| One of the most often-repeated stories in Canadian film lore is the one about the critic Robert Fulford’s reaction in 1975 to Shivers, a film by a then-little-known director named David Cronenberg. After seeing the film, which Cronenberg financed in part with Canadian tax dollars, Fulford wrote a now infamous article entitled "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It."
Fulford clearly isn’t a horror fan. He’s not alone in this. Almost 40 years later, many critics would still argue that most horror movies, sci-fi pictures, gangster flicks or any other so-called genre films aren’t worth a dollar, let alone a second thought.
The idea that genre films are dumb has been around long enough that it’s taken for granted. Countless genre films that time has judged to be classics – from Bonnie and Clyde to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – faced scathing dismissals upon intital release.
However, the distinction between genre flicks and so-called serious films hasn’t always existed. In the beginning, there were movies, period. To the earliest film audiences, just seeing pictures move was amazing – it hardly even mattered what the pictures showed. The Lumiere brothers’ naturalistic images of a train barrelling toward the seats were as fantastical as George Melies seminal short from 1896, Le Manoir du diable, which depicted a macabre visit to the house of Satan himself.
As cinema grew and its potential for entertainment and profitability was fully revealed, a Cinderalla story emerged – studios began playing favourites with their films, devoting more money and attention to some than to others. The low-budget pictures, produced according to formulas and designed to give people the most thrills for the least money, were bundled together or tacked onto the back end of marquee films. They were labelled "B-movies," apropos of their second-class status, and if there’s a reason most people today think films with science fiction or horror elements are facile, it’s to be found in the birth and growth of the B-movie industry.
In today’s megaplexed marketplace, literal B-movies no longer exist. What does remain is the idea that films that share certain imaginative qualities are somehow less worthy of serious consideration than films that purport to show the world as it is.
"People feel as if they have to apologize for liking (genre films)," says Guillermo del Toro, a director whose filmography boasts both highly personal projects such as Pan’s Labyrinth and proudly populist fare like Blade II. Since its release last year, Pan’s Labyrinth has received widespread acclaim from critics, but its fairy-tale structure and fantastical elements were still deemed not serious enough for the influential Cannes Film Festival.
"On my way to Cannes I had dinner with David Cronenberg," Del Toro says. "He said to me, ‘Don’t expect any prizes. It’s enough of a landmark that a fantasy film is in competition.’" Sure enough, despite prompting a standing ovation, the film was denied any hardware.
"A jury is like a crime scene – eventually someone tells you how it was done," Del Toro says. "A couple weeks ago I got together with one of the jury members, and this person told me, ‘We all loved it, but there was one member that got up and said, ‘It is a genre film. This is the guy who did Hellboy. We cannot reward this type of filmmaking.’"
That logic starts to seem silly when you consider just how slippery the very notion of genre is, especially in our fluid, post-everything culture.
"The kinds of hard and fast distinctions that people used to make about genre cinema are not so easy to make anymore," says William Beard, professor of film studies at the University of Alberta and a regular commentator on genre cinema. "Genre itself is looser than it’s ever been before – a lot of categories that were designed to deal with an earlier kind of classicism in mainstream cinema are not quite so functional anymore."
While categories are getting decidedly more and more scrambled, there’s still a considerable residue of class bias left in some film circles, especially when it comes to mainstream institutions. Beard points to Paul Haggis’s leaden Crash, winner of the best picture Oscar in 2006, as a typical example of the kind of sincere, "issues-based" film Hollywood still holds up as superior, in both esthetic and moral terms, to genre films – despite its boasting a plot as contrived as a 10-cent sympathy card.
Even so, there’s a force arguably stronger than sentimentality that could yet annihilate the line between genre films and so-called serious filmmaking. Recent years have seen plenty of genre films receive critical accolades – it’s just that they always come disguised in the wax moustache of ironic self-awareness. Films like Wes Craven’s Scream and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill are genre films about genre films. They comment on genre convention by playing with the visual and narrative syntax of the formulas that inspired them, recontextualizing those earlier films as objects of nerdly reverence. In the process, they strut brashly over the line between high and low art, critical respect and cult worship.
"It’s an interesting question to ask what happens to genre concepts when self-consciousness comes into it, because, of course, traditional genre was not self-conscious," says Beard. "Now, of course, there’s no escape from self-consciousness anywhere, and when it gets to the point it’s at with Tarantino, it’s all in quotation marks. Then you can ask the question, is it really genre if it’s self-conscious? And that just leads to another conversation about, well, what do you think genre is?"
While it would make life tougher for Blockbuster employees, it may be time to declare the "genre film" distinction obsolete. If that’s impossible – and given our culture’s obsession with classification, it probably is – then at least we should stop judging the merit of films based on their adherence to a bogus realist esthetic that’s as much a product of fancy as any Martian invader or bloodthirsty ghoul. Regardless of where your tastes lie, you can surely agree – it’d be awfully funny to see Rob Zombie give an Oscar speech. |
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