As you might have noticed, the (current) title of this journal is "The War on Mediocrity", which is most definitely a war I'd lobby Congress to fund. (Turns out Congress has no clear position on mediocrity.) I'd considered "The War on Cliché", which I also support, but the phrase now seems to have nearly passed into the realm of cliché itself. But if you fight a war on all mediocrity, you necessarily fight a war on the particular manifestation of mediocrity that is the cliché anyway, so it's all good.
You may remember me writing that "Defeat of cliché is the sine qua non of goodness." You may also remember my admonition of "Don't be a genre", since genres would seem to be little more than prepackaged sets of clichés to which works adhere. Though I still think these hold, it's taken me a long damn time to take the next step and figure out that the unclassifiable might be a goal, both of consumption and of production. The cracks in a genrefied view of culture started to show early, back when, as a young teenager, I first deemed major video rental chains' addiction to organization by genre arbitrary, groundless and confusing. Yes, anyone looking for, say, Airplane! will know to make a beeline to the "comedy" shelf and those who would prefer Terminator 3 need look no further than "action" (or maybe, less justifiably, "sci-fi"). But the best of cinema — the most memorable, the most engaging, the riskiest — resides almost entirely in the borderlands.
(This is one of the many reasons I still plump for organization by directorial surname like Roger Ebert plumps for Maxivison. Everyone can agree that The Squid and the Whale was directed by Noah Baumbach; everyone seems to disagree about whether it's a comedy, a drama or what. And don't even get me started on "foreign" sections. I do, however, provisionally applaud Netflix's ever-more-specific categories that have now transcended genre to include region, era and certain low-res aesthetic values. My current algorithmically-generated Netflix front page is fairly certain that I enjoy these sub-sub-subclasses:
- "Critically-acclaimed dark documentaries"
- "Japanese dramas from the 1960s"
- "Underrated British independent movies"
- "Visually striking Cerebral [sic] movies"
Can't really argue with that. But, uh, would I have wanted critically unacclaimed dark documentaries? Overrated British independent movies?)
The same seems to hold for other forms: the best books, the best music and the best visual art tend to be the works that defy easy categorization; the ones, in other words, with the fewest clichés to indicate where to shelve them. So why not use that phenomenon as my own cultural lighthouse? Instead of asking myself "What genre should I watch/read/listen to?" or "In what genre should I work?" — questions that have paralyzed me before — I'd likely do better to ask "What would be least genrefiable?" A simpler heuristic: "Choose the option that least fits a genre", whether that option be the choice of which work to experience or the choice of how to craft a particular component of a work. And I think I'm in good company here. Andrei Tarkovsky often spoke and wrote of his desire to release cinema, especially his own, from the shackles of genre. Only one of his films fell victim, in his own mind, to the vile manipluations of genre, and hey, it still turned out to be, alongside 2001 and Blade Runner, one of the three greatest science-fiction movies ever shot.
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