MOVIES

YOU DON'T KNOW A MOVIE UNTIL YOU KNOW ITS SUB-GENRE

on the narrative importance of subtle and not so subtle cues

By Megan SooHoo 

What does this woman know and what do we know about her?

Every film you see, you already know what’s going to happen. From the initial trailer to the opening credits, there are too many clues to not to see the end coming. We know who will live, who will die, who will get their happy ending, who will overcome the barriers to success and so forth. As the plot shifts through sequencing, surprises, and other signifiers, we tend to easily alter our understanding of what to expect based on what we already know, specifically the genre. In all movies, the genre that’s given is merely a small detail of what it’s about, but they never give the full picture. And that’s where subgenres come in.

In film subgenres are the most direct and simple way to understand what will happen before it does. In many ways, subgenres are the answer to spoilers, a way in which viewers can see for themselves how the story unfolds. In doing so, they are aware of how the director and screenwriter manipulates our expectations from moment to moment. To fully understand their impact, I’m going to look at the thriller genre to show how complex these supposedly simple narrative markers can be.

Not only a victim of multiple personalities, but also a victim of three different sub-genres.

Glass

M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass (2019) is known as a psychological superhero thriller. The movie is an excessive display of shifting concepts and focus, depending on what character and subgenre is center stage. For example, James McAvoy’s character, Kevin Wendell Crumb, is the victim of past traumatic experiences and suffers from multiple personality disorder and these two facts split into two well-worn subgenres: the traumatic past narrative and the multiple personality narrative. Not only that, Crumb kicks off the film by kidnapping three cheerleaders. And so, in an incredibly complex arrangement, we see Crumb through these three competing subgenres.

Shyamalan is clearly playing with our minds. For instance, he uses aspects of kidnapping and captivity throughout the film to complicate our understanding of the story, a technique he also uses in the first two films of this loose trilogy, Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016). However, in Glass the genre of kidnapping is flipped upside down where the kidnapper is kidnapped and held hostage at a mental institution. In a strange way, that switch in subgenres allows for a change in what we feel about the characters. With the switching of genres, Crumb goes from victimizer to victim. He then, even more abnormally, becomes part of a team of victims that include Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price and Bruce Willis’s David Dunn.

An odd team for a caper film

Shyamalan uses the concept of mental institutions to reframe how we see these characters and in turn allows him to use one genre (the mental institution) to slip to another genre (the escape). All of sudden it becomes an escape film, which it always was, and also in a weird way a “team on a mission: film. As the story unfolds, Price aka Mr. Glass is the only person that knows the whole story of their history together, leaving Crumb and David to realize that they have been played. They aren’t in a captivity narrative, or an escape film, or a buddy film, but caught in a master plot worthy of a James Bond villain.

All while these events play out, there is a hidden character right in front of their very own eyes--Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). She takes part in this secret organization that deals with people who honestly believe that they have superpowers. She creates this other dimension of manipulation and control, especially since she is the overseer of the mental facility. She has the ultimate power in the film, but it’s not known until the very end of the film, making her character a kind of complex narrative anomoly. The barrage of one subgenre after another keeps the viewer on edge and makes for a film in which we always know what’s coming, but not really.

Extraction

Sam Hargrave’s Extraction (2020) starring Chris Hemsworth is known as ‘just’ another Netflix action thriller. Contrary to popular belief, this nondescript action flick is an interesting display of how subgenres can take over a movie. Right from the start of the film, we know that Hemsworth’s character, Tyler, is suffering. We see bits and pieces of his traumatic past, which has something to do with his young son dying. This narrative of loss is in tension with the more action oriented lone wolf mercenary narrative: he takes a job to rescue the kidnapped son of an incarcerated Indian drug lord, but we find out it’s really to rescue his soul. Unlike Glass, Extraction doesn’t slip from subgenre to subgenre, but effortlessly merge them into one seamless whole.

This man wants to be a traditional father

By attempting to recover the kidnapped son, Ovi Mahajan, the boy unknowingly brings out Tyler’s paternal instincts. And so, Extraction is at one and the same time a kidnapping film, a chase film, a parent film, and a redemption film. In saving Ovi, Tyler dies, which is perfect, because he redeems the loss of his son by saving another surrogate son. He both completes his mission and reworks his life at the same time. The order of the world is made right, as the father dies before the son and the two genres (redemption and action) become one.

Parasite

Bong Joon-Ho’s Oscar-winning and much acclaimed Parasite (2019) is a unique play on the black-comedy thriller. The story begins with a class comparison between the rich Park’s and the poor Kim’s, which Joon-Ho turns into a brilliant visual comparison between their two homes. The Kim’s live in a small, shabby basement apartment, while the Park’s live in a beautiful, extravagant urban oasis in the most expensive part of Seoul. The Kim’s somehow manage to trick the Park’s into hiring them by getting their employees fired one-by-one in a series of hilarious con games. They then pose as highly-trained servants and serve as over-the-top references for each other until all the Kim’s are hired by the Park’s. This is the first sub-generic move on Joon-Ho’s part, combining the family secret film with the caper film.

As the film moves forward, one of the former employees, Moon-gwang, comes back to retrieve something from the basement of the Park mansion while the family is away on a camping trip. As the Kim’s are indulging themselves at the Park’s, Moon-gwang eavesdrops on them and discovers who they really are and what they are getting away with. She intends to tell her former employers of the Kim’s deceit, which in turn creates a battle between the servant class. So, what started out as class warfare turns into inter-class warfare. Instead of the normal battle between high and low, the battle lines are horizontal, going across the same class, a kind of crazy low-class version of Keeping up with the Joneses.

The Parks have a very nice house

All while this occurs, the Park’s leave a message to the Kim’s that they are returning early. As the Kim’s rush to tidy up their mess at the mansion, they must figure out the best way to deal with Moon-gwang. They shove her down into a basement, where she falls down some hidden stairs and dies. The Kim’s manage to escape detection only to find that when they come home their basement apartment has been flooded with sewage waste. Joon-Ho’s critique of class couldn’t be more vicious: the Park’s live in the equivalent of a glamorous celebrity mansion and the Kim’s live in a shithole.

As the next morning follows, there is an undeniable force of unrest that has not been resolved from the day before. Joon-ho saves his best genre switch for the end of the film Geun-sae, Moon-gwang’s husband goes crazy, attempting to kill the Kim children. What begins as inter-class warfare, turns into a revenge drama. And then the revenge drama turns into a real warfare, where almost everyone gets hurt. Joon-ho truly uses the driving forces of human defeat to showcase the results of an unavoidable bloodbath, but it is all filtered through a critique of post-capitalist Korean society. And we understand it primarily by Joon-ho’s use of subgenres. The film makes you re-analyze every detail up to the inconclusive ending, where the film makes one more generic switch and turns, strangely and powerfully, into the hidden man narrative as the father hides beneath the Park mansion for what seems like forever.

Through each of these examples of ‘thrillers’ there are differences and similarities with one another, the first being that they are all considered thrillers. However, as you progress through each one, it is the subgenres that really tells the story.

©Megan SooHoo and the CCA Arts Review