Genre

Genres are often perceived to be rigid, predictable, ideologically pernicious, and associated with commercial mainstream. "Put simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations." is the opening phrase of Barry Keith Grant's book Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, and it is a good example of the conventional wisdom regarding genres.

Yet genres are in reality wonderfully fluid, malleable and flexible, and can contain everything from derivative mainstream sequels to great films at the height of what the art form is capable of. This gap between a perceived idea and the reality is apparent both among scholars and the ordinary viewer. 

The problems with much of genre theory, or discussions of genre in general, are the same as with much else within film studies/criticism: it is rarely based on that complicated reality but on ideal types, and often founded on a lack of awareness of the historical nuances, developments and complexities of the subject being studied. To borrow a quote from Jason Mittell, many "scholars seem content to take genres at face value, using the labels that are culturally commonplace without giving much consideration to the meanings or usefulness of those labels." In this article I want to point out some of the difficulties with genres, and why the ways they are frequently seen and discussed are unsatisfying.

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The basic problem is that the common belief that we can easily define and specify genres is wrong. We can not, because, being made up by us, they are subjective. Therefore, there is no consensus about what constitutes a given genre, or which films should be counted as belonging to a given genre. To give a seemingly trivial example: once in a video store I overheard two teenage girls talking in front of the horror section, and one of them said, outraged, "Why is that film in the horror section?!?! It is not a horror film!" Her friend though it was. That is the reality of the situation. As soon as you try to define a genre it slips away, and the arbitrariness of it becomes apparent. Another example: is Fort Apache (John Ford 1948) a western or a war movie? Or does it not belong to a particular genre? Or is it a cavalry film, as a distinct genre that is neither a western nor a war movie. There is no correct answer to these questions, because it entirely depends upon how the person answering it has chosen to define either of those categories. Or compare She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford 1949) and The Gunfighter (Henry King 1950). They are both routinely referred to as westerns, and that is understandable, but do they have anything in common, whether in terms of narrative, aesthetics, themes, or characters? Is not the only thing they have in common, other than being non-animated, feature-length, fiction films, that they are set some time towards the end of the 19th century? You could make a film on the same script as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon but change the setting to, say British India in the 1920s, or far in the future at some distant planet. It would tell the same story yet not be called a western then.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Thomas Schatz writes about the "deep structure, those rules and conventions which render this film a Western and that film a musical." but I do not believe that such rules and general conventions exist. The reason a musical is called a musical is because the characters sing in it in a context in which people would not sing in the real world. But that is neither a rule nor a convention (any less than being green is a rule or convention for a green apple) but a banal necessity needed for those films to be called musicals. While there are conventions in musicals, as there are in most things in life, there are no uniform conventions for all musicals. Different kinds of musicals have different kinds of conventions, just as musicals from different eras or decades have different conventions, and musicals from different studios have different conventions, musicals from different countries have different conventions, and musicals by different directors or choreographers or actors have different conventions. And there are no rules. Your musical can look, feel or move any which way. It can be upbeat or sad; it can be progressive or reactionary; it can be fast-paced or slow; it can be serious or playful; songs might be integrated or free-standing. Sometimes a film is made as a musical, but then released without the songs, as a non-musical; sometimes a film is written as a musical but the director ignores that, and refuses to do the song and dance numbers, so it ends up as a non-musical. But the only difference is that they have no songs.

Another difficulty is that there are so many films, most of which are forgotten, and for there to be a theory that explains or defines a genre, it must cover the genre in all its historic appearances, all of these forgotten films from past decades. Another complication is that a lot of older films do not belong to genres that we talk of today, or to genres that have been forgotten. If you look at the top-grossing Hollywood films of the 1930s, many of them cannot be categorised by using our contemporary genres. It instead happens that older films are today placed into genres that did not exist back then, when they were considered as part of some other genre, or not of any genre, but instead considered as part of a cycle for example, like the journalist films of the 1930s, or the same decade's prison films. What, by the way, is the difference between a genre and a cycle. Does a cycle become a genre when it has been going on long enough?

A famous conundrum is film noir. As is well-known, it was not something that existed in the 1940s when the films that today are considered film noirs were made, and they were then instead referred to as all kinds of different genres: detective stories, thrillers, melodramas, spy films, action films, and so on. While some French critics began writing about what they called "film noir" in the late 1940s, they were using it in a slightly different way then how it is being done now, and it was not until the early 1970s that all of these films suddenly became film noirs in the modern sense. A pioneer was Paul Schrader and his article "Notes on Film Noir" from 1972, in which he tried to explain what it was, and how it had evolved from 1941 to 1958. But whether there was an evolution of film noir was dependent upon which films he choose to refer to as such. Laura (Otto Preminger 1944) is clearly different from Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955), but that might as well be because only one of them is a film noir, or neither is. One of the few things that are consistent regarding film noir is the fact that there is no consensus at all about which films qualify as noir. This is not strange though, but, as Steve Neale has pointed out, it is inevitable: "as a concept film noir seeks to homogenize a set of distinct and heterogeneous phenomena; this inevitably generates contradictions, exceptions and anomalies and is doomed, in the end, to incoherence."

What is interesting about film noir is that hundreds of films from the 1940s and 1950s are nowadays included under that term, yet it is not a genre, and few claim that it is. (Schrader emphasised that it is not.) This means that a large bulk of what is now remembered from Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s are without a proper genre, as they are defined and discussed today.

Given all of this, it is no surprise that almost all attempts to present a coherent theory of a genre or genres are flawed from the beginning. Whoever has developed a theory has chosen to include some films and exclude some others, either out of ignorance or deliberately in order for the theory to work. Many thousands of films have been made that are considered westerns, and you are inevitably going to have to narrow it down a lot, but the 10 or 20 films you have chosen to build your grand theory on are not enough. At best, your theory will be valid for those films, but not for westerns in general. (I say at best, because something like Will Wright's famous and influential Sixguns and Society (1975), does not even work for the small sample he has chosen to focus on.)

An obvious risk is that if the claim about a certain genre is that it is rigid and rule-bound, you can only include films that are rigid and rule-bound, and where does that take us? You may well define westerns as films that always exhibit traits A, B, C, and D, and then criticise westerns for being an inferior genre as it only relies on the traits A, B, C, and D, and make ideological hay out of that, but to what extent we have learned something by this is unclear. The flaw is not in the genre westerns, in all their manifold representations, but in your chosen definitions of it. 

This aspect of definitions is central to genre theory, yet it too often is the case that the person writing about a certain genre is not explaining how they define it but seemingly assumes that we all define things the same way, even though we do not. Some are loose and open in their definitions, and others are very strict and narrow. If your theory requires a narrow understanding of the subject for which you have developed the theory, considering it in some pure state in which it never existed, you are setting yourself up for tautology. 

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So far I have only spoken of some genres in relation to Hollywood, which is the way it is usually done. But why is that? Brazilian, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Swedish, Italian cinema, and others, can also be discussed from generic perspectives if one wants to do so, in the same way Hollywood is discussed. That would also add some needed perspectives to the field, because it would give rise to questions like whether for example neorealism is a genre. It is not treated as such, yet it is easier to define and specify than most of the American genres, and the films have recurring tropes and traits. Considering the fact that many critics and historians have referred to various films from other countries than Italy as being neorealist, it would seem that they might be open to calling it a genre. Or is it merely a style? Another Italian kind of film is giallo. Is that a genre? Is it derivative of Hollywood genres or its own homegrown thing? (I need not take that discussion though because Alexia Kannas already has.)

Genre is often said to be the opposite of art, and to exist only in mainstream cinema, but that is to have a very narrow view of art, and also to believe that a lot of literature and music, including Shakespeare and Mozart, is not art. Some of the world's best filmmakers make/made genre films and many of the best films are genre films. It would be a strange art form of its greatest examples were not to be considered art. The claim that genre equals mainstream (as Grant does in the quote above) is also a dead end. To take two obvious example, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick worked within genres. You might disagree that they made genre films, but then you need to re-define for example war films and science fiction, so that when they make them they are no longer genre films, only when others make them. (Nancy Meyers's The Intern (2015) is a mainstream film yet less of a genre film than Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).) Another example is Yasujiro Ozu. He is not considered mainstream yet he was working within established genres. Or is Ozu to be considered as an example of mainstream cinema, albeit within the Japanese context?

Considering the inevitability of such questions, I often wonder if we do not needlessly waste a considerable amount of ink and time because of our abstruse need to think of cinema, and most things in life, in crude binary terms, and mistake our subjective idealisations for some larger truth.

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Genres exist, and they can be interesting to talk about, and production companies, filmmakers, scholars, and the regular viewer, refer to genres on a daily basis. But it is rare for those references to acknowledge the complexity and vagueness of the reality. Genres are hardly what we say they are. This does not matter much when choosing a film at the video store, but scholars and historians should thread more carefully, or else their work risk becoming pointless.

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Schrader's influential article about film noir was published in 1972, which, as it happens, was also the year Thomas Elsaesser's even more influential article "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama" was first published. Just as the contemporary understanding of film noir to a large extent comes from Schrader's article, so a contemporary understanding of melodrama in films comes from Elsaesser, even though he cautious the reader that "what I want to say should at this stage be taken to be provocative rather than proven."

Bibliography:

Elsaesser, Thomas, (1972) "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama" published in Monogram, No. 4, 1972.

Grant, Barry Keith, (2007) Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. (He must like the sentence I quoted because he has opened other books with it too.)

Kannas, Alexia, (2017) “All the colours of the dark: Film genre and the Italian giallo” published in Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, Vol. 5 Issue 2, March 2017.

Mittell, Jason, (2001) "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory" published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring 2001.

Neale, Steve, (2000) Genre and Hollywood.

Schatz, Thomas, (1981) Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System.

Schrader, Paul, (1972) "Notes on Film Noir" published in Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1972.

Wright, Will, (1975) Sixguns and Society - A Structural Study of the Western.

Interstellar

Sometimes when I need to cheer myself up I watch speeches by John F. Kennedy, and especially the one about going to the moon, given on a very hot day on the campus at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The best part is when he says "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Watching Interstellar (Christopher Nolan 2014) brought that speech back.

What we as humans do is transient, and not all that important, and most people are probably content with merely surviving, and trying to have some fun while they are doing that, while a few others seem primarily interested in destroying, degrading or stealing. But for many just surviving and having some fun is not enough, they have dreams that go beyond that and act upon those dreams. They are often celebrated as heroes, while simultaneously ridiculed by others; others who ask "What was the point of that?" The action can take many forms. One, as was shown in the film Tracks (John Curran 2013), can be an Australian woman who walks through the desert with some camels and a dog, for no apparent reason other than that she wanted to do it.

Interstellar is also partly about that. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is not satisfied with just surviving; he knows that there is more to life, that there has to be more to life. But he feels that the human race have forgotten about that. "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." he complains at one point, and he is right. When he goes to a parent-teacher meeting, the teachers want to discourage his children to continue to study or to have dreams, they are concerned only about what is practical and profitable. There is sense to this, the world is in a terrible state, as is our world today, but just looking down and carry on is not the answer. In the world of the film the textbooks have been altered and are now arguing that the moon landing never took place, that it was faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and to think otherwise is dangerous. Dreaming about going to the moon can get you expelled. In the first trailer for Interstellar, Cooper talks, in a voice-over, about these moments "when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known" but "we've lost all that." But he has not, that is still what is on his mind.

So Cooper is perpetually dissatisfied, this world is not his, he has no real place in it, and when he is given the chance to leave it he takes it, and not just once but twice. For me that is what the film is really about, and that is also what Christopher Nolan is really about. In his earlier Inception (2010), one character says to another "You mustn't be afraid of dreaming a little bigger, darling." but that is not something Nolan can be accused of, or his main characters. They thrive on dreams and ideas (while often going through a crisis of identity).

Some critics have complained about the film with the argument that it would be better to stay on earth and fix things rather than run away to another solar system. Is not Interstellar in fact imperialistic, or even fascist, for suggesting that we might have to abandon earth? Is not this "pioneer spirit" what got us into trouble in the first place, and is the cause of our wars and our suffering? You might however likewise argue that were it not for our wish to leave, to go further, to look beyond the horizon, we would still be living with the other animals in central Africa, hunting gazelles. That might not be so bad, we as well as the planet might be better off had that been the case, but it is not the case. If you complain about this "pioneer spirit" but are still happy with modern life and all its conveniences, then you need to ask how you would have that without the pioneers. As with religion (which I wrote about in the previous post), human history contains both good and bad and you cannot pick the parts you like and say "This is what matters, this is who we are." because everything that has happened matters, and we are good as well as bad.

But what about costs? Why should we pay for it all? Could not all that money, whether to make Interstellar or go to the moon, be put to better use? Maybe to build day care centres or shelters for homeless people or some other undoubtedly good thing. Yes, perhaps, but to do only that would be to diminish us humans and what we are, and what we need. In 2010 South Africa hosted the football World Cup, and many (not least people who were not South Africans) were upset with this waste of money, spending on football stadiums when people were poor and hungry. But many of those who were poor and hungry were rather thrilled about hosting the World Cup. It made them proud, that South Africa could do such a thing, and pride is nothing to sneeze at. If you have enough food to survive, sometimes pride might be worth more than an extra portion. Life is not all about measurable utility, there are intangibles too. There are hard materialists all across the political spectrum, many who decry "wasteful" spending, which for some is money spent on the humanities in academia, or the arts, or space travels, or football stadiums or whatever. They are people who look only at what they feel is most urgently needed right now for surviving, and forgetting about other values.

Last year ESA (the European Space Agency) landed a small robot, Philae, on a comet. It had been brought there by the probe Rosetta, and nothing like it had ever been achieved before. When the news was announced people were quite excited all over the world for this show of human engineering, wondering what we would find on the comet and where we might go next. Philae has its own Twitter account, with close to 400 000 followers (it is asleep at the moment though). Curiosity, the rover which NASA has landed on Mars, also tweets, and has 1.8 million followers, so the global excitement also extends to that world. (Philae is one of Curiosity's followers but Curiosity does not seem to follow Philae. It does however follow Lady Gaga.) These small machines, or robots, tweet in first person style, as if they were individuals. Here is a typical tweet from Philae: "Now that I’m safely on the ground, here is what my new home #67P looks like from where I am. #CometLanding ". The robots in Interstellar, TARS and CASE, are, as so often happens in science fiction, individuals with distinct personalities, and the humans in the film care for them, including them in their conversations and ethical thinking. But it is not just those two; other objects are also treated as if they had a life of their own. The Indian surveillance drone that Cooper and his children encounter at the beginning of the film is an example. The daughter, Murph, asks why it has flown all the way from India to the US and Cooper suggests that maybe it was looking for something. Then Murph says that "We should just set it free, it wasn't doing anything," feeling upset about them taking advantage of it, even though it is just a drone.

The humanity expressed in Interstellar, which is somehow related to the way the characters speak to each other, often in hushed tones, is one of the many things that makes Interstellar so great. The impressive acting, the grainy visuals on earth contrasted with the clarity of the images from space, the cross-cutting and Hans Zimmer's music are other reasons. The film is very intense, an emotional and exhaustive experience, even though its pacing is comparatively relaxed. There is a scene where a failed docking manoeuvre in deep space leads to an explosion, and every time I have seen the film in the cinema there have been a collective gasp in the audience, an overwhelming experience of a shared feeling, a feeling of both release (after a long and tense sequence) and shock, and such a shared feeling is also something you cannot put a prize on.

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Interstellar is related to Contact (Robert Zemeckis 1997), including the presence of McConaughey and relativity. Here is the extraordinary first shot of the film, a camera movement through the solar system and through time.

Godzilla and Edge of Tomorrow

There is a scene in the end of the new Godzilla (Gareth Edwards 2014) when the monster is exhausted after a big fight and is lying on the ground, almost covered in dust. Then it sees a human, also lying on the ground, bleeding. They look at each other for a few moments, the monster with a facial expression that combines fatigue, concern and sadness, and then it disappears in the dust. It is an extraordinary scene, and almost completely at odds with the rest of the film.

While there is also a very good scene on a railway bridge in the middle of the night, and a magnificent halo jump, the rest of the film is abysmal. It has no coherence or forward-drive, and its scenes are underdeveloped or haphazardous. There is a scene on the Honolulu Rail Transit system in which Ford Brody, the main human character, is involved, as well as a kid that gets left behind when his parents get off the train. Brody tells the parents that he and the kid will get off at the next station and go back. Then there is a cut to a scene in a jungle in which some US soldiers, including the air force, engage in a fierce battle against a monster. After the monster has triumphed it flies away and decides to attack the train and apparently there are hours of journey time between the train stations because Brody and the kid is still on it. This is not a plot hole or whatever people call it these days, it is bad storytelling, or, rather, bad decoupage. Clearly the scene with the jungle battle should have come before the scene in which the kid got left behind with Brody, so that there had been less temporal confusion.

As an exercise in Spielbergian images and editing style Godzilla is interesting, the influence is obvious and it is uncanny how they have captured his style. Alas it is not enough. Spielberg cares about his characters: such care is not to be found in Godzilla. The human characters in the film are uniformly bland and uninteresting, and the acting is uninspired. Nobody comes out well in that respect, the monsters and the animals have more life and personality. On this everybody seems to be in agreement, whether you read professional critics, online fans, or people on Twitter. The only difference is whether people think that it matters. Many do not, because it is "a monster movie and all we want is the monster". I do not understand that at all. Most of the film there are no monsters, just the people, and why would any fan find this acceptable? There is absolutely no reason why there could not be interesting characters that we care about in a film such as this, and it would not diminish the role or the impact of the monsters. It is an obvious win-win. Yet, although it would be in their own interest (they would get better films)  the fans are not pushing the filmmakers into doing better, but saying that they do not care even though they clearly do. Are they afraid they will be regarded as elitists (in some corners the ultimate insult) if they ask for more? I have no such fear, and so I will ask for more. Had the filmmakers put as much care in the humans as they did on the monsters Godzilla would have been a good film. Now it is considerably less than that.

The success, even partly the purpose, of a narrative could be said to be that the person experiencing it, whether as a film, a book, a story told by a campfire, wonders what happens next and also care about what happens. Godzilla fails on both accounts.*

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A film that succeeds on both accounts for me is Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman 2014), in which the world is attacked by aliens. It is lean, there are no silly jokes, no detours, and it is very exciting and also well-written. I genuinely cared for the characters and the story has a path that was never obvious or dull. The film is set in the present day, with French president François Hollande seen on TV, and it takes place entirely in Europe. That is unusual for this kind of film where the destruction of famous American cities and landmarks has long been a dull cliché, and it is clear that the filmmakers are taking advantage of the fact that this year it is 100 years since the first world war began and 70 years (almost to the day) since Operation Overlord, i.e. the Allied invasion of mainland Europe, took place at the end of the second world war. Both these events are written into the film so that, although it is set now, it is about the past as well as the present. The main male character, William Cage (Tom Cruise), is killed in battle and then reborn on the day he began combat duty (in a sense) so he relives the whole ordeal over and over again. This, in combination with the invocations of the two world wars, can be interpreted as a comment on us humans being in a state of perpetual warfare, and that there is no way out of it. We are doomed to be at war; that is the loop we are trapped in.

I liked almost everything about Edge of Tomorrow and I am happy to see Emily Blunt, who I like a lot, playing a tough soldier for a change. Her character Rita Vrataski is, in a way, using Cage in order to save mankind. He is in the beginning a smug PR-man, trying to blackmail his way out of combat. She has the skills, the muscles and the brainpower, what Cage brings to the mission is mainly that he is trapped in this time loop, and she teaches him everything he needs to know. He would be lost without her and eventually the two of them go to battle, side by side.

The film reminded me a lot about the first film about Jason Bourne, The Bourne Identity (2002), also directed by Liman, in the sense that they are both serious, gritty and very focused. You could also say that Vrataski is training Cage to become Bourne. (The other two Jason Bourne films, directed by Paul Greengrass, have a different style, but Liman set the tone and it is a bit unfair that nowadays Greengrass gets all the credit.) Liman became an indie sensation after directing Swingers (1996), followed by Go (1999), but his films of late have received less attention. Not unfairly so, Mr and Mrs. Smith (2005) is remarkably lacklustre. But Edge of Tomorrow is not lacklustre, it is really good.

One of the great scenes from Swingers, a guy calling a girl he just met and panic ensues.



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*Tom Gunning is famous for his argument that it is wrong to compare early cinema, in which there was very little storytelling, with what came later. Early cinema was of a different kind, a "cinema of attractions" as Gunning calls it, where the spectacle was what mattered, not characters or story. It is an arguable point but the cinema of attractions did not end around 1903, it continues to our day, in modified form, with Godzilla as an example.

This post is part of an Edge of Tomorrow special among a number of Swedish film bloggers. Here are links to other participants. First one is in English, all the others in Swedish. The Velvet Café, Bilder och ord, Jojjenito, Fiffi, Fripps filmrevyer, Haruintesettden 1, Haruintesettden 2, Filmparadiset, Movies Noir, The Nerd Bird.

Elysium

It is easy to like Matt Damon. It is not easy to like Elysium. At least not for me. It is however easy to exemplify what I dislike about the film. With regular intervals there are shots in slow motion of children laughing and running from the camera, while glancing back towards it. This is a sentimental trick that I have always found cheap and cheesy and the fact that Elysium is filled with these shots is a sign of the big problem I had with it. Nothing in it felt sincere or genuine, but like somebody had used a computer program to construct a science fiction film, and then left it to the software to direct it. It showed desperately little evidence of craft and artistry. At one point during a fight sequence there was an overhead shot, showing the ground from a high altitude, that was so short that it was not possible to see what it was meant to show, and neither was in sync with the general editing patterns of that sequence, when the heroes attack the villain Carlyle after they have shot down his space craft. It was just completely random and pointless, like so many other shots and ideas in the film.

Towards the end of Elysium Matt Damon's character Max, his childhood friend Frey, her daughter and three evil men are all in a space craft together flying to Elysium (a "paradise" in space) to which they all want to go, albeit for different reasons. Just as they are about to land they all start to fight, a hand grenade goes off and they violently crash (although nobody is killed). What was the purpose of this? Nobody in the space craft had anything to gain from such a fight or from a crash, so why would they start this fight? And what narrative purpose did it serve? It had no effect on the story. The most evil of the men, Krüger, had his face completely disfigured, well, destroyed, but he was soon resurrected by the healing machines that are common on Elysium. It is not a question of "plot holes" but of bad filmmaking, or laziness, an example of the sense of drift and randomness to the film. This is particularly a problem in a film like Elysium, that clearly aims to be political and serious and consequently should be made with more care. It matters less in a film like Pacific Rim, which is considerably more playful and fun and which I thought was more profound with its idea of "the drift", a wonderful version of love.

What about the ending of Elysium? The world in the film is polluted and filthy, and society has collapsed. Those with the means to do so have escaped to the man-made paradise called Elysium. The rest has to stay on the toxic earth. But in the end everybody is made a legal citizen of Elysium thanks to the heroism of Max. But how is this going to change anything? They cannot all live up there, and earth is still a filthy and unhealthy place to live on. If anything this end result will only make things worse because everybody will try to get to Elysium and it will be ruined too. So nobody is better off. Is that what the filmmakers intended or do they think that they have given the film a happy ending? Our world, here and now, have innumerable problems and conflicts and Elysium might have wanted to address them in a meaningful or nuanced way but it failed on that level too. Up in Elysium they all spoke French. Is that because Americans think the French are all elitist snobs, what with their wine-drinking, love-making and philosophing? Tell that to those who live in the banlieues. And what is one to make of the fact that the leaders in the dystopian future is a woman and a South Asian man and that the world can only be saved by a burly, all-American, white man? Is that what we call progress these days?

I would not mind these things so much if the film had been made with some wit, charm and visual panache. Alas, there was nothing of that. So no, I did not like Elysium, not at all.

This post is written as part of a focus on Elysium among a number of Swedish film bloggers. Here are links to the others. One is in English, The Velvet Café. The others are in Swedish Rörliga bilder och ord, Jojjenito, Fripps filmrevyer, Fiffis filmtajm, Movies - Noir.

Oblivion

Beware that this post discuss important plot points, including the ending of the film.

Oblivion is the kind of film which it is easy to criticise, or even ridicule, for its obvious nods to earlier films, its many illustrious precursors from which has borrowed this and that. I said something myself to that effect on twitter. But then I thought better of it because there is nothing wrong with showing awareness of the history of the film one is making, and since it is easy to imagine Joseph Kosinski (who came up with the idea for Oblivion and also directed it) having been in love with science fiction since he was a little boy and now, when in a position to make his own contributions, he wants to acknowledge that. Most films borrow heavily from what has come before, but it is particularly transparent with films like this. Since I really liked Oblivion I see no reason to quibble about it and will instead focus on the good things. It was well-paced, sharp and focused, with the humour thankfully kept to a minimum (without being self-important) and with spectacular visuals. It was a treat for the eyes. I also liked the importance of art in the film; books, music and paintings.

The sociologist Jane Jacobs once wrote:

We need art /.../ to help explain life to us, to show us meanings, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity.

which is actually exactly how it works in Oblivion. The two main characters, Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are not humans, they are clones, but this is not apparent. There are two things that makes Jack in particular human. First his memories. Victoria is less human because she has no memories, but Jack has the same sensibilities and (repressed) memories* as his origin, the ur-Jack. The other thing is his interest in art. When he finds a book he picks it up and reads it. He listens to music, he saves paintings. Through art his humanity is reassured, and consequently life on earth. But does this make all his clones equally human, as human as the first Jack, the original. The ending of the film puts this in sharp relief, whether intentional or not. When "our" Jack is killed in the end, and a new Jack appears, is there a difference between the two? The film seems to suggest that they are the same.

One thing I was wondering as I watched the film was whether Kosinski or anyone else ever thought of switching the gender roles. Now the woman is staying at home, watching a computer, while the man is out and about, fighting and repairing drones. There is no reason why it could not have been the other way around, no reason except traditionalism or possibly sexism. Having the man at home and the woman out on the field would have made the film more original than it is now, and more fun. (Or having women in both parts.) Maybe they thought about it, but felt that it would damage the film's financial success. If so, was that an accurate assumption? I do not know.

Something I do know however is that there was a ridiculous mistake towards the end, a mistake made by the humans who were hiding underground. When they were ready to go off to the final battle they opened the door to their cave and was immediately attacked by the drones waiting outside. What kind of madness was that? They have lived in mortal fear of these drones for 60 years, but now, when they are about to strike back, they seem to have forgotten all about them. Why did they not, for example, open a peephole, for a look outside first? I understand that the filmmakers wanted to have an attack but it could have been handled in many different ways so as to remain plausible (for example by having the drones hiding and not appearing until it was too late for the rebellious forces to spot them). Such unnecessary silliness is something that is all to common in films, and it can only be explained by laziness on the part of the filmmakers. It is not there because the genre demands it, and it is not there because the story demands it. And it is not me being silly for questioning such a thing in what is after all a science fiction film. I am only asking the film to adhere to its own laws, its own reality, which is that these fighters would not go out without making sure it was safe to do so. It is a small thing, but I get annoyed because it is so common and so unnecessary.

But even so, Oblivion remains one of the highlights so far this year.

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*Our memories are for me a key aspect of what makes us human, and that defines who we are as individuals. We are, partly, what we remember.