While I was in the midst of having to reorganize my project, it was suggested to me that I think carefully about why I cared about convention, pleasure, genre, etc. The result is the following, a “free write” in which I cast aside my academic writing voice and tried to capture what it is about convention that I find so fascinating, to articulate why I return to questions of convention and genre time and time again.
This is the kind of writing I imagine will populate my website: knowledgable, a bit tongue-in-cheek (while maintaining a sense of sincerity in regards to the love I have for this stuff), curious, excited. I think this means that I will have to write about books that fascinate me, with moments that make me both quake with a kind of rage and sigh with pleasure (it’s confusing to feel both of these things, often in response to the same moment! That is the impetus of this project!) It’s certainly not a perfect (or even polished, really) piece of writing. I spend too much time talking about film and film tropes, but I find that much of my own genre-and-gender-consciousness developed due to a fascination with horror film, so the questions I pose here about the deployment—or subversion—of the “final girl” trope will help me to shape and reshape my thoughts about similar questions in regards to popular fiction. Why do you care about formula/convention? The ways that a text adheres to, departs from, winks at, mocks, acknowledges, and parodies the expectations of its genre are a fascinating attempt to communicate with its audience. (Is this communication a wink or a mock? I’m not sure about this. It’s certainly some kind of acknowledgment, though arguably it can be any, either, both–but there’s a message there.) This wink, this mock, this mimic, occurs most often in spaces that are devoted to generic coherence – or what we might think of as the convention of a genre.
When we watch a horror movie and expect a death to occur a certain way, only to have this expectation subverted, it perks us up, it engages/enrages/annoys/excites us, it’s a space for reaction, a space in which we acknowledge that choices are being made by some higher-up, some godlike figure who has taken us down a path we did not expect. These are often moments steeped in humor, regardless of whether or not the text practices comedy.
When we notice this split from expectation (what Barthes might call a “cleavage”) in the texts we choose to consume, we all (however briefly) become literary critics as we contemplate the choice being made, its effect on the narrative (as well as the us, as the consumer), and, as we might see this choice as a point of departure, we interrogate its generic and historic predecessors to articulate what this text is getting at with this specific choice.
For example – the “final girl” is a universally beloved (or reviled, depending on who you talk to) trope in the horror film. The antecedents go way back to teen horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the brilliantly parodic Scream, wherein a sweetly brave teenage girls survives all of her friends who have, over the course of 90 minutes, died gruesome (often explicitly sexual) deaths. In A Nightmare, Nancy has a climactic confrontation with Freddy after he’s destroyed her life by killing everyone she loves, and through this face-to-face interaction with Freddy, sweetness and innocence are restored. This final girl is typically chaste, which film scholars have argued plays a crucial role in her ability to survive. But what if, in a new take on the teen slasher film, there is a final boy? What if he is virginal and innocent and wears chunky sweaters and cries and screams a lot? This would be, in short, an unexpected filmic choice.
To think about this choice as having been made – like meaning is made – would take us down a long, winding road, where we might stop to interrogate gender expectations, the role of violence and survival, and filmic expectation along the way. But we’d certainly take note, because this isn’t how things are usually done. We might ask questions like, What does it mean that the “final girl” is now a final boy? What does it mean for the ‘girls’ in the film? How can we read their deaths against his survival? After so many iterations of this specific character type, what can we read in this shift, this split, this cleavage? There’s a reason that characters like to ask questions like: “What is the meaning of this?” and “What does this mean?” — the desire to tell stories in a certain way is the desire to effect/affect a specific kind/way of meaning. The desire to read, watch, see, hear, think about stories in a certain way is the desire to confirm/reject that specific kind/way of meaning. The reader is thus embroiled in a system of meaning – of deciphering, connecting, choosing, reacting.
Genre fiction has a similarly steep and sturdy history of adhering to certain conventions. The various plot points that make up a successful take on the romance novel, for instance, have been detailed in great length in Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, likewise the detective novel in Dennis Porter’s Crime Fiction. Both emphasize the role of the reader in the making and creation of meaning. It seems that certain tropes have become so enmeshed within the texture of the genre that they begin, in a certain sense, to define them.
Take the hypermasculine hero in the romance novel. He’s gruff, maybe sarcastic, and certainly rougish. But there comes a time – usually a bit more than halfway through the book – where the hero must vanquish his own demons and display his love for the heroine in a scene of excruciating tenderness. In one novel, the heroine runs out of a ball, into the rain, due to the hero’s perceived betrayal. (We, the readers, know the truth! That there was no betrayal! So this is a delicious moment, to read two gorgeous boneheads thinking they aren’t good enough for the other.)
The couple passionately fight in the rain and make stuttered, stunted declarations of their feelings – but then, the woman faints – due to a traumatic moment in her origin story, she can’t bear to be cold – and the hero moves her to a local inn with haste to aid in her recovery. He gently prods her to lift her arms up so that he can take off her wet clothes – mimicking the movements of so many mothers and fathers who gently whisper “arms up” in the darkness of childhood bedrooms.
He slams the door in the face of a maid who dares to bother him in this moment of concentrated worrying and brings the heroine warm soup. It is the unexpected tenderness – the tenderness that belongs only to the right woman – that is so attractive. This is a trope that absolutely has begun to define the romance novel, and indeed hints at the kinds of things that women want from their reading experiences.