A while ago I wrote a general theory of genre fiction, where I argued that genre fiction was the first manifestation of postmodernism. It takes features of fiction and internalises them, so the detective in crime fiction is a version of the narrator, even when they aren’t the narrator themselves. The role of fate in fantasy fiction is to explain how the hero survives to the end when, in most fiction, the hero just does because they have to.
The theory works pretty well, but there were some genres I left out not because I didn’t have anything to say about them but really through absentmindedness. These are Action, Romance, Comedy and Horror. I think all of these have something important in common. Often, they’re blended with some of the types of genre I’ve previously discussed. Action often requires a level of suspension of disbelief and wish fulfilment that frequently verges on the magical, and modern action movies often contain elements of sci-fi and fantasy (the superhero movie mixes and matches from all three). A type of fate plays a prominent role in romance (the (in)famous ‘star-crossed lovers’), linking it to fantasy. Horror, meanwhile finds a natural friend in tales of the supernatural, again giving it a mirror-image relation to fantasy of that found in romance.
Of course, any genre can mash up with any other and frequently does. Outlander contains romance, magical (as opposed to sci-fi) time travel and a fair bit of action, and several of the spin-offs are also crime novels. But there’s no particular necessity to these mash-ups, in the way that the re-internalised narrator-detective is necessary to crime fiction. There’s plenty of horror with no fantasy in it, plenty of action with no sci-fi. And comedy can mash up with anything.
What distinguishes these types of genre is the focus on particular types of emotion. Action focuses on excitement, anger and fear – adrenaline, essentially. Horror is similar but zeroes in on fear in particular. Comedy, obviously focuses on humour. Romance, too is obvious. Of course, none of these genres is just these things. Romance is never just ‘people in love’; in fact, the focus of romance is on the falling in love, the yearning and courtship. That’s why there’s such a strong and familiar arc to the romcom: they meet, there’s an initial attraction but also a reason not to get together (she/he’s my boss or owns the bookshop next door or is going out with my mate or one of us is already in a relationship or I’m a time-traveller from the 20th century and he’s an 18th century highland warrior); then of course they do get together, but then they argue! But then, finally, they commit themselves and bring about the resolution, wherein they do get together.
Notice how this arc is almost exactly the same as an action movie. The initial conflict cannot be immediately resolved (often because the bad guy just… runs away, an option that doesn’t occur to them later), parallelling the initial attraction in a romance. But then they do ‘get together’ but in a big fight rather than a beautiful romance. At this stage, the hero is beaten, of course only temporarily, again a parallel to the sort of refractory period in which the romantic leads mope around wishing things had been different, much as our action hero must do, often with an accompanying montage. Then, the action hero regains his or her composure, goes running back to their destined mirror image in order to fight them, often in the rain, and, this time, they win.
I may, at some point, have to write a whole separate blog on when and why it rains in these types of films.
This is why Point Break is so great and also, famously, super gay: Kathryn Bigelow fully leans into the latent (homo)eroticism of the action movie. Hot Fuzz does the same thing, not only quoting Point Break but having the main characters actually watch the movie in the movie, but adding a massive dose of comedy. It’s telling that a film dedicated to parodying action movies can simultaneously be a subtle parody of the romance film. Of course, there’s no point doing an overt romance parody, because the genre relies so much on familiarity with the tropes that parody, which in most genres relies on drawing attention to those tropes, is as a result always just groanworthy in romcoms. Romcoms often send up the genre conventions, but they don’t parody them: you couldn’t do a romcom Hot Fuzz (at least, I don’t think you could, but I’m sure there’s a screenwriter out there proving me wrong as I write).
The reliance of these genres on a few tropes isn’t a sign of a lack of imagination. It’s part of what I’ve discussed before: the rise of a highly literate audience making new demands of writers
Horror has a similar arc to the above examples. It also resembles comedy, especially in its reliance on timing and on the expected-unexpected: you know the jump scare is coming, but you don’t know exactly when. Similarly, in comedy, we often see a joke coming a mile off and laugh anyway: the timing is everything. Otherwise, we wouldn’t rewatch comedies or horror films.
It would be inaccurate to say that these genres only depict the one set of emotions with which they’re associated. It’s a question of focus, not of exclusion. And, as with other kinds of genre fiction, it’s not that these genres are any worse than one another or than ‘literary fiction’. They rely on literacy in the broader sense, familiarity with the tropes and patterns of the form, to create their effects.
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Frank Podmore 