often, female characters written by men just don’t “ring true”, though not attempting to “deny men’s ability to write female characters”. China Mieville and Stieg Larsson were both examples of male authors who had created very strong female characters (e.g. Embassytown, Millenium Trilogy) but seemed to have compromised on depicting how their characters were women. An interesting point raised by Mardi was that there doesn’t always need to be a strong clear demarcation between male and female characters: the gender becomes irrelevant at times. Kirsten has an essay coming out soon on gender in Mieville’s book, which should be an excellent adjunct to the discussion points raised this evening!

Georgia noted that books are sometimes seen as instructional on behaviour for young women (although no one brought up the dreaded T-word during this event). Though the status of books as instructional was queried (I personally would say yes, certainly. Mark would disagree.) The panellists mentioned a recent British article about research linking the impact of romance fiction on women’s health, which was vociferously challenged by those present.

The panel also discussed the (somewhat dire) reality that most men don’t read “women’s books” and counter-strategies pursued to negate this: for example, choice of book covers, or using an author’s initials instead of their full name (I’m looking at you, P. M. Newton).

During the fascinating discussion of the implications of book covers, Mardi McConnochie noted that “book covers are a shorthand of what to expect” – thus a book with the picture of a couple kissing on the cover… leads to certain conclusions made by the bookstore browser.

Mark brought up the issue of product placement in bookshops – particularly given that many recent book prize winners have been male authors, and these novels are naturally displayed prominently in shop windows and shelves.

Which brings us to another issue raised during the evening regarding Australian prizes for fiction: prizes for fiction written by women and prizes for fiction about women. Kirsten Tranter discussed the Stella Prize; which has been developed in response to a significant under-representation of female writers in most of the major Australian literary prizes. The Stella seeks to celebrate women’s writing, without bowing to biases regarding how women ought to be depicted in fiction.

…If only it were possible to write down each minute detail of the evening – but in retelling and rewording, one risks diluting the ideas so well-expressed originally! … Be assured that the When Genres Attack events are definitely worth attending in-person.

For a very well documented transcript of the proceedings, head to Kylie Mason’s twitter to witness her formidable feat of live tweeting so many ideas so well!

On a personal note,

I was thrilled to attend an evening with such a variety of thoughts and opinions on a topic very dear to me. Kudos to Shearer’s for providing an accessible venue (both literally and figuratively) to host these proceedings.

I do so hope we eventually become a society where more men can believably write about women. And even sooner than that, I’d like to see more people (especially men) reading books by women, or with female protagonists: very rarely are these books solely “about women”.

Written by Vani Gupta. You can find Vani on Twitter @_itsvani

But it’s a good time to reflect on the Harry Potter movies, as they have had such an impact over the last decade. Right? With its record-breaking opening weekend, Deathly Hallows 2 saw the Potter franchise eclipse Star Wars to become the most (financially) successful film franchise of all time. And all that from a renegade filmmaker who took a risk by making a safe, big-budget adaptation of the most successful children’s book of all time. No, no! Naughty cynic, get back in your cage!

Will there ever be anything to match the Potter franchise again? Look at the impact. The lines from the films that will stay in popular culture forever like…ok, well, the scripts were bad. Good lines aren’t everything. What about the memorable scenes like the one where…ummm…something with a dragon?

So I contend that the Potter films have had very little impact apart from a purely financial one. The success of Potter is not creative success at all, the good films were the exception, quality wise Harry Potter in the cinema is synonymous with mediocrity. The adaptations were generally too safe, paying too much mind to fans who may have been upset by changes and to the powerful JK Rowling. The directors lacked vision and were content to play it safe. The two directors who had the boldest visions only got to make one film each, arguably the best films of the franchise (The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire).

I just don’t see the Potter films being remembered for anything other than the fact that they were really popular. And I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, it’s perfectly fine if you love Harry Potter and I should admit that I am a fan of the books. To finish off, here is a completely fair and impartial comparison of classic lines from other movie franchises compared with lines from Harry Potter.

Star Wars: “No, *I* am your father” Harry Potter: “I’m a wizard.”

Lord of the Rings: “My preciousssss” Harry Potter: “Expecto Patronum”

James Bond: “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” Harry Potter: Some crap that Dobby says.

Written by Mark Harding

On Bloomsday this year someone Tweeted ‘No one has actually read Ulysses‘. That’s quite an intriguing and hilarious thought. You could have two people having an in depth discussion of Ulysses and neither of them know what the other is talking about. This must happen with plenty of books, although James Joyce’s difficult tome is probably right up there with the best of them. For the record, I’ve never read it – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was more than enough for me. But entire University courses could be taught based on a book that nobody has read. Which brings us to an intriguing point. At what point does style and length become artistic in itself? Is it possible that books are published that editors and publishers haven’t actually read, but recognised as somehow ‘worthy’? I’m sure that some of the publishing types who read this blog have some fun anecdotes to answer that question, please leave them below with names changed to protect the innocent.

So what about these ‘worthy’ books? Are they worth it? Should you read them? I have always intended to read Ernest Hemingway, but to this date I’ve never picked up one of his books. I haven’t even purchased one with good intentions. My problem is that there are too many books like this to distract me. But why is it fair that when someone says to me ‘oh, you really must read Hemingway’ I’m meant to take them seriously, but if I were to say ‘oh, you really must read Alastair Reynolds’ then I can be laughed at. Maybe I don’t want to read Hemingway. Maybe Hemingway has been so built up in my mind and fawned over so much that it will inevitably disappoint me. Why is Hemingway’s prose and storytelling inherently better than Alastair Reynolds? You need to respect how difficult it is to successfully tell a story about male and female clones of the same individual having an illicit relationship 6 million years in the future. That’s hard to write.

The point is that you should never be ashamed to say you haven’t read a book and you should always be proud of the books you have read. Even the crap ones. Because this cuts both ways, people are quite often derisive of popular books that they haven’t even read. I’m willing to bet that Dan Brown is called the worst names by the people who haven’t read him. I have read him, which means I can legitimately say he’s crap. How boring would the world be if we only ever read the same books? So don’t feel pressured to read certain authors because you think you have to. Read what appeals but branch out often, maybe you’ll get to those writers one day and maybe you won’t. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, just so long as you got something out of it.

Written by Mark Harding

Box office takings have become a measure of success to such a degree that most movie fansites have regular updates on weekend figures and projections as to how certain films will do. Box Office Mojo is a site dedicated to nothing else but box office takings and meticulously charts the international financial success of films. It’s instructional to take a look at the highest grossing films of the last ten years worldwide.

• 2001 – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• 2002 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• 2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• 2004: Shrek 2
• 2005: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• 2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• 2007: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• 2008: The Dark Knight
• 2009: Avatar
• 2010: Toy Story 3
• 2011 (so far): Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So the lesson that movie studios take from this is that if they want to make money, serious money then the way to it is by releasing sequels to popular films that are based on something already popular. Or to be James Cameron. The ‘franchise’ film has become a genre unto itself with its own tropes and expectations. But the question is how organically this has happened. Are we watching these films because we genuinely like them, or are we watching them because they’re simply what’s on offer? Are we suckers?

Most film buffs and movie fans love to complain. We complain that Hollywood only releases re-makes and re-boots and sequels, and when we watch them we complain even more. Yet we’re constantly going to see them. Trailers make us excited. How is it that a film like Transformers 3 is almost sure to be a huge hit despite the fact that everyone hated part 2?

We usually have someone trot out that idea that complaining is part of the fun. Isn’t that part of the package, the ability to analyse the film to death and opine about all the wrong decisions the filmmakers made? I personally think it’s more about optimism. We go to the movies, especially movies like this, to escape. We’re looking for a moment to step out of our lives and into something else and we hope that the experience will be a good one. So when we see a trailer for Transformers 3, despite the fact that we hated Transformers 2, it looks escapist enough and possibly fun enough that we’re willing to take the risk (please note this is just an example, I will in no way shape or form ever be watching Transformers 3)

It seems that there’s a big disconnect between what movie audiences say and what they do. But the ‘franchise’ genre has cleverly capitalised on that disconnect by allowing audiences to have a reason to attend a film that is almost certainly of poor quality. Tapping into things like nostalgia and widespread cultural awareness piques curiosity in a way that drives people into cinemas.

A good example of the ‘franchise’ genre is that of the new Star Trek movie that was directed by JJ Abrams (I know this is the second post in a row that’s seen me talk about Star Trek, I’m not that guy, don’t worry). The new Trek tapped into nostalgia (only referencing the ’60s incarnation) and cultural awareness (Kirk and Spock are icons) to the point that there wasn’t much explaining for the filmmakers to do. Other major ‘franchise’ tropes that were observed were the telling of the story in a slightly different (sexy/gritty) way, redesigns of sets and costumes that emphasise retro chic and a definitive ending for part 1 with a door wide open for back-to-back sequels.

The franchise as genre is here to stay, at least until people start turning away from it. But they haven’t for at least a decade now, and the only question is what nostalgic TV show or movie series with high cultural awareness will be plundered next?

Written by Mark Harding